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The titans were gone, the walls didn't matter anymore, and Hange was still getting herself into trouble.
She held up a big snake, fat and sluggish-looking, though Levi was sure it was big enough to swallow an entire dog. "Hange," he said. "Put it down."
"But Levi," she protested, petting it like it was a goddamn horse or something, "it feels so cool."
"You've seen snakes before."
"But not like this." Her goggles were pushed up onto the top of her head as she leaned in close to the snake's face. "He's so cute."
"If it kills you it's not going to be on my conscience," he muttered.
He watched her play with the snake for a few more minutes, almost enjoying the sight—though he still felt apprehensive about it; titans were big and terrifying, but small animals could still kill a human being effectively. The snake did not bother with her, but he was still relieved when she set it down and it slithered away where it belonged.
"Good," he said. "Let's get back. Right now."
"Don't be so sour," Hange said. "It's nice to be outside of the walls."
"You won't say that when it starts raining."
"Yes I will. I like the rain."
Levi tried not to sigh too loudly. They had been gone another week collecting soil samples from different areas; Hange had written down descriptions of different plants and animals; they had come across wild horses that were clearly descendants of horses that had been lost by the Survey Corps; they had seen abandoned farms and towns; it was nice to be outside of the walls, but they had work to do. People were depending on them to gather information in order to slowly continue spreading the population outside of the walls. The Survey Corps did surveying to find suitable areas; they drew up map; they gathered samples of things and returned to HQ to study them. Then, when areas were deemed appropriate, workers would be sent out along with Garrison soldiers to build—farmhouses, villages, mills. Then roads were built, people began to move; it was all very controlled and very tiresome, but it had its upsides. Seeing the faces of citizens from within the inner walls as they stepped outside for the first time—that generally made all their trouble worthwhile.
In ten years, what was left of the Survey Corps had done a lot of good.
Levi generally went with Hange on these trips; they were both getting older, and after years of fighting titans, suffered some physical difficulties. Neither wore the three-dimensional maneuvering gear anymore; it would probably do more harm than good, Hange said; if they landed too hard on the ground now, they may regret it.
She often found herself distracted by the wildlife, by the smell of the air and the freedom that she found outside of the walls; it was Levi's job to keep her focused.
"Hey," she said.
"What?"
"Do you want to retire?"
He blinked once, slowly. "Why would I want that?"
"I don't know." She wiped her dirty hands on her pants. "Your leg is always bothering you."
"We're not old, Hange," he said, and didn't admit it, but the thought of retirement, of not being of any use anymore, bothered him; he was not known for his intellect, and now that the Survey Corps was little more than a scientific unit, his only real purpose was—well, helping Hange, really, and through that, helping everyone else.
"Of course not," she said, and loaded a sample into the back of the wagon. "I just—you know. I wondered."
"I don't have the money to retire," he thought to add. It was true enough. None of them did except Erwin, and Erwin's hair was thoroughly grey at the temples and his face was lined, but he smiled more easily now and he refused to leave the Corps—not yet, he said, not now. Maybe later.
"Maybe in ten years you will," she said with a smile.
He tried not to think too much about it. He'd be in his 50s in another decade. He wondered vaguely if he would be limping by then; he wondered if Hange would still be around, or if she'd go off on some grand adventure and leave him alone.
"Yeah," he said, wondering what retirement would even be like for him—for Hange, if she stuck around. "And maybe Erwin will retire."
"He deserves to relax, but I think he'll work until the day he dies."
Levi imagined that day, imagined going into Erwin's office and finding him slumped over his desk, his blond hair streaked liberally with grey, his face frozen into an expression of pain. If Erwin died, he thought, it would be of something fast, of something sudden. He would have a stroke or his heart would give out, and he wouldn't live through it; someone would find him alone in his office. Levi did not want to be that person.
"That sounds like him," he said. And then, to change the subject, to avoid thinking of retirement, of death, of anything but being useful still, he added, "Let's head back."
Hange just smiled at him like she knew, like she understood how he felt, what he was thinking—and maybe she did know. She had always been good at reading him, and she had not changed much over the years. "All right," she told him, getting up onto the seat of the wagon. "Let's go."
Before the titans were eradicated, Levi had considered retirement—what it would be like to get old and quit working. It had almost been a dream then—a not-quite-tangible thought. Nice, but not likely to ever happen.
But while in bed with Hange after returning to HQ, with the knowledge that retirement was probably well within his eventual reach, he ran his hands through Hange's hair and wasn't sure what he wanted.
As if sensing his confliction, Hange rolled over in his arms. "Do you want to work until you die, too?" she asked.
"Is that what you want?"
"I don't know."
"What would I even do with retirement?" he asked her, touching the single grey streak in her otherwise still dark hair.
"I don't know. You could clean all day. I could read and cook."
He snorted.
"We could stay in bed like this all day if we wanted to."
He pressed his lips together, twisting the grey streak of her hair around a finger. "Ten years ago, I never would have thought such a thing were even fucking possible."
"I know," she whispered, and kissed the corner of his mouth. "I never thought I'd make it to thirty, but here I am at forty—still going."
"Do you want to retire?" he tried again.
She rubbed one bare foot against his shin. "Not yet. Ask me again in ten years, though. I think by then I'll be too tired to keep working."
"I never thought I would hear you say that, shitty-glasses."
"And I thought you were done with that dumb nickname."
"No." It kept them both young, he thought. Younger, anyway. It reminded him of every memory he wished desperately to both hold onto and to forget. "You're not too tired, now?" he asked.
She hesitated. "I think I have another ten years in me."
He gave her a smile, though it was hardly one by conventional standards. "Sure," he said. "Well, when you're sick of working…I guess we can both retire and be useless together."
She pulled his arm around her and buried her face in his neck. "Yeah," she said. "We can just stay here just like this for as long as we want, then."
And Levi said, softly, "I'll be looking forward to it."
Hange had six years left in her.
He found her slumped over her desk one evening, and for a moment he could have sworn his heart stopped. It was Erwin he was going to find like that; it was always Erwin that would work until his heart gave out, until he couldn't keep going anymore, until he just up and died. Not Hange.
It couldn't happen to Hange.
He was not used to panicking, but his hands shook while he tried to find her pulse, and at last he managed it: it was light and fluttering, and he stumbled out into the hall to send a younger person for help.
She recovered, but returned to work for a week before she decided that she just couldn't keep going anymore. They both retired that year, Hange at forty-six and Levi at fifty. Fifty was not really so old, but it felt old to him; all his life he had surrounded himself with early death, first in the underground and then in the Corps. He wondered if it was ironic that someone like him should live for a long time while people who would have adjusted to the peaceful world better, more efficiently, had died fighting titans or the government.
He pushed thoughts of long-dead fellow soldiers aside—or tried to. He wondered how some of them might have aged. Some better than others, he supposed. Most better than him.
Hange still looked good, but maybe he was biased. Her hair had gotten a little greyer, but her eyes were still bright, and her voice still pleasant, and everything had happened so slowly that he almost hadn't noticed it happening at all. He might not have noticed it, period, until he saw himself in a mirror and hated what he saw.
Erwin hit fifty and looked distinguished.
Levi hit fifty and looked older than that, his own greying hair an odd fixture against his prematurely lined face.
Hange and Levi said goodbye to Erwin, and to the kids of the 104th that were still, in Levi and Hange's minds, just kids; they moved into the country, close enough to one of the new towns that they would not have to worry about supplies, but far enough away that they would never be bothered.
They lasted a year before they moved back into the city. Neither of them could get used to not working and being so very alone. Erwin laughed when he saw them, and they had tea together every Sunday morning and talked about the old days: about Mike's old sniffing habit, about how Hange had relentlessly pestered Erwin to allow her to do titan research, about Nanaba's determination and Gelgar's drinking and Henning's fairly decent poetry recitations (accompanied on occasion by Lynne). They moved onto Moblit, who had moved to the country and now had a wife and kids, about how Nifa had loved clothes and took every chance to wear anything but her uniform; Petra and Auruo's special manner of bickering came up, Eld's laughter, Nile's grumbling.
It was nice; Levi was surprised to realize that he enjoyed it, that the bad memories weren't so terrible anymore. When Hange joked about the time Petra had played a prank on Auruo to get revenge for something long forgotten, Levi smirked, remembering the lives they had lived instead of how it had felt to find their battered and broken bodies on the forest floor. It was a nice change.
Hange visited the lab occasionally. She didn't work—didn't get paid for it. It was a way for her to spend her time, something to get her up and moving, something to keep her busy.
Levi started reading as a way to pass his time.
The 104th kids visited sometimes, and they brought with them children of their own after a while. Sometimes seeing the little brats made Levi want his own, made him wish that he could have such a thing with Hange. They had been together for years and years, though they had never married; they never tried not to have kids. Hange never ended up pregnant; Levi supposed that was a sign that they weren't meant to have any. It was for the best; sometimes dreams still shook him; he would wake dripping sweat and kicking out hard—sometimes at the wall, but sometimes at Hange, who had gotten better at avoiding his dream-sleep fighting over the years.
Levi did not find Erwin in his office.
Armin found him face-down on his bedroom floor.
Commander Erwin Smith died at fifty-six years of age.
Armin said, softly, "I think he felt ill, got out of bed, but then only made it a few steps before he collapsed."
"Was it his heart?" Hange asked.
Armin looked away. "That's what the medical officers are saying."
Later that night, after Armin had gone home, while Hange pushed her supper around on her plate, Levi said,
"It's just us, now, shitty-glasses."
She smiled at him, but it looked pained, and suddenly she looked older than he remembered.
"I miss everyone," she said. "I know it's stupid. I know it's dumb. I know it's been twenty-some years by now, and that even the kids don't remember Mike or Nanaba or Auruo or Nifa or—" She broke off, shoved food into her mouth, and chewed for a while before swallowing. When she spoke again, her voice was weak, "Erwin never forgot anyone, you know. He thought about them all a lot."
"That's probably why his heart gave out."
"Yeah," she said, smile looking more genuine. "You're right."
And then, after a moment, she pushed her plate away.
"It really is down to us, isn't it?" she asked. "I wonder if Nile will be at the funeral."
"With that stupid fancy-ass cane of his, no doubt," Levi grumbled.
"When is it going to be our turn?"
Levi swallowed hard. "What kind of stupid-ass thing is that to say?"
"I don't want to be left alone," she said.
"I think you need a new pair of shitty glasses," he said. "Do I look like I'm going anywhere?"
Erwin's funeral was on a cool autumn morning. The kids of the old 104th attended; Moblit came with his wife and children; it was a quiet and short service, crowded with people who had probably never even known him.
But it was nice, Hange told him later, that so many people had come.
She had been afraid, for some reason, that nobody would show up.
He supposed that years of military service had changed their expectations. They were still used to mass funeral pyres where the crackling of the fire drowned out the pastor's words.
"Let's go somewhere," Hange said that same night.
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Somewhere not here. Back to the country."
"You hated it there."
"It was nice," she argued, "but it was quiet. It was too quiet. And Erwin—I felt bad leaving him here alone. But now there's no reason for us to stay here."
"It'll still be quiet," Levi warned.
"Let's just go looking for things, then. For fun. We can get a pair of horses and pack a lot of food and just—we can get a wagon and go."
"Is that what you want?"
She smiled, long and slow and almost sadly at him; she touched his face, rubbing her thumb against the corner of his mouth. "We can still have fun," she told him.
They went southwest.
Their food ran out and they hunted with one of the guns Hange had thought to bring. The ammunition wouldn't last forever, but something told Levi that it wouldn't have to.
Hange kept journals—wrote in them and stored them in a watertight wooden crate. She catalogued plants and animals and wrote musings about her life. Sometimes Levi added his opinion to them, added to her reminiscing entries about the people they used to know.
They passed forests and lakes and dilapidated houses. Sometimes they talked about the titans: what if they ran into one, what would they do?
"Die, I guess," Levi said.
Hange did not laugh, but she did nod—like she agreed with it, like she was willing and ready to die, now, like she was tired of this life and what it had to offer.
And Levi supposed she was. Her movements were slower; he recalled, sometimes, her exuberance of the past, and compared it to her slower smiles and her careful footsteps. Things changed; there was no arguing against it.
The air eventually turned heavy and salty and Levi wondered what Mike would think of it if he were still alive. Would it be overpowering? Or would it be pleasant, unusual, fascinating?
They first saw the ocean from miles away atop a hill, and Hange cried out with surprise and delight and some of that youthful excitement that he had been missing, though he hadn't even realized it until that moment.
"Oh," she said. "Oh!"
It took them two days to reach it, and she tasted the salty water—making a face afterward—caught some kind of creature scuttling about in the sand—"Hange, put that creepy-ass thing down!"—and laughed when tiny waves of water lapped up over her calloused feet.
That night, when they sat in the sand around a campfire made of driftwood, Levi said, throwing another stick on the blaze, "Do you want to go back?"
"Can we stay here for a while?" she asked. "Just a while—just a little while."
But the air grew cold and Levi's knees ached and still they remained by the ocean.
"If we're staying here, we need to do something," he said.
"Do you want to go back?" she asked.
Twenty years ago he'd have said no. But he found himself giving a slow nod of his head. "Yeah."
Hange smiled. "I'm just so tired," she said. "I wouldn't mind staying here forever, but I don't think—"
"Don't think what, shitty-glasses?"
"That I have much longer to live," she said, voice hesitant as if she did not want to admit it to him. "If you want to go back—let's go back."
They started back a few days later, dried fish for rations that would last a while. Hange was slower than usual, and did not improve. She acted, sometimes, as if she were in a daze, confused; twice she woke up crying, calling out the names of friends who were long dead.
A month into their slow journey back, when they stopped at the edge of what had once been a farm, he kissed Hange good night under all of their blankets and touched her tangled mostly-grey hair; she sighed against him and smiled. She said, "Thanks, Levi."
He asked, "For what?" but she was already asleep.
The next morning, when he went to wake her, she was gone.
The ground was too hard to dig a grave, so he wrapped her up in a blanket and held her for hours until he pulled himself together and loaded the wagon; when he reached the farmhouse, he traversed the stairs and laid her body on one of the beds on the second floor.
He stared at her for a long time before he left, stared and felt his eyes growing hot and wet, stared and choked out, "I don't want to be left alone, either, shitty-glasses."
He hated it, being the last one standing.
He made it back to the Survey Corps' HQ and was greeted by Armin.
"Captain!" Armin said, and for one fleeting moment, Levi was transported back more than twenty years. But then Armin corrected himself, and said, "Levi. You left and—we thought for sure… Where is Hange?"
Levi slowly shook his head.
"I'm sorry," Armin told him, and he sounded genuine. "You look terrible. Have you eaten?"
No, Levi thought, but he said, "I'm fine. I just want to sleep."
It was a funny thing for him to say; he had struggled most of his life with insomnia, but now sleep came to him easily, came to him now that he didn't need sleep to effectively fight titans, now that he was too old to be of any use to anyone, now that he was the very last person who remembered everything.
Armin showed Levi to his own room at HQ, the one once used, not so long ago, by Erwin, and Levi took it, gratefully. He pretended not to hear the recent news that Armin gave him, but he heard it anyway; someone was getting married, someone had had a child, and Moblit—well, Moblit had passed away.
"His health was poor at the funeral, too," Armin said.
Levi found that he could not remember the funeral very well; Moblit had been pale, he supposed, when he thought about it, but deathly ill? He wondered why the other man had neglected to mention it.
To keep from worrying anyone, most likely. But Levi distinctly remembered hearing Moblit say, when he was half-drunk during a post-titan celebration, "Our worries are over, now."
Well, he was wrong about that.
Levi focused primarily on being the only one left, on being a survivor. Hange had called him that, once, had said, "Levi, you're just a survivor, is all," after the death of his entire Special Operations Squad. "You're meant to survive, that's what you know, what you've always known."
He hadn't minded it so much then, but he minded it now, minded his poor health and minded having to keep going.
"I miss her stupid shitty glasses," he found himself saying aloud sometimes to no one in particular. But it wasn't just Hange he missed. He wondered if she had felt the same, if the wistfulness in her voice when she spoke about the occasional night out with Petra and Lynne and Nanaba and Nifa meant more than she had ever admitted to him. Maybe it had.
He missed Erwin and Mike—missed Auruo, too, even though Auruo's habit of imitating him had been annoying; he missed Isabel and Farlan, missed everyone and wondered, sometimes, if he missed the titans, too, if the titans hadn't almost felt like a security at times, because there was some twisted certainty in their existence, in knowing how you were probably going to die someday.
Most people he had known in his adult life had died at the hands of titans.
But a few of them had died of other things, to illness or a bad heart or an exhaustion that settled into a person's bones and made them wish to never leave their bed again.
Was it because they had seen too much? Was it a curse to survive, to die a slower death, a different death? Was it worth getting to see the new world with Hange—was everything worth it?
It wasn't until Levi, half-dreaming and more than a little delirious, remembered Hange's face when she had seen the ocean; remembered her delight at finding new things outside of the walls; remembered how she had smiled at him the first time they had met, how she had called him amazing.
Yes, he supposed. It had all been worth it.
Hange stood there, smiling at him. "Hey," she said.
He wanted to say, "You're dead. This is impossible," but he didn't. This was a dream, and he would enjoy it, would treasure it; he would not shatter the image by telling her that she was dead.
He would wake up then, and he would be alone. He didn't think he could handle that.
"Hey, shitty-glasses," he said.
She grinned as if his words completed her existence, somehow. "Yeah," she said.
He walked closer, looked at her hands. She was holding another goddamned snake. He made a face. "Gross," he said. "Put that nasty thing down."
But he loved that she was exactly the same in his dreams as she had been in life, that she had never fucking changed, not even a little, not really.
Her face was still lined, her eyes still bright, her hair more grey than brown.
"You sure you don't want to hold him?" she asked.
"Hell no."
"He won't hurt you. He can't hurt you here."
"Please put it down."
She rolled her eyes at him but let the snake go, then turned back to him with a smile. "Hey," she said again, softly.
"Hey what?" he asked and hated that he wanted to cry just because she seemed so real standing there in her wrinkled shirt, a knit sweater pulled overtop, wearing the pants he'd last seen her in.
"Aren't you going to kiss me?"
He couldn't refuse her, but as he leaned in, as he pressed his lips against her cheek, and then her lips, he thought,
This is the moment I wake up.
This is the moment I wake up crying.
But he did not wake up. Hange's face was warm, and exactly as he remembered it. She wrapped her arms around him for a moment, held him close, and she was solid. He felt his throat close up, felt a smile pulling at his lips, felt himself cry all at once—but his face was dry and—
He didn't wake up crying like a child who had been visited by nightmares.
"Much better," Hange said, and pulled away, taking his hand and holding it tightly. "Now let's go."
"Go?" he asked, the edges of his dream whitening. "Go where?"
"To the ocean," she told him, and laughed. "Where else would we go? That's where everyone else is."
Armin rarely used the old commander's room at HQ himself because he had his own home nearby, so it had been no trouble to let Levi borrow it.
As far as he was concerned, once someone was in the Survey Corps…they were always in it, and welcome.
But Armin had not seen Levi since they had parted ways the night before, and Levi was, generally speaking, an early riser. As Armin opened the door to the room Levi was staying in, he felt his chest tighten; it was dark inside.
Eren, standing just behind him, put a hand on Armin's shoulder and peered over his shoulder into the room.
Armin held out a hand, said, "Let me—first, I just need to—" and then he moved into the small bedroom; he went to the window first and pulled back the shades.
The early afternoon light flooded the second-floor room, and Eren's whisper of, "Oh, Captain," told him everything he needed to know.
Both men moved over to the bed to find Levi still in it, face slack as if he were still asleep, lips tilted up as if he were still in the midst of a pleasant dream.
Eren said, "Maybe—"
But Armin shook his head, even as he felt for a pulse.
"No," he said after a few minutes, after leaning down to listen for breath, after taking the cool skin of the former captain of the Survey Corps for what it was: "He's gone."
"He was unhappy at the end, anyway, right?"
Armin allowed himself a small smile. "Restless," he said. "And unhappy. Sometimes at night, when I was working late, he would say things in his sleep…"
"Oh yeah? What kinda stuff?"
"He'd tell Mike to shut up, tell you to clean 'it'—whatever 'it' is—again; I suppose he just missed everyone."
"Well," Eren said, smiling, though it was a grim one, "I guess he wasn't entirely happy being the last of the older Survey Corps members left alive. He lost all his friends—Hange, too, y'know?"
Armin left the room, and Eren trailed after.
"I guess," Eren said softly as they headed down toward the mess hall, "that there is one advantage to being the last survivor."
"And what do you think that is?"
Eren laughed, sounding, for a moment, like a teenage boy having fun with the other trainees again, despite everything that had happened. "It's stupid," he began, but Armin gestured with his hand to encourage him to say whatever-it-was. "If you believe in an afterlife and you're the last one to go, then I guess that means, well, everyone else is there already, right?"
"Hah." Armin allowed himself a smile, at that. "I guess that means that Captain Levi didn't have to wait for anyone, then. They were all there to greet him when he got there."
"Yeah, if you believe in stuff like that."
"Do you?"
"I'd sure like to," Eren said.
"Yeah," Armin found himself saying, thinking of all of the people he'd known in his lifetime, of all the lives that had been lost and how much he'd like to see every single one of those people again someday. "Me, too."