Archive of Our Own ^beta

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"Hange."

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"Oi, shitty glasses. Hange."

No response.

Levi stands in the doorway, shoulder-leaning the frame and glowering into Hange's cluttered quarters. He has been calling her name for the better part of five minutes now, but Hange, hunched over her desk with her nose mere inches from the leaf of parchment she is scribbling on, had failed to notice him.

He kicks his boot against the door, and the resounding bang is enough to catch her attention. She jumps a little in her chair, and turns quickly to the door. She relaxes when her gaze lands on him.

"You scared me."

Levi grunts. "You didn't come to dinner.”

Hange blinks at him. Her gaze travels to the window, where the sky beyond had grown dark save for a speckle of stars and the thin smile of a wispy moon.

"I forgot.” 

Levi rolls his eyes, pushing off the door frame.

"You forgot lunch, too." And breakfast, and countless meals over the last few days, weeks. Months, maybe.

She hums absently, turning back to her papers. "I've been busy. Lost track--I don't know how Erwin had enough time in the day to do everything."

Levi gives a noncommittal grunt and picks his way towards the desk, avoiding haphazard piles of books and papers and discarded scrolls, small, disorganised mountains of debris that must have made some semblance of sense to Hange. Even as he watches, she twists in her chair and reaches blindly into one pile, plucking up a stack of papers and dropping them onto the desk with a sigh.

Levi stops beside the desk, arms folded over his chest to look at her.

Up this close, Hange looks tired. It isn't an unusual sight--Hange has been prone to fits of research-fuelled insomnia for as long as Levi has known her, so easily side-tracked by her every theory and scheme that basic needs like sleep and sustenance often took a back seat. But there is something unsettling to her exhaustion, these days. There is no manic glint in her eye, no exaggerated waving or yelling, no aroused flush to her cheeks; recently, Hange is always pale, skin papery at best, but waxy and sickly more often than not. Her shoulders sag over the desk, shirt hanging more loosely over her frame than Levi remembers, and there's a near constant tremor to her fingers that barely ceases even as she presses pen to paper, scribbling notes and signatures on countless forms presented by countless people.

Her gaze is fixed dully on the newest expense report, now. The low orange light of her lamp flickers in the lenses of her glasses; fire dances on a matt black backdrop over her left eye, where the patch is strapped firmly in place. Her right is half closed, exhaustion pulling at the lid, the skin beneath it puffy and bruised deep purple. Her lips, dry and cracked, shift almost imperceptibly as she mouths the words on the page, reading quickly, scratching her signature where needed and flipping to the next page.

"There's food," he says, leaning his hip on the corner of the desk. "Stew, and the brats hid some bread from Sasha. Go eat something."

"In a minute," Hange mumbles. Levi huffs, and pinches the top of the pen, plucking it out of Hange's grasp. It's a testament to her exhaustion, that her fist keeps the motion of writing for a second too long before realising she is no longer making a mark on the paper. With a tired sigh, she sits back, and levels her exhausted gaze on Levi.

"In a minute," she says again, holding her hand out for the pen. "Let me finish these first."

"Eat. It'll still be here when you get back."

She looks very much like she wants to argue. Levi watches the way her brow creases in the middle, the way her eye pinches, narrowing at him, the way her hands ball into white-knuckled fists against her thighs. But she's tired. She is bone tired, and the righteous energy saps from her within seconds. She deflates, and brings a hand up to rub at her eye, knocking her glasses up to her forehead as she does.

Levi almost wishes she had fought with him instead. There's a terrible, gnawing guilt, seeing her like this--seeing the way the weight of his choice bears down on her. Hange is a worthy Commander, of that, Levi is certain--Erwin never would have chosen her if he didn't believe the same.

But things have changed. The world has changed. And what it means to be Commander of the Survey Corps has morphed into something unfathomable, larger and more complex than what it was before. It is unchartered territory, and Hange has been thrown into waters black and bottomless.

Hange pushes her bangs back from her face with both hands. The hair, limp with grease, sticks in place, and even Hange seems surprised, pulling her hands back and looking almost curiously at her palms.

"Huh. Its been four days."

"Since?"

She gives him a look, then, and there's a flash of something old and familiar in her eye. She quirks the corner of her mouth in a grin.

"Since I bathed."

Levi swiftly raises his arm, and Hange flinches, but the curled fist that thunks atop her head is almost gentle. She blinks up at him in surprise.

"Disgusting. I'll hose you down after you eat."

Hange sits cross-legged in the tub, while Levi's fingers scrub soap suds into her scalp. The bathroom is mostly dark, save for the flicker of lamplight and the pale, foggy glow from the moon through the window.

She is quiet while he cleans her. She had eaten some food, though not as much as he would have liked; sipped at the stew and picked half heartedly at the bread the kids had painstakingly secured. It was better than nothing, but Levi finds his gaze travelling from the top of her soapy head to her bony shoulders, and to the knotted curve of her spine. He can see the shift of her ribs beneath her skin, and when she obediently leans her head back for him to rinse the suds from her hair, he can see twin points of bone at her hips, the skin brutally bruised from the pressure of their belts.

Something unpleasant rolls in his gut.

"Turn around."

Hange does, twisting until she is facing him and re-crossing her legs. Levi dips a cloth into the warm bath water and begins the meticulous process of scrubbing her down, starting at her shoulders. Hange dutifully extends first one arm, and then the other, and it is while Levi is thumbing at the grime between her fingers that she hums, tucking her knees to her chest and resting her chin upon them.

"It's been a while," she says, voice soft in the quiet. Levi moves on to the next finger; Hange's hands, like his, are calloused across her palms and at the tips of her fingers, from years of using the triggers on the manoeuvre gear. They are rough, but her fingers are longer and thinner than his own, and limp in his hand like this, they look almost delicate.

Levi hums in question.

"Since we did this."

Levi makes another non-committal sound. Things have been hectic since everything that happened at Shiganshina. A whirlwind of learning, adapting, planning, everything moving at such a dizzying pace that moments like this had been all but abandoned.

Moments of peace, of quiet; moments where the world falls still and time slows to barely a trickle, they are a rarity none of them have been able to afford.

Levi dips the cloth in the water and rinses the soap from Hange's hands.

"We've been busy," he says. You've been busy, is what he thinks, but his guilt would sit too far forward, if he said it like that; it would be too brazen, and he knows already that his apology is not what Hange wants to hear. He made his choice, and now he has to live with the consequences. There is no room for regret.

Hange sits back when Levi brings the cloth down over her chest, crossing her legs so he can wash over her belly and sides.

"It's nice," she says. "I forgot. How nice it was."

"For you, maybe," Levi says. He taps her knee, and Hange hook her leg out over the side of the tub. Levi adds more soap to the cloth and smooths it over her thigh.

Hange lets out a low chuckle. "Just another floor to mop for you, huh?"

"The floors don't get this filthy."

He is careful around her knee, where scar tissue from a recent wound is still forming. It is tender to the touch, he knows, but Hange makes no complaints when he touches it. She lets out a pleasant little groan when his fingers knead into her calves, toes curling.

Levi washes over her foot, then taps the sole, and Hange draws one leg back in and raises the other one, and the process starts again. It is methodical and familiar; strangely comforting, in the mess of everything. They've been battered with new information, faced with a world that is so vastly different from anything they had imagined before, burdened with the  insurmountable task of exploring it, of finding their place in it--all of this new, all of this frightening.

But this; this is an old tale. They have danced this dance for years, muscle memory leading them in each step. Shiganshina changed some things--Levi is more gentle in places than he used to be, careful cleaning the thickened, still healing skin on her back where Bertolt's titan had burned her. He used to dump water over her head like a dog, bit back smiles at the way she would cough and sputter and stare indignantly through her hair at him, but now is he careful to keep water from dripping into her bad eye. He slides the cloth over her face with more consideration, avoiding too much contact with the tender tissue above and below her clouded, milky eyeball. The swelling has lessened considerably over time, but the wound will remain raw for a long while to come.

When he is done, he helps her stand, and rinses her down with a pail of clean water before offering a hand to help her step from the tub. Standing up to her full height, Levi can see the extent of the way her body has changed. She has always been a rake of a thing, all straight lines and sharp edges, but she has always seemed strong and sturdy. Something steady, dependable.

Now,  she seems fragile in a way Levi has never known her to be. There is no room left for her to bend; too much pressure, and he fears she will snap, splinter into a million pieces he cannot hope to fit back together again.

He holds a towel for her. Hange takes it with a small, grateful smile, and wraps it around herself, then leans back against the edge of the tub and bows her head. Levi scrubs at her hair with a second towel, ringing as much water from it as he can.

She dries herself half heartedly  and pulls on the spare shirt Levi had brought for her while her back and shoulders are still damp. The fabric sticks to her, highlights the protruding bones of her spine when she bends over to tug on her pants.

Once fully dressed, Hange stretches, popping her back as she does, and rolls her shoulders, her neck. She gives Levi a lazy, pleased smile.

"I needed that," Hange says. Levi clicks his tongue.

"I know. You stank."

Hange laughs, a light, airy thing.

"Always so kind, Levi," she says tunefully. She seems loose, more relaxed than Levi has seen her in what feels like forever. Her shoulders sit lower not bunched up about her ears, and her face isn't so pinched or strained. It's a relief.

It's short lived.

"I should get back," she says.

"You should sleep."

She shrugs a shoulder at him, waves a hand.

"Later," she says. Even as she speaks, Levi can see the tension rising in her; the respite of a bath and a hot meal had been brief, and already the weight is reloading. Her burden grows heavier by the second.

"A few hours, Hange. The paperwork will still be there when you wake up."

"And there will be more, no doubt," she says. "I'll get further behind than I am already."

There is no more room for negotiation. Levi can only count himself lucky that he managed to get this far with her, to do this much. He schools his face into a neutral expression and nods, scooping to pick up her wet towel and dropping it into the laundry basket as he follows her out of the bathroom.

Levi refuses to regret his choice. He made the right decision in Shiganshina, and he will not doubt himself for that.

But the tight, nauseous knot in his stomach does not ease. He watches Hange settle back into her desk chair, strap her eye patch over her still-damp hair, and bow herself over the pile of papers she had abandoned on the desk, and the sickening unease swells to his chest, pushing the air from his lungs.

He made the choice to condemn Erwin to death. He will do everything he can to ensure he has not done the same thing to her.