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Hange knew without asking that the others were dead. It was on Levi's face, written in the lines that shouldn't have been able to appear overnight but had. It happened a lot in the Survey Corps; she could spot it without trying, now.
Levi was a survivor.
There was nothing she could do about it, of course. Nothing she said would help. Nothing she did would bring back Flagon Darlett or his dead subordinates. He hadn't been a bad guy, Flagon. How long had she known him? A few years. He'd always been rough around the edges, pushy and a know-it-all, but not a bad person. Hange was half-convinced that nobody in the Survey Corps could be a bad person.
She wondered if Levi had seen Flagon die.
She wondered if Levi had seen all of them die...or if he'd been spared that torture.
Was spared the right word to use? No. Sometimes watching someone die was better than finding them after-the-fact, and anything was preferable to never finding them at all, but seeing it happen always brought with it a special kind of torture: endless what-ifs and if-onlys.
Hange didn't give Levi so much as a sympathetic glance as she moved past him to get to the other side of their temporary shelter where the sleeping mats were stacked; a guy like him—he wouldn't want her pity, anyway.
But she put her mat down close to him. Just in case.
He didn't know her. He didn't care about her.
She knew that.
But maybe it would help him to know that someone was there.
The loss didn't really sink in until the Survey Corps passed into Shiganshina again; the heavy groan of the gate as it closed behind them stirred something in Levi.
For a moment he had to fight it—the urge to wheel his horse around, to slip under the gate at the last second. It wasn't to attain freedom. It was something else, something he couldn't quite explain even to himself. He felt as if he'd forgotten something in the open wall-less outside world.
And he had.
The final slam of the gate as it closed forced a shudder down his spine.
Isabel and Farlan were still out there—what remained of them, anyway.
They were only corpses, now, he reminded himself, and corpses didn't matter. They couldn't matter. Not to him. Not anymore. He was a fool for remembering the last look back at them he'd taken: the flash of red hair against the rain-cleansed grass, the tattered remnants of a military uniform that almost looked right—
He kept his hands steady on the reins and his head up, eyes facing forward.
"Let's go somewhere for lunch," Hange said. She wasn't sure if she still wanted to uphold her end of the bargain anymore, or if it was something else—something more.
Levi barely looked up at her.
"Dinner?" she tried.
The silence was almost overwhelming. Maybe she was coming on too strong; maybe a week wasn't enough time for Levi to want to do anything. When he finally answered, it was a scraping, forced, "No."
She swallowed hard. "Maybe another time, then."
He did not respond.
She left after another minute, unable to think of anything to say.
He couldn't sleep anymore.
He stayed up and cleaned because it was something to do, something that kept his hands busy and his mind occupied on tiny details instead of the big picture.
It was easy to concentrate on making sure the cracks between the floorboards were clean.
It was hard to think about Isabel and Farlan. Even the memories of their laughter filled him with guilt.
He should have listened to them that first night. The documents could have waited.
Everything could have waited.
Hange slipped into Erwin's office without a word and waited to be acknowledged: not by Erwin, who was out with Commander Shadis, but by his second.
It didn't take long. Mike had probably smelled her coming four corridors away, after all.
"Something the matter?" he asked, eyes glued to the report in front of him.
"No," she said. "I was just wondering..."
"About Levi?"
"You have good instincts."
"It's obvious, actually." He glanced up then, one side of his mouth lifted slightly.
"What happened, Mike?"
"What do you mean?"
She slipped into the chair on the other side of the desk and sighed. "What happened to Flagon and the others? Levi's friends?"
"What makes you think I know?"
"I know you were there," she said.
Mike let out a sigh through his nose and straightened his back. "Why do you want to know?"
"Let's just say it's curiosity." It wasn't, though; it was much more than that—and yet, nothing singularly identifiable.
"I didn't see it happen. They were dead by the time Erwin and I got there, but I think he saw it happen."
"To all of them?"
Mike looked away, but tilted his head forward in a slight nod. "Mm."
Hange let the silence linger between them. When Mike's fingers closed into a loose fist on the desk in front of him, she crossed her arms over her chest. "Is that ever something you can—" she hesitated, at a loss for words, "—move past?"
"No," he said, not immediately, but after a long pause that could have meant any number of things.
"I can't help him, then."
The creases at the corners of Mike's eyes deepened as he didn't quite smile. "You can try," he told her, "but it's hard to lose an entire squad on your first expedition."
He knew, of course. Not everyone in the Survey Corps had been a sole survivor during a single expedition, but Mike had—more than once.
"How many times?" she asked. Perhaps it was insensitive, but she wanted to know.
Mike seemed to realize that her intentions weren't to bring him pain, but to try to understand other people better. "Six," he admitted, voice soft.
Hange felt a familiar ache in her chest at the sound of that single word. Surely out of those six times, he had lost friends, too. The reactionary, "I'm sorry," slipped out before she could stop it.
He shrugged. Both of them knew that the past could not be changed.
"Hange," he said after another moment.
"Let me guess: you have work to do."
"That's always the case," he told her, still not smiling, but he looked less—distraught, she supposed. "But no. I wanted to say...that I think those two were all he had in the world."
Of course they were, Hange thought. Of course. The only family he had—the only friends. And he'd lost them. She couldn't imagine that. She didn't know what she would have done if she'd only had two people in the world to care about, and they'd both died right in front of her.
"I don't think I'd survive something like that," she said.
"He needs time."
"And space?"
Mike hesitated. "I don't know."
She didn't either. But maybe Levi didn't know, himself. How could a person know what they needed after they'd lost everything that mattered to them?
"What do you want?"
Levi didn't mean to ask. It slipped out against his own will, but he didn't take the question back. He wanted an answer.
Hange paused, surprise flickering over her face. "I'm here to ask you if you want to get dinner. You know, food that doesn't suck? On me?"
"No."
"All right." Her words were simple, but he saw the disappointment in her eyes, and it annoyed him.
"What do you want?" he asked again, fingers curling around the rag he was using to wipe his spare blades clean.
"I just said—"
"Not that bullshit excuse," he interrupted. "What do you think you're going to gain from this? Why are you here? What do you want?"
"From you?" she prompted.
"There is no secret technique that will make you a better soldier," he said.
"That's not why I'm here."
He tried not to feel frustrated, but he was. She had asked him no less than five times to get lunch or dinner over the last month, and she kept coming back. She kept talking to him—seemingly for no reason. But there was always a reason; there was always a motive. He couldn't help but direct an impatient sigh at her.
She smiled at him, then.
He didn't trust it at all.
"What?" he asked, nose crinkling with annoyance.
"Take me up on my offer for dinner and I'll tell you," she said.
He stared at her for a long time. She didn't so much as blink.
"Fine."
It was a table for four.
The two extra chairs made Hange uncomfortable, but she didn't comment on them.
"You going to say what you want, now?" Levi asked while they waited for their food.
"I already did," she told him, a genuine smile parting her lips.
"Eh?"
"I just wanted you to come to dinner with me."
He looked, for just an instant, as though he was struggling with a response. "That's stupid."
She laughed and decided she could appreciate his preference for saying exactly what he thought. "Is it?"
It was stupid, he thought. It was weird. Why would she want a thing like that? Why would anyone want a thing like that? "If this is because of that shit that you said before—"
Her face softened. "No," she said, shifting to let her face rest in one of her hands. "I mean, at first, maybe, but—that'd be kind've insensitive, don't you think? The Survey Corps isn't a game where the winners get treated to dinner."
"There are still winners and losers," he pointed out.
"You think so?"
"Yes." How could there not be? The winners were the people left alive.
"It's still not a game," she said. "You can't think of it like that or you'll go mad in the first couple of months. I know you've seen a lot of stuff already, even before you joined us, but—"
"What's your point?" He didn't want to listen to her stupid sympathetic speech. He had only agreed to come because she'd promised to tell him why she was being so insistent on taking him out. Well, now he knew—and he wanted to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.
It took her a moment to collect herself; he watched her eyes turn thoughtful behind her glasses, watched her chew on the inside of her cheek. "I think you're an excellent soldier, Levi, and I think you're an all right guy for joining us."
He frowned. "I was going to kill Erwin Smith. I almost did."
“Oh?” Hange’s only outward reaction was a twitch of her mouth, but he knew that meant the information had startled her.
Did she believe him? Did he care?
"Well, why didn't you?" she asked when he didn’t comment further. "I'm assuming Mike couldn't stop you. And if you're both still here, well..." The shrug of her shoulders was exaggerated and accompanied by a grin, both of which unnerved him. "You must have worked out your differences, right?"
He didn't know what to say to that. What could he say, anyway? That Erwin Smith wasn't to blame for the death of his friends? That in a fit of stupid childish rage he'd blamed the wrong man?
"I guess you could say that," he said.
The food came, then, interrupting their conversation for a few moments. When the serving girl left, Hange dug into her food right away; it was half because she was hungry and half because she hoped it would dispel the awkward direction their conversation had taken.
Levi picked at his food. Maybe he didn't trust it—maybe he couldn't. She didn't know everything about him, but she knew enough. Everyone had heard the rumors by now: Levi and his friends were all from the Underground City. She wondered how they'd met. Levi didn't seem the type to make friends easily. He didn't seem to be the type to want friends, though surely, like all human beings, he did crave some human companionship.
"Just eat it," she said, waving her fork at him. "It's way better than the slop they feed us at Headquarters, you know. And this is on me, so you should enjoy it."
Levi glanced over at the empty chair beside him.
She wondered if he was thinking about his friends. The two extra chairs at their table should have been filled.
Maybe they were there in spirit.
Did she believe in such things? Well, why shouldn't she? Precious little existed in the world to give a person solace; she saw no harm in snatching at it when the opportunity presented itself.
After the first bite, Levi's eyes widened slightly. Hange grinned around her own mouthful of food.
"Good, right?" she asked before she'd finished chewing.
He shot her an annoyed look, but it only made her laugh with her mouth full.
"You didn't let me finish what I was saying, earlier, before you decided to tell me all your deep dark secrets about trying to kill Erwin."
He kept his eyes on his food, which suited her just fine.
She took a deep breath. "So I was thinking, Levi, that you and I should be friends."
He almost choked on his food. The cough was undignified at best. "What?" he asked.
"I said that we should be friends."
The earnestness on her face was disturbing. He didn't know what to make of it—or her.
"Farlan was right about you," he said without thinking. "You're weird."
She didn't laugh. She just watched him, those over-expressive eyes of hers softening.
"It's true," she finally admitted.
Sudden realization dawned on him, then: she knew what it was like to lose people she cared about. Of course she did. How could she not? Everyone in the Survey Corps had probably experienced it once or twice or over and over again.
Erwin Smith was right, then. The titans were to blame in the end. Maybe Isabel and Farlan and Flagon and Sairam would have lived longer if he had forgotten about the documents, but how many expeditions would it have taken before they ended up dead? He wouldn’t have been able to protect them from everything.
He was only a man.
He glanced over at the empty seat beside him, and then at the one next to Hange; had things been different, Isabel and Farlan would be eating with them. They would have liked the food. He doubted Isabel would be able to talk because she'd be too busy shoveling her food into her mouth and trying to steal Farlan's from him.
He glanced back at Hange.
He didn't know about the whole friend-thing, but...it was stupid to wallow in his own grief when he wasn't alone.
"How long have you been in the Survey Corps?" he asked.
Her eyes lit up, a smile spread across her face—and she asked in return, "Are you sure you want to know?"
Did he? Well, maybe not, but he grunted out something that passed for agreement.
She took a deep breath, and then she was off. "Well, I joined the Training Corps when I was... Hmm, but before that, actually, I—"
He let it happen.
For some reason he didn't mind. In fact, it almost felt comfortable.