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The Accident
“Rise and shine!” Hange bellows as she kicks open the door to the doctors’ lounge and flips on the lights, illuminating the room with a row of harsh fluorescents. On the couch, sleeping face down in a puddle of his own drool, is Levi - who reaches down, picks up one of his shoes, and hurls it at Hange as hard and as fast as he can without looking up. Hange tries to jump out of the way but is too slow, the shoe landing squarely against her right breast.
“Fuck, Levi!” she howls, clutching at herself. “You hit me right in the boob!”
“Shit. I was aiming for your face.” Levi drags himself to a sitting position and puts on his remaining shoe, then motions for Hange to return the other one. “Gimme that back. And if you try to hit me with it, it’s going up your ass.”
Hange snorts and tosses Levi’s shoe back to him. He catches it effortlessly in one hand, the rest of his body remaining perfectly still. “Save your cranky bullshit for later,” she tells him. “We’ve got a blizzard special coming in.”
Levi exhales heavily. “What are you talking about, you lunatic?”
“It’s snowing,” Hange fires back.
“It’s snowing?”
Hange all but gapes at him. “When is the last time you looked out a window?” Levi shrugs. “Or watched a weather report?” Another shrug. “I don’t have time to explore your many dysfunctions,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s snowing like crazy, so now a bunch of people on the interstate need to have their blood and organs put back in their bodies. Huge pile-up. Go drink some shitty coffee and get ready to work,” Hange tells him, rocking back and forth on her heels as she lingers in the lounge doorway. After tapping the door frame a couple of times, she leaves.
Levi takes a few minutes to suck down a styrofoam cup full of sludgy hospital coffee before he heads back to the emergency room. The place is a madhouse: the waiting room is full of people, triage nurses running around trying to allocate beds and trauma bays, patients grumbling about the wait and cradling injured limbs. Each room is occupied, some even with two beds crammed in the small space. More stretchers and gurneys line the halls of the ER, making the space seem even more cramped.
It’s utter chaos, and he loves it.
"Need you in bay four!” one of the nurses calls, pointing in the direction of the trauma wing. Levi turns and heads there, nimbly dodging shuffling patients and nurses running supplies between rooms.
“Dr. Ackerman!” one of the residents calls after him. Levi turns to see one of the residents working under him, looking over at him with wide, scared eyes. “What do I do?”
“You know how to be a good doctor,” he yells over the din. “So be a good doctor. Treat and move on to the next.”
“Thank you!” the resident shouts back, but Levi doesn’t hear it.
In bay four, there is a pale, blue-lipped woman on the table surrounded by frantic interns and residents. He steels himself for a moment as he scrubs up, suits up, and goes in.
“Who checked her lungs?” Levi demands, pressing his stethoscope to the patient’s chest and furrowing his brow as he tries to discern the meaning of her labored breathing. “Do any of you shit-flinging idiots know what pneumothorax is?”
“Collapsed lung, Dr. Ackerman,” one of the interns answers.
“Did none of you think to check for one after a car accident?” Levi snarls, then reaches for a needle to insert into the woman’s chest. He pulls the plunger slowly, slowly, and her stats start to climb - but not much. He swallows his planned speech for the residents (short, full of expletives, deeply disappointed) and instead examines the patient more closely, locates the site of her internal bleeding - caused, he correctly surmises, by a piece of bone that has splintered from her fractured ribs.
Within twenty minutes he is done with her, cutting her open and closing her up neatly and efficiently. He sighs a heavy rush of breath, then peels off his bloody gloves and pulls down his surgical mask. There’s paperwork to follow; there always is, but he’d rather doze off on the stack of papers than explain exactly how he saved this particular life. The woman on the table is getting better, her lips turning pink again, so Levi stands back to rest for a moment while an intern cleans her up, wiping away dried blood and dirt to reveal pale skin mottled with bruises.
“Can someone check her ID bracelet?” a resident asks. “I need a name for her chart.”
An intern lifts the woman’s wrist to read the white plastic bracelet looped around it. “Says she’s a Jane Doe,” the intern says. Levi looks over at the young doctor, but his eyes are drawn to a small black tattoo on the patient’s wrist. Brushstrokes, he remembers, brushstrokes he’d traced with the tips of his fingers. He’d made fun of her for having a cliche tattoo of Japanese characters until she stopped him with a cool glare. They were brushstrokes, she told him, in the shape of her mother’s name.
“I know who she is,” Levi says, and his stomach twists even before her name crosses his lips.
The Kid
“Any word on the Jane Doe from bay four?” Moblit asks around the doctors’ lounge, his movement hampered by the small boy he cradles in one arm, fast asleep. “Hello? Jane Doe in bay four?” His voice is soft, weary, the exhausted tone of a man beaten down by a thankless job, called into work during a blizzard at five in the morning because there is no other social worker on staff.
“Over here,” Levi says from a corner of the room, raising one hand as he leans back in his plastic chair. “I treated her. She’s not a Jane Doe. Name’s Mikasa Ackerman.”
Moblit chuckles. “Any relation?”
“Shut up.” Levi shoots him a sharp glare. The smile quickly fades from Moblit’s face.
“Look, do you know if she came in with anyone? I need someone to watch her kid.” He nods toward the child in his arms, snoring softly, his face obscured by a sheet of shaggy black hair. Levi shrugs, then pulls out his phone and pretends to check his email. “Can you?” Moblit asks. “Just for fifteen minutes or so.”
Levi looks up from his phone just long enough to say no.
“I need to go tell a fourteen-year-old girl her mother is dead,” Moblit insists, his voice taking on a slightly harder edge. “Please do me this favor, Dr. Ackerman.”
“Fine,” Levi sighs, dropping his phone in the breast pocket of his white coat and holding out his arms. “Hand the little brat over.” Moblit does so, passing him the small but surprisingly heavy boy. The kid wakes up as soon as Moblit jostles him, blinking a few times beneath the bright light of the lounge, then sucking in a breath and letting out a soft wail.
“Mommyyyyyyy,” he whines directly into Levi’s ear, sobbing as this stranger takes him in his arms. Levi grimaces and looks skyward as though imploring the heavens to strike him down immediately.
“Hey. Hey,” Levi says, holding the child so they’re at eye level. The cries quiet, then cease. “Do you know your name?”
The kid thinks for a few seconds. “Weo,” he whines.
“Leo?” Leo, still pouting, nods in response. Levi sighs, uncomfortable with the similarity between their names but unwilling to ask a kid who’s barely verbal if he has a namesake. Leo just stares at him, then lets out a yawn. He’s asleep in Levi’s arms before they even get to Mikasa’s room in the intensive care unit, and Levi nods off mere minutes after settling into a stiff-backed chair. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he does remember waking up to frantic beeping.
“Leo?” Mikasa calls, her voice slow and thick through an opiate haze. Despite the drug-induced languor of her voice she appears awake and alert, her gaze darting about the room, falling upon white walls and wires. She tries to swing her legs out of the bed but finds herself tethered there by IVs and hampered by a cast on her right leg that runs from mid-thigh to toes, and another around her right wrist. Without thinking she starts to pull, yanking the tubes from her veins, barely cognizant of the blood running down her arms and hands. “Eren?”
“Hey! Stop!” Levi yelps, leaping to his feet and roughly placing Leo in the chair. Leo wakes up and starts to cry, startled by the sudden loud noises. Levi bounds the two steps over to Mikasa’s bed and grabs her by the shoulders, forcing her back into a prone position as she struggles against him, her eyes squeezed shut as she strains. “Calm down. You were in a bad car accident. You’re in the hospital. Leo is right here.”
She stops moving, seemingly shrinks back into the bed. “Is he okay?” she asks in a small voice.
“He’s fine. Look, if you start struggling like that again, I’m going to have to sedate you. You’re badly injured. You need to rest.” Levi steps back from her, walks over to a supply cabinet for gauze and new needles. “I’m going to put your IVs back in,” he tells her.
She sinks back into the pillow. “Where’s Eren?” she groans.
Levi finishes hooking her back up to bags of saline and morphine, to machines that tell her pulse and oxygen saturation, cleans the blood off her skin with a gauze pad. He keeps his head bowed as he works. “I didn’t see him, but I can look into it,” he says. He reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a pen light, clicking it on with one thumb. “I’m going to blind you for a second,” he says.
“What?” Mikasa asks, alarmed. She relaxes when Levi points the light into her eyes, then asks her to follow it from side to side.
“Tell me your name and what year it is.” She does, and Levi clicks off the pen light. “Do you remember me?”
Mikasa blinks a few times, readjusting to the now comparatively dim room before settling her gaze on the doctor for the first time. Her eyes widen until she looks haunted, almost scared.“Levi?” she asks.
“Yup. You know, if you wanted to visit me at work, I think you’ve gone too far.” The corners of his mouth make the slightest move upward before settling back into a firm line.
“No, no-” she says, lifting her uncasted hand as though trying to stop him.
“It was a joke. Relax. You’re not concussed, but you’ve been banged up pretty badly.” He walks over to the chair and picks up Leo, already asleep again, then deposits him in the hospital bed next to Mikasa. “If you need someone to watch him, call the nurses’ station. I’ll go see if there’s any news on Eren.” Levi turns on his heel and walks out then, moving too quickly for her to get a word in edgewise.
“Thank you,” she murmurs at his back as he leaves.
Eren isn’t on any patient chart, and when he checks on the three John Does scattered around the ER and ICU he’s not there either. A quick scan of the slowly quieting waiting room provides no help, and it is only then that Levi decides to head to the elevators and take them to the basement, to the morgue. It is there that he finds Eren, cold and turning blue beneath a white sheet.
Back upstairs he hesitates outside Mikasa’s room, peering around the doorframe to see her stroking Leo’s hair, looking down at him with a lovingly maternal gaze. Her expression is serene, almost comically so considering her surroundings and her injuries. Levi sighs and walks in, gripping Eren’s chart in one sweating hand.
Mikasa starts to cry when Levi hooks one foot around the leg of the chair and pulls it close to her bed, sinking into it so he can deliver the news. She blindly gropes behind her and grabs a pillow, clutching it to her chest and sobbing into it, when Levi tells Mikasa what happened to her best friend. She doesn’t catch most of it, doesn’t hear much past crushed chest and severe internal bleeding and nothing we could do. Levi sits there and watches her; what little he can see of her face is angry red, flushed from crying. After a few minutes he moves over and perches on the side of the bed, reaching over so he can rest one hand on her back, half-embraces her. Mikasa leans into him and cries until her body cannot anymore, her tears drying and her muscles too sore to sob. She lies back down, putting the pillow back behind her so she can gather Leo in her arms and clutch him tightly.
“Is there anyone we can call?” Levi asks. “To watch Leo while you’re in the hospital,” he adds. Mikasa shakes her head. “No one? You’re going to be here for at least a few days, if not a week.”
“No one,” Mikasa repeats. “Armin moved away last year. Jean went with him. All I had-” here her voice starts to waver and break- “was Eren and Leo.”
Levi thinks for a moment, tries to think of a somewhat tactful way to bring up the subject and fails. “Why don’t you call his dad?” he asks, gesturing toward Leo, who snores softly in his mother’s arms. Mikasa presses her lips into a tight line and looks away. He waits for her to answer, but the silence stretches out longer and longer until he’s too annoyed not to ask her the question that’s been plaguing him since he met the kid. “It’s me, isn’t it.” Levi speaks without inflection, delivering his question as a statement because he already knows its answer. “I’m his father.”
Mikasa lets out a long sigh. “Yeah,” she breathes.
She would almost prefer he rage, that he yell or swear or punch a wall. What happens instead is even more unnerving to her, watching Levi digest this information quietly. His gaze drops to an indeterminate point on the floor, his eyes creased with worry and shock and a sadness that is almost palpable, his mouth hanging slightly open. He takes on the slightly hunched posture of someone who has just been punched in the stomach. She tries to forget the image of Levi taking a deep, shaky breath and slowly straightening himself out, but the image of seeing him try to tamp down his vulnerability slices into her memory like a knife between her ribs.
“When did you find out?” he asks softly.
“A month after we broke up.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You dumped me because you were afraid that we were moving so quickly, and-”
“I wasn’t afraid. Just… uncomfortable.”
“It doesn’t matter. When I found out I was pregnant, I decided to go through with it. I wasn’t thinking about you when I made that decision, and I didn’t want you thinking that I was trying to trap you into a relationship with me. So I had Leo myself, and I’ve been raising him myself.”
“How are you going to do that with half your limbs in casts?” Levi asks, annoyance in his tone giving way to worry.
“I’ll find a way,” Mikasa answers, her voice steel.
“I can take Leo,” he offers. “I’m not living in that shitty apartment anymore, so I’ll have room for him-”
“No!” she yelps. Levi raises one eyebrow. “We’ve never been apart for more than a day or two,” she explains. “I can’t do that to him.” She lets out a long, shaky sigh. “And I need him,” she admits. “Especially now.”
“I’m not going to dump you out on the street,” he says shortly, and that’s how their arrangement is set.
The Change
Levi gives her the bed and takes the couch, and doesn’t realize what he’s in for until he’s tossing and turning at two in the morning, trying to find a position that doesn’t make the nerves in his neck throb angrily. He swallows his pride and takes his pillow and blanket back to his bedroom, ready to collapse in bed next to Mikasa. When he turns the light on he finds her sprawled across the whole mattress, Leo similarly splayed in the area she’s not taking up.
He retreats back to the couch, swearing that he won’t be supplanted in his own bed by a toddler, even if it is his son. Still, that designation feels distant; he feels linked but not bonded to the kid, and isn’t sure if he even wants to feel anything for Leo. Mikasa will heal in two or three months, should be able to take care of herself after two or three more months of physical therapy. He’ll get half a year with Leo at most before Mikasa goes on her merry way, building a solitary life for the two of them.
Levi feels something when he imagines that, but he doesn’t know exactly what it is.
One day, a few weeks into the novelty of this quasi-family life, he comes home from to find Mikasa sitting on the floor, her broken leg outstretched so Leo can scribble on it with markers. A few of them lie on the carpet, some missing caps.
“What the hell are you doing?” Levi snarls, rushing over and scooping up the markers from the floor, pulling the last one from Leo’s grasp.
He doesn’t expect Mikasa to get so damn angry, but then again why wouldn’t she side with the kid? It’s hard to be mad at her, a small flame of righteous anger quickly snuffed out by the sight of her cradling Leo in her arms as he wails and sobs. He feels, strangely, unwieldy and huge, a lumbering monster looming over an injured mother and her frightened child.
“You can’t yell at him like that,” she explains in between coos and soft shushes. “He’s too young to understand why you’re mad at him, so he just gets scared.”
“Why isn’t Sasha supervising him?” Levi asks, trying to keep his voice calm but only succeeding in sounding like he is barely controlling his temper. He looks around for the home care nurse he’s hired, but doesn’t see her.
“She’s making dinner,” Mikasa tells him. “Put some newspaper or something under my leg. Leo likes coloring on my cast.” Levi huffs. “It’ll keep him from running around and knocking more of your stuff over.”
Levi frowns, then looks around for some paper that won’t stain his pristine cream-colored carpet with ink. When he finishes he sits down on the floor next to Leo, watching him pick up a marker and pull the cap off, then make a few experimental green lines on top of the scribbles he’s already drawn on his mother’s cast.
“Put the cap back on when you’re done,” Levi instructs him. Leo does so, but can’t get the cap to click shut, so he hands it off to Levi, whimpering for help. Levi finds himself smiling, his chest swelling with pride over this little gesture, and grabs a marker for himself.
“You’re coloring now?” Mikasa asks, bemused.
“Shut up and let me hang out with my kid,” Levi grumbles in response.
He starts to wonder if the kid is a parasite, worming his way into his heart, but the nature of this particular infection is that it immediately seems distasteful to think of his son like that. At the same time it feels wrong, unnatural almost, to think of the way he behaves when he’s around Leo, feeling inordinate surges of pride when the kid completes a minor task or when he sees that Leo holds a marker the same way he does.
“You love him, you idiot,” Hange tells him after he complains about his affliction for the fifteenth time that week, clapping him on the back so hard his tea sloshes over the rim of his mug and runs over his fingers. “So you’re not a robot. Now if you’ll excuse me, I owe Erwin some money.”
The Video
“You’ve got to see this,” Mikasa says, waving him over to the couch once he returns from putting Leo to bed. “I took a video of Leo earlier while you were at work.” Levi sits next to her, making sure to keep his knee from touching hers, but finds that he needs to sit a bit closer to her to see the screen better. So he does, hyperaware of her leg pressed against his, his body tense and taut.
But then Mikasa presses play, and what he sees makes him temporarily forget his anxiety: Leo sits on the living room floor, pushing his toy trucks around and chattering to himself, and it makes him grin despite himself.
“Leo,” Mikasa calls from off camera in a sing-song voice. “It’s almost five o'clock. Who’s coming home soon?”
Leo stares at the camera for a moment before venturing, “Daddy?”
Mikasa says, “Yes! Daddy’s coming home soon! Good job!” but Leo almost doesn’t seem quite to understand her. Instead, a look of confusion, then shock crosses his face before his features spread into pure joy. Then he gets to his feet and starts jumping up and down, chanting, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
She pauses the video. “It goes on like this for a couple of minutes. He jumps around for a while, then he starts running around in circles yelling until he falls over and starts crying,” she tells him.
“That’s so stupid and amazing,” he coos. “I’m almost angry at how cute this is.” He reaches over and presses play on the screen, his hand brushing against hers. In his peripheral vision, he thinks he sees her smile a little.
“He’s pretty great, huh?” Mikasa asks him as they watch the video, then replay it.
Levi sighs, nodding. “Yeah, I can’t believe he came out of my balls.”
“God, you’re disgusting,” Mikasa groans, but she still laughs a little.
The Shower
When Levi sees Sasha sniffling, he sends her home, unwilling to let her infect anyone in the house. He has quietly accepted that his unwillingness to expose Leo to germs now comes from an instinctive, molecular-level drive never to see him even remotely uncomfortable, rather than a self-serving desire not to have to mind a cranky toddler.
The downside to that is when he returns from work, worn out and weary, he comes home to a home strewn with toys and books, Mikasa sitting on the couch while Leo runs around, scream-singing along to the theme song of a cartoon that blares from the television.
“How did you get in the living room?” Levi asks, frowning at the situation and at the faint odor of greasy hair and unwashed bodies that reaches his nostrils.
Mikasa shrugs it off, saying, “I lifted myself into my wheelchair.”
“With a broken wrist.”
“My cast is coming off next week. It feels fine.”
Levi lets out a low sigh, checking his temper before he snaps at her. “Don’t do that again until you get your cast off.”
“How else was I supposed to go to the bathroom, Levi?” she asks, faintly annoyed. “I don’t think you’d like me peeing on your sheets.”
He frowns and lets out a soft grunt in response, then goes to the kitchen (similarly cluttered and dirty, eliciting a low groan from him) and makes himself a cup of tea. When he returns, setting his steaming mug on the coffee table so Leo can climb all over him on the couch, he can only bear it for a few minutes before he blurts out, “You both need a fucking shower.”
“Do I really smell that bad?” Mikasa asks, lifting one arm and sniffing a few times near her armpit. “I’m not shower fresh, but-”
“Then you need a shower,” he says, crossing his arms decisively over his chest.
She scowls. “Sasha helps me with that. Do you really feel like doing all that work?”
“I’ll help you in there and you can take care of yourself.”
Mikasa lifts her right arm, brandishing her cast. “No, I can’t.”
Which is how Levi ends up in the bathroom, yanking Mikasa’s shirt over her head and trying not to snag the sleeve on the protrusion of her casted thumb. He averts his eyes as he braces her so she can stand on her good leg, trying not to sneak a glimpse as he pulls her sweatpants down over the cast on her leg.
“Don’t strain your neck trying not to look at me,” Mikasa notes sarcastically.
“I’m being respectful,” Levi insists.
“You’re being weird. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
But it is, he thinks, looking up at her as he gets her to step out of the sweatpants pooled on the bathroom floor, and into the plastic seat he’s set up in the shower. She is softer than he remembers her, the hard lines of her abdomen softened from childbirth and convalescence, her hips a little fuller, her breasts a little heavier. He is dismayed at the amount of relief he feels when he realizes he needs to leave the room to fetch garbage bags to cover Mikasa’s casts.
Be professional, he tells himself, but his job has never required that he wash his ex-girlfriend’s hair, rubbing the pads of his fingers against her scalp. She closes her eyes, her lips curling into a feline smile as she relaxes beneath his hands. “You should have been a hairdresser,” she all but purrs. “You’re good at this.” Levi snorts and rolls his eyes.
He thinks that it should be easy to do this. He should be able to separate his feelings from his obligation to her and to Leo. She will get better and move back home and they will figure out a schedule for him to spend time with his son, and he will go on with his life ignoring the pain in his gut that he feels when he’s away from Leo for too long.
It’s stupid to commit to a plan that you hate, he thinks.
He puts the thought out of his mind and tells himself to consider it later, at a time when he’s not kneeling on the bathroom floor to scrub Mikasa’s lower leg and foot, because she can’t reach them herself. When she’s all rinsed off he abruptly shuts off the water, storming out of the room to grab a towel and tossing it over her head, rubbing the towel over her wet hair to dry away the moisture.
“Levi!” she laughs, her voice muffled from beneath the thick terrycloth. “What the hell?” After a few moments, he whips the towel away and hands Mikasa a nearby comb, allowing her to tame the mess he’s made of her hair while he dries the rest of her off. “Are you uncomfortable?” she asks, looking over her shoulder at him as he wipes droplets of water from her back.
“Extremely,” he grumbles. He finishes, then moves back up to her shoulders, running the towel down each arm. “Just don’t look anywhere below my waist, okay?”
“What, do you have a boner or something?” Levi says nothing. Mikasa raises her eyebrows in surprise but chooses not to press the issue further, concentrating instead on removing knots from her hair.
He can’t quite meet her eyes when he helps her out of the tub, or when he takes her back to the bedroom to help dress her and put her into bed.
“Look, do you want to sleep in here tonight?” Mikasa asks, settling into bed and pulling the quilt up to her chest. “The couch can’t be that comfortable.”
“It’s not bad,” Levi replies, his words clipped.
“I’ll let you be the little spoon,” she offers, and at that he can’t help but laugh.
“I guess,” he replies, pretending to capitulate. “You do drive a hard bargain.”
But even then, the pretense does not last long; Levi is barely in bed next to her when he turns to her and, after seeing a smile spread across her lips, kisses her deeply. She is soft beneath his hands, her skin cooled from the shower, her mouth as open and warm and inviting as he remembers. When he pulls away, Mikasa wears an expression on her face somewhere between alarmed and overjoyed.
“We should talk about this,” she says.
Levi murmurs, “I don’t think there’s anything to talk about,” and then leans in to kiss her again.
The Family
“You’re full of shit, Dad. That sounds like a movie. Mistaken identity, a secret baby? That’s insane!” Greta scowls at her father, her face a mirror image of the wry expression he wears. “Plus Leo said he doesn’t remember.”
Levi sighs and rolls his eyes. “Leo wasn’t even two when your mother and I got back together. Of course he doesn’t remember. Where is your brother, anyway?”
“Asleep in his room, obviously. That’s all he does.”
“I don’t know where he gets it from,” Levi muses, shaking his head. “It’s definitely not from me.”
“Mom!” Greta yells into the next room. “Dad just told me the dumbest story!” Mikasa walks in, carrying a tray with three steaming mugs of tea. “Tell him he’s full of shit!”
“I’m not going to say that, and don’t talk about your father that way,” Mikasa warns.
Greta lets out a frustrated groan. “Why not? He’s so full of shit!”
“Greta!” Mikasa snaps. “Language!”
Levi shrugs. “I don’t see a problem with it. She’s twelve, she should be telling me I’m full of shit. I was way worse than her by the time I was her age.”
“Levi, you were basically raised by wolves. I like to think we’re doing a slightly better job than that,” Mikasa says.
“You’re not, since you’re lying to me about how you met!” Greta whines.
Levi shakes his head, smiling. He reaches over to ruffle his daughter’s hair -s because he knows she hates it when even a single strand is out of place. “It’s true, you little brat.”
“Nuh-uh!” she cries, wriggling away from his hand. Levi chuckles.
Mikasa sits down next to her husband, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek. “It is true,” she chimes in. “Every word of it.”