Work Text:
Hange Zoe had a habit, one that was very quickly turning into a routine.
Every morning, she would take the train to work. She brought a book with her, an old tattered paperback that had been marked up and dog-earred to death. She never read it; she only used it to hide half of her face, to pretend she didn't spend her entire commute staring at the man who sat across from her everyday.
Nothing about this habit started on purpose. The book was a childhood favorite, something she genuinely intended to re-read before she co-opted it to hide behind. The train route was due to necessity, ever since her old hand-me-down sedan had finally fallen apart. Even the job was something she just fell into, a little part-time gig that made her just enough money to scrape by. It wasn't her idea of a perfect life, but she made do. Still, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something missing, somehow. Maybe it was her dead-end job or her utter lack of a love life, but she just felt like she was sleep-walking through time, waiting for something to happen. It was a feeling Hange disregarded most days. Most people in their late twenties felt like that, didn’t they?
As far as how this man fit into her routine…well, he was just so damned pretty that Hange couldn't help but look. The curve of his face, his delicate features, his long lashes. Hange never came close enough to make out the color of his eyes, but she was sure they were absolutely striking. His hair always seemed to fall perfectly and his clothes were tailored to perfection, hugging the lines of his body so sensually that Hange couldn’t help herself from drooling.
She might have developed a little bit of a crush.
Never before had someone affected her like this. Hange had never thought of herself as someone shallow enough to lust after another person for their physical appearance alone. He never even paid her the least amount of attention, too busy taking important business calls or typing out emails on his phone. And yet, she was turning into a feral beast, greedily soaking up the way his thigh muscles flexed under his trousers, biting her lip whenever he shifted enough for his clavicles to peek out from his shirt collar. God, what she wouldn’t give to be able to trace the veins in his neck with her tongue.
The whole thing was stupid. It was just an illogical little fantasy she liked to indulge when she was bored at work or feeling far too alone at night. She didn't even know him, neither his name nor the first thing about him. He just felt familiar, somehow. Almost like a childhood friend that she hadn’t seen since kindergarten, or maybe a face on a magazine she had seen before. (Neither of those hypotheses proved correct, though; she had checked.) Seeing him every morning felt so right, like he belonged in her life. He just fit, a puzzle piece that clicked right into place amidst the rest of Hange’s daily routine. She even missed the sight of him, like a phantom limb, on the days she didn’t go to work.
‘Well, why shouldn’t I miss him?’ a stubborn and intrusive voice pouted in her head once, as Hange zoned out eating breakfast. ‘He was mine, once, wasn’t he?’
Woah.
Pump the breaks.
The stuffing had slowly slid out of Hange’s sandwich as she froze, absolutely appalled at herself. It was official, she was a Grade-A creep. Practically a predator. She had no idea where that thought had come from, but this stranger from the train was certainly not hers and had never, in her living memory, been hers. What a preposterous notion.
But thoughts like that kept floating through her head, setting Hange at war with herself. On one hand, her logical mind acknowledged that she was developing a bit of an obsession, an unhealthy attachment and even a sense of entitlement towards this man, a person with whom she had never interacted before. It was kind of sickening, actually, how frequently he would waltz in and out of her thought patterns.
On the other hand, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she did know him, somehow. He didn’t feel like a stranger. He felt like…a friend. Like someone she knew intimately, or at least had known once upon a time. She knew he was someone she could trust, someone whose hands she could put her life into. It made her happy to think about him, this beautiful stranger that felt, absurdly, like her missing other half.
So, she came to a compromise. It didn’t hurt just to look, so she would let herself look her fill for the entire train ride, and then banish the thought of him from her head the moment she stepped foot onto the platform. Hange could forgive herself for the dreams that overtook her at night. She couldn’t help having fantasies when she was unconscious. But in the daytime, when she was strong enough to wrestle with her mind and force it into submission, she tried her best to maintain at least a shred of dignity.
It didn’t stop her from secretly looking forward to weekday mornings, however. It was the only time she allowed herself to indulge her delusions. On days like today, when the sky was overcast and dreary, when she was still a little hungover and everything seemed to be falling apart bit by bit, she allowed herself to indulge just a tad deeper than usual.
Their route was unpopular and their train car was frequently nearly empty, especially at this hour. Hange was glad for that; it allowed her view to be unobstructed and saved her the embarrassment of being publicly shameless. Her depravity was known to only herself and the object of her desires. But that was fine. She was sure he hadn’t even noticed. He never paid her any attention anyways.
“Hey, four-eyes,” he said suddenly, directly contradicting her thoughts. His voice cut straight through the silence. He wore an irritated scowl as he abruptly looked up at Hange with a hard glare. She looked around herself, wondering who he could be talking to. Seeing no one around, her eyes grew wide and she pointed at herself in confusion. Surely he wasn’t talking to her?
It was official, she could no longer tell the difference between dreams and reality. She needed to see a shrink, ASAP.
“Are you ever planning on actually talking to me, or are you just gonna keep gawking at me like a kid at the zoo?”
Hange’s cheeks blossomed bright red, flushed with embarrassment. If she looked surprised when he first addressed her, it was nothing compared to the shock on her face now. Her jaw dropped, mouth hanging stupidly agape while her heart rate jumped up to two hundred. Her soul shriveled up inside, and she desperately wished that the ground would open up and swallow her whole.
She tried her best to recover, chuckling nervously and scratching the back of her head. Her laughter sounded forced, awkward and uncomfortable as all hell. Her book, having failed to serve as a shield, dropped down to her lap. She guessed she wasn’t as subtle in her admiration as she thought she was.
“Sorry, Levi,” she said, the name falling easily from her lips as though she had said it a million times before. Alarm bells were ringing in her head, but her mouth kept moving even though her mind was furiously telling herself to just shut up. “You have such a pretty face, how could I resist?”
‘What the fuck,’ Hange thought to herself immediately. Her eyes closed in pained humiliation. ‘Why, why, why did I say that?!’
Where was this coming from? And who the hell did she think she was to speak to a stranger so casually? As if it wasn’t bad enough that she was caught staring and drooling, now she was addressing him by name and dropping cheesy pickup lines. If they were in an office setting, she would have been sent straight up to HR. She could practically hear her mother screaming in her head about how ladies should be coy and demure. Of course, she always thought that notion was horseshit, but in this instance, Hange probably could have used a little bit more tact.
She didn’t even know how she knew his name; this was the first time they had ever spoken and he certainly had never introduced himself to her before. The name Levi just felt…right. It felt familiar and comfortable in her mouth, though her brain had simply plucked it out of the ether.
A new worry popped up in her head. What did he think about a total stranger knowing his name? Did he think she was a stalker? Hange was certain he already thought she was creepy with her staring, and this was hardly a point in her favor. She had all but admitted to being a peeping tom! She might as well have been an old man hiding inside a women’s bathhouse, for how brazen she was being.
But rather than call security or seek another place to sit, where he could wait out the rest of his commute in peace, Levi simply clicked his tongue in annoyance. He looked away and crossed his arms, his scowl deepening. Even so, Hange watched as a steady blush made itself known on his face, highlighting the tops of his cheekbones with a soft, pink glow.
‘Oh, he liked it when I called him pretty,’ a naughty part of her thought salaciously. ‘I wonder what else he would like.’
‘No, bad Hange! Stop it!’ the other 90% of her brain screamed. ‘You can’t think that way about a stranger!’
They sat in awkward silence for another minute, as Hange wracked her brain for something to say. She looked anywhere but at Levi. Her gaze bounced from the train ceiling to a coffee spill on the carpet. She looked directly out the window, watching the skyscrapers fly by as the train continued moving.
“My apologies,” she said finally. Hange sat up nice and proper, trying to regain some of her dignity. “That was. Weird. Of me to say. And I shouldn’t have been staring…to be honest, I didn’t think you would notice…”
He scoffed. The tips of his ears were still pink, but his attention turned back towards Hange. He gave her a flat, unimpressed look. “You do it every day. Of course I’ve noticed.”
A sudden urge to scream and throw herself out of the train window washed over Hange, but she was able to maintain control. The blood that had finally left her cheeks came back with a vengeance. Her face felt hot as she was filled with even more embarrassment. Sure, she had wanted him to notice her, but not like this. This was her worst possible nightmare; the man she had been crushing on for ages not only caught her staring, but had been aware of how creepily she had been watching him, day in and day out.
“But wait,” Hange said before she could stop herself. “If you’ve noticed me staring every day, why haven’t you moved? There’s tons of empty seats on this train, and other cars for that matter. I board the train before you do, so you could avoid me easily if you wanted to, but you always choose to sit right across from me.”
It seemed to be Levi’s turn to be embarrassed. His pale skin became bright red, flushing even more violently than Hange had. He didn’t seem to know what to say, only managing a few stammers before he shut his mouth, folded his arms, and sank deep into his seat. Levi glared down at the ground between them. Hange couldn’t help herself from grinning, feeling inexplicably filled with victory.
That feeling left as quickly as it arrived, as the train pulled to a stop and the automated voice announced the name of the stop. Levi got up quickly, adjusting his clothing so that his lapel once again sat perfectly against his torso, and exited the car without a single look back.
The moment he was gone, the swish of his long coat serving as a dramatic punctuation at the end of their story, Hange slouched in her seat and groaned. She threw her arm over her face, hiding in the crook of her elbow.
‘For shame!’ she thought, her mind running wild with theatrical flair. ‘You’ve chased him away, you’ll never see him again! Oh Hange, this is exactly why you shouldn’t be allowed out in public.’
It was with great self control that Hange resisted the urge to stamp her feet like an unruly toddler. Her thoughts were fractured. At once, she tried to cheer herself up with useless and trite platitudes like ‘there are plenty of fish in the sea!’, while another part of her began deconstructing her every move from the moment she stepped onto this godforsaken train, identifying every action she could have taken differently. The last part of her just felt sad, like she had lost someone far more important than a stranger she had barely spoken to. Her grief was almost unbearable, made worse by her awareness of how disproportionate it was, and the mental berating she was already giving herself for how stupidly attached she had become to this…nobody.
“Oi — Hange.”
Her eyes snapped up. Levi stood between the train and the platform, stubbornly preventing the doors from closing. He looked like a vision, the glow of the morning sun illuminating his back. The hem of his tan coat fluttered in the wind, but the lighting from the train seemed to make it glow a deep hunter green. Hange didn’t question how he knew her name; it only made sense, the syllables sounding comfortable and perfect as they fell from his lips.
He clicked his tongue, an annoyed ‘tch’ that sounded all too familiar. His face was drawn into a scowl. In a single move, he jerked his head towards the platform, his eyes never parting from Hange’s face.
“Are you coming, or what?”
Suddenly, Hange realized that she had just been staring once more, her mouth agape and her body frozen. Like she had been startled awake, she sprung into action, shoving all her stray items messily into her tote bag and scrambling towards the train doors. Never mind that this wasn’t her stop, never mind that she was about to start walking away with a veritable stranger.
Leaving all else behind, Hange decided that she was going to spend the rest of her day together with Levi. Just the two of them.
As she walked out onto the platform, boldly grabbing onto his hand, Hange had the strangest sensation overcome her. For once in her life, everything felt right.
She had been waiting for this for a lifetime.