Work Text:
Touching is a simple matter. It requires only movement.
To touch, he merely has to make contact. He can touch Levi’s shoulder as he passes him in the corridor, he can brush his fingers against Hange’s when she hands him paperwork. It’s easy.
But feeling is harder. Feeling requires investment. He can bump Nile’s shoulder with his own, can snap his fist against his chest over his heart in a habitual salute, but he can’t feel those things. If he feels them, then he’ll know more than the concept of touch as it stands. He’ll know about the lift of shoulders taking breath, the warm, rough callouses of hard work, the give of a sturdy body against his own, the beating of hearts.
He’ll know the blood that pumps through their veins and the fire that snaps in their eyes.
He’ll know about their humanity, the fragility of the human condition. He’ll know it and feel it too close to his own distant heart, and then he won’t be able to sacrifice them as he’s sacrificed so many others.
A good commander knows when he has to do the unthinkable. A good commander knows that sometimes, for the greater good, for the bigger goal, lives will be lost.
So it’s fine if he touches lives, hundreds of thousands of them—
in one way or another, by appearing to care too little for them as individuals or too much for a goal larger than all of them
—but he won’t allow himself to feel a single one.
Not deeply, not enough.
“What do you see?” he asks, hands gripping too hard, breath tickling against an ear. “Who is the enemy?”