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Levi–
I figured out why you hate me. Or, at least, I think I figured it out. It was the whole “I’ve been watching you” thing, wasn’t it? Moblit told me that was pretty creepy, and probably not well-accepted by someone who used to be a criminal.
I didn’t mean anything by it, I promise. Just that I thought your technique was pretty neat. You fight like…well, I don’t know, because it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I thought you were proud of that, maybe. I don’t think that anymore.
God, Levi, I’m sorry. I’m sorry your friends are gone. It’s the nature of the Survey Corps, that the people we love will leave us one day, but it wasn’t fair. Not to them or to you. They were all you had, I think, and now they’re gone.
…Maybe I shouldn’t write letters with so many assumptions. Oh well.
I can’t say any of this to your face, you see. I think you’d knife me. Or kill me with your bare hands. You look like you could do it. I’ve known men who don’t know their own strength, and I’ve known men who know their own strength and don’t care how they wield it. You’re something else; you know your own strength and you dole it out in careful measures.
I like that. I like you. I wish I’d made a better first impression. Maybe then I could buy you dinner and try to get your mind off of everything. It hurts to think of you curled up in that bunk all alone, mourning your friends after you’ve probably had to mourn so many other people throughout the years.
(No, I don’t know for sure. You just seem like the type of man who’s too used to bearing sadness.)
Anyway. I hope you’re alright. It will get easier. It’s such a bleak thing to say, but it will – the hurt fades into something more bearable after a while, and then you get used to it. I try not to. I don’t want to get used to losing people, and a lot of Scouts worry that it makes them monsters if they do. I always tell them that I think feelings are like matter: the shape of them changes but they’re always there. If the grief consumes you one day and fades into background noise the next, that’s just the way of things. The shape of feelings is a funny thing.
I try to remember their names, their faces, things about them that mattered. They were people. Isabel and Furlan were people, and I will try not to forget them.
Okay. That’s all. See you around, shorty.
–Hange
Levi–
You just asked me what I’m writing for the third time. I made some joke about Titans and you rolled your eyes, but you didn’t move away from me. I’ll call that a win.
This is the first expedition in a long time where it hasn’t rained, so you got to see the sunrise. It didn’t dawn – HAH! – on me until embarrassingly early that you’ve probably never seen one before. The ones over the Walls don’t count; there’s something so beautiful about the fade of dark to light at the edge of the horizon that you can’t really fully appreciate with meters of stone in the way.
It was worth staying up all night to see you see it. I saw your eyes widen and then squint into the light. Saw the pink and orange and how the colors reflected over your face. You looked so…not happy, maybe, but stunned? Enchanted, maybe? (You’d kill me for saying that, I think.)
See? The world can be beautiful. I’m glad I got to watch you realize it.
–Hange
Levi–
New year’s celebrations are always a trial. Now you know this from experience, though I did warn you!
I’m sorry I’m too much of a coward to explain what happened to your face. I could, I guess, but you don’t like people who cry and snivel, and I don’t think I could get through it without fully melting down. I don’t want you to see my tears, and you don’t deserve my rage.
The man who was shouting at me in the street was my father. I haven’t seen him since I was a kid, and for good reason. I ran away from home when I was sixteen1. I grew up in the country
Hold on. Let me start over. This isn’t making any sense.
I was raised in the country. Middle-of-nowhere country. I don’t think anyone was around for a good 30 miles. My parents loved each other once, but not anymore, and they both despaired of me because I wanted to go outside the Walls and understand the world. I asked too many questions. That, apparently, gives alcoholics a headache.
Your suffering was no doubt worse than mine, but they did beat me sometimes. Shouted at me. It doesn’t matter – or, I thought it didn’t – because I ran away. I lied about my age and got into university to get away from them. And then Erwin found out about me and all my questions and recruited me into the Survey Corps. You know the rest.
The point is, I’m a Scout. I can stare down 20-meter Titans without flinching. But when my father appeared around the corner, shouting my name, I froze.
I fucking froze. I was a kid again, suddenly, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t shout back. I couldn’t breathe. And then you came out of nowhere and stood in front of me and said that only a coward would scream abuse at a soldier in the middle of the street.
I didn’t really know what to do with that. Still don’t, if I’m being honest. No one’s ever protected me before. Not from my father and his rage. Not from my mother and her neglect (and she’s dead, so don’t worry). And you just…showed up and did it, then vanished like it was nothing.
It wasn’t nothing. Thank you, Levi.
You’re in my lab with me now. Sitting on the cot I keep in the corner, watching me. We’re both tired. It’s a new year, and I’m confronting the fact that I have actually changed. My father’s rage lives in me, the way your instinctive capacity to fight and fly and sniff out liars lives in you. I have an immense capacity for anger, a capacity I hope you never have to see. I don’t think I could handle it if you were scared of me.
And, at the same time, the hatefulness I carried into the Survey Corps, the rage that fueled me in battle, is fading. I try to believe that’s a good thing, that it’s a better use of my time to be warm instead of cold, kind instead of angry. Normally it works out. I think- I hope that’s why you and I can be friends now.
You told me earlier that I looked like my father. You’re not wrong. Please don’t ever say that again.
Sometimes you sleep down here. It’s cute, the way you roll up into a ball, facing me and drifting off between my sentences. I don’t know why you sleep down here, but I’m just glad you’re sleeping.
Happy new year, Levi. Thank you again.
–Hange