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Erwin is hunched over his desk again.
He’s not sleeping; Levi can hear the scratch of a pen against paper. He’s busy, as always. The arch of his shoulders is strong and tight—an interesting picture painted and washed over again in fragmented colors of the setting sun. Of course a man like Erwin needs his desk to face the window; he needs to see outside of himself.
Levi is built small and compact, a product, perhaps, of his upbringing—or lack thereof. His muscles are short and sinewy; his own back strong but with no wasted space. His posture is always a little too rigid; it, too, is a product of his upbringing.
Erwin is tall and strong. Levi wonders sometimes what he and Erwin might have looked like as children, compared side-by-side. He can’t imagine it because he can’t imagine the childhood of another—of someone not like him, and Erwin with soft little arms and wide impressionable eyes seems impossible now that he knows this man whose muscles have built upon one another, whose eyes that have become shadowed.
In the public sphere, Erwin always stands tall; he makes Levi look as if he’s slouching.
But here in the quiet of his office, his shoulders hunch and his back bends.
Levi can see the planes of it through the fabric of Erwin’s white shirt: the muscles of his shoulders are clenched too tight; his back is strong but too broad. It’s where he carries his guilt. Erwin swallows all of it and packs it away as if it’s something precious, something worth saving, and he always carries it on his back. He’s just better at hiding it than most people. Who else has seen it? Hange, maybe; she’s astute, but it’s not as if she’s free of burdens, herself. It’s not as if any of them are. How can they help one another when they can’t even help themselves?
Erwin sighs, his pen shifting in his left hand. Levi knows that if he looks closer, he’ll see Erwin’s fingers trembling.
It’s not so much sad as it is painful. It hurts to see the strong struggle, but it’s not Erwin’s missing arm that’s causing the tenseness across his shoulders.
Someday, Levi thinks, one day, perhaps a day closer at hand than any of them dare to hope, Erwin will have to face it. His guilt will consume him, then, if it doesn’t crush him first.
Levi steps forward and puts a hand on Erwin’s back, between his shoulder blades. The muscles contract. When they relax, a moment later as Erwin realizes who is standing behind him, Levi notices that they remain too tight, knotted from years of adding burdens and never letting any of them go. It’s easy to decide to deal with shit later, isn’t it? he wants to ask, but doesn’t. It’s hard to love a man like this, a man whose fate was sealed in his boyhood, long before he’d ever met him.
No amount of patient kneading will fix this.
“Don’t you know how to knock?” Erwin asks, turning back to the document in front of him. His left hand is not quite steady as he writes something in one of the boxes.
Levi comes to stand at the side of the desk and looks out of the window, down into the courtyard where new trainees are laughing and carrying on. Some of them are from the Southern 104th; he wonders, vaguely, how Eren and the others might feel about them.
“Give me something to do.” He doesn’t want to think about Shiganshina or the upcoming meeting about the trip. He doesn’t want to think about Zackly or about Eren’s training. He just wants meaningless mindless work: the usual.
Erwin pauses. “You could learn how to knock. That would be a fine start.”
Levi’s lips thin as he crosses his arms over his chest. You can’t fool me, he thinks, but “I know you’re swamped with bullshit,” is what he says. “Hand some of it over.”
“You’re sure?” he asks. “It’s just—this is just backlog, Levi.”
Levi turns his head slightly, just enough to catch the look in Erwin’s eyes. He knows what the backlog is. All of the deaths they haven’t had time to record. All of the official letters of condolences. They all say the same goddamn thing, but Erwin thinks he has to write them himself. Levi looks down at the one beneath Erwin’s left hand.
Mike Zacharias is the name at the top.
“You shouldn’t be doing this shit,” he says, snatching it up. “All this official writing? Left-handed? Nobody will be able to read it by the time you’ve smudged it to death.”
Let me fucking help you, he thinks, chest too tight.
Erwin’s shoulders shift, his back straightens slightly.
“Thank you, Levi,” he says.
Levi tries not to look down at the shaky handwriting dotting Mike’s death certificate, but he can’t help it.
Cause of death: unknown, and the letters forming unknown are halting and uneven, as uncertain as the word itself.
“Why don’t you go check on Eren’s training?” he suggests, and turns toward the window. “It’s worth a look.”
“One of the only positive things happening right now, is that what you’re saying?” Erwin’s voice is casual, but there’s a heaviness to his words that Levi understands.
Yes, of course. For every tragedy the Survey Corps experiences, they make one or two small steps forward.
“Sure,” Levi says.
And when Erwin vacates his seat and leaves the room, Levi takes it and grabs a new form, his own shoulders hunching, his own back bending, as he grasps Erwin’s pen and fills it out.