Work Text:
It starts, as most disasters in the Scouts headquarters tend to, with Hange.
Specifically, with Hange beaming at you with a rusted canister of questionable origin in hand, eyes glittering behind fogged goggles, asking if you wouldn’t mind ‘giving this a hold while I go grab something’.
You hesitate. There’s a voice in your head - whether that’s your conscience or the glob of meat where common sense develops - that suggests this is the exact kind of request for help you should ignore, times ten because it’s Hange asking. But Hange’s already shoved the canister into your hands and begun rambling about bioluminescent trace materials and Titan sweat analyses and skin cells and toe nails and you - like an idiot - want to be helpful, so you hold the canister up and peer at it suspiciously while she grabs a vial of something thick and neon green.
It starts to hiss and wheeze like air escaping the lungs of a tiny ferocious kitten. Then the smell hits - acrid and rotting, something between fermented cabbage and lemon rinds and old fish bones.
The canister pops open with a loud whump, spewing thick greenish fluid that coats the room from floor to ceiling - the same fluid as in the small vial. You’re drenched. Hange is squealing.
You blink rapidly, chest heaving, soaked from your collarbones to your boots in some kind of slime. It’s warm. It’s sticky. It’s everywhere. And it glows - a sickly, chartreuse sheen that pulses faintly under the fire lights.
You’re still frozen when you hear Hange exclaim, “Oh! That… was not supposed to happen.”
No shit.
The room is thickening with fumes. Your eyes sting. Somewhere overhead, a trail of ooze slides off a rafter and lands on your shoulder with a wet splat. You don’t flinch. You’ve moved past shock and into a state of quiet, simmering dread.
“I guess there was too much pressure,” Hange says, adjusting their goggles and squinting at the mess like it’s a promising thesis.
“Is it dangerous?”
“I have no idea,” she says with a gleam.
Your mouth opens then closes again, because there really isn’t language for the depth of your frustration. You gesture vaguely to the dripping walls. “Are we - or the HQ - going to melt?”
Hange shrugs, unapologetic. “Dunno. Science is discovery!”
“If I start glowing–”
“Free night light,” she offers brightly.
The air shifts.
You turn.
Levi is standing in the doorway, just beyond the slick trail seeping toward the corridor. He takes in the scene - glowing green goo, the canister with a missing nozzle, your slime-soaked uniform - and meets your eyes without flinching.
You think, perhaps not so absurdly, that if he were capable of murder by glare alone, you would no longer exist.
The silence drags. He turns on his heel and walks away.
The summons arrive fifteen minutes later.
You and Hange are escorted - indignantly glowing - through the main wing to Erwin’s office. The storm that’s been threatening the skies all afternoon finally arrives as you climb the stairs. Lightning streaks the high windows. Thunder rolls deep and low, shaking the glass in its panes.
Inside the office, Erwin is seated at his desk, fingers laced in front of him like the patient headmaster of a school. Which, to be fair, isn’t far off.
Levi stands to the right, arms folded across his chest, eyes narrowed. You can’t tell if he’s more irritated by the mess or the fact that he now has to handle your impending punishments. Either way, you feel like you’ve stepped into a courtroom.
“Well,” Erwin says, “I trust you two know why you’re here.”
“Absolutely not,” Hange replies.
You resist the urge to groan. Loudly.
Erwin doesn’t flinch. “Your… scientific breach… has rendered an entire room of HQ temporarily unusable. It will require full decontamination.”
Hange offers, “But the glow is sort of charming, don’t you think? Like ambient lighting.”
“No,” Levi says, without looking at her.
Erwin turns to you. “Is there anything you’d like to say in your defense?”
You hesitate. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. I was simply following instructions.”
“Whose?”
You glance at Hange.
She lifts a hand. “Scientifically valid instructions.”
Levi exhales. The kind of breath that says he’s restraining something - anger, a tirade, or possibly the urge to throw you both out a window.
“It was an accident,” you say quickly. “It just exploded.”
“That’s not in question,” Erwin replies. “The question is of consequence. Hange, you should have known better than to perform experiments inside.” He turns to stare at you directly. “And you should have known better than to assist. But no matter, I’ve already been presented with a proposal.”
You don’t like the sound of that.
“Levi,” Erwin continues, “suggested a way to make amends that doesn’t involve a formal reprimand.”
You glance sideways. “You what?”
“Would you rather be suspended?” Levi asks. “I say, what’s the point of suspension when we could channel this energy into something productive?”
“Productive,” you repeat flatly.
“You’ll be cleaning,” he says.
You blink. “Sorry?”
“Cleaning,” he repeats. “HQ. Top to bottom, starting at dawn.”
“Both of us?”
Levi doesn’t answer right away. “Hange gets latrine duty for the next quarter and will spend the entire night removing the slime. You’re with me,” he says eventually.
You laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s either laugh or spontaneously combust. “With all due respect, sir, why am I getting the worse puni—”
“Six bells,” Levi interrupts. “Don’t be late.”
Erwin folds his hands. The decision is final. Hange grins like the maniac she is. Levi doesn’t look at you again.
You stand there, soaked in glowing slime, the scent of fish and citrus in your hair, and wish for death.
The hallway is still half-dark when you arrive. The sky beyond the high windows is a flat, early-morning gray, colorless and cold. A dawn where even the sun is hesitant to show its face. There’s a pressure sitting low in your chest as you make the turn into the east corridor, a quiet dread.
You stop short.
Levi is already there.
He’s crouched near the far wall, sleeve cuffs pushed up over his forearms, shoulders hunched as he scrubs at the baseboards like they insulted his mother. Three metal buckets sit lined beside him like sentries - one steaming, one cloudy, one clear. The hallway smells faintly of vinegar and pine, strange at this hour, and he doesn’t look up when you enter.
You hesitate a moment longer, then force yourself forward, shrugging off your jacket and rolling up your sleeves. He still doesn’t speak.
The floorboards creak beneath your step.
“You’re early,” you say, for lack of anything better.
“You’re late,” he replies.
You aren’t.
You lower yourself to a crouch beside him and dip a sponge into the nearest bucket. The water is hot. Scalding, even. You wring it out with a hiss, biting back the sting as the heat sinks into your knuckles.
You start on the opposite side of the room, matching his pace with the quiet resolve of someone who refuses to be outdone by a man with questionable sleep habits.
You can stomach hierarchy. You’ve accepted orders from people with nicer boots than yours for years. But there’s something uniquely undignified about being on your knees at six in the morning, deep in a bucket of suds, scrubbing grime from beneath a table because of your superiors.
Your sleeves are already soaked. Your knees ache. Someone spilled something sticky here weeks ago–judging by the consistency, it fossilized. And all you can think, while you scrub at it, is that if you ever earn a commendation from Erwin, you’ll refuse it on principle. It should be Hange doing this, not you.
You make it nine minutes before Levi speaks again.
“You’re holding it wrong.”
You pause and glance down at the sponge. “I’m holding a sponge.”
“Don’t grip it so tight. You’ll fatigue faster.”
“Alright,” you mutter, but relax your grip like so.
“Switch hands every few minutes,” he continues.
Your eye twitches but you switch hands anyway. “Duly noted.”
You last ten more minutes before he passes you a different rag without explanation.
“Why?” you ask, turning it over in your hand. “Is this one blessed?”
“It’s for wiping down,” he says. “Sponge for scrubbing, rag for wiping.”
You stare at him.
“Don’t argue with me about rags,” he adds.
“I didn’t,” you protest.
“You were going to.”
“I wasn’t.”
That earns you a look. He returns to scrubbing. You do too.
By the time the sun slants fully through the windows on the second day, you’ve developed a rhythm. Scrub, rinse, repeat. Trade buckets. Fold rags. Replace soap. You stop thinking about time, which might be the only way to survive this.
Levi moves with a grace you weren’t expecting. Not elegant, but precise and deliberate, as though even his posture is planned. When he works, he barely makes a sound. No throat-clearing, no frustrated sighs. A seamless efficiency and silence that makes you painfully aware of every crack your knees make when you shift weight.
He expects you to clean like it’s a sacred rite.
Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, or the absurdity of scrubbing door frames like your military life depends on it, but something restless bubbles in your chest at that. You’re not easily cowed, and you’ve had enough of being watched, so you start to push back.
At first, it’s small.
You rearrange the bottles on the supply cart he left lined up–alphabetical, color-coded, glass facing forward. You switch the pine solution with the vinegar. You shift the brushes so the stiff one is on the left instead of the right.
When he returns from rinsing rags and narrows his eyes at the cart, you say nothing.
Later, you hum. Something folkish and slow and annoyingly repetitive. When he doesn’t flinch, you add claps between verses. Then you try whistling.
Still no reaction.
So you escalate.
At noon, when he stops to check the drying hallway, you leave a smear of soap on a clean window, an uneven streak down the center. Subtle enough to go unnoticed by most eyes, but Levi isn’t most.
Sure enough, he notices.
He stares at it, tilts his head, and dips his rag in the rinse water. Then, without looking at you, he murmurs, “Amateur.”
You grin.
You lose count of the stairwells over the days. Your palms ache. Your knees hate you. At some point, Levi hands you a salve without asking. You pretend not to appreciate it but you refill his bucket before he asks. He leaves a dry cloth folded near your elbow when yours frays.
You start learning his habits by watching. You learn he favors the left side of staircases and double-checks door locks even if he just watched you secure them. He folds his cloths in quarters while he works, flipping to each clean side with obsessive regularity. He carries matches in his left pocket. He breathes out ever so quietly through his nose when something truly annoys him and always stacks the rinsed rags from lightest to darkest, even if they’re identical.
You develop an odd, quiet kind of truce. A soft snort when you drop a sponge. The barest twitch of his mouth when you insult the hallway’s crown molding. And once, when your bubbling bucket slipped in your hand and spilled boiling hot water, he cursed and gripped your wrist to check you’re not mortally wounded.
At dusk, it’s over.
You stand with your back against the wall, sweat cooling along your spine, arms burning from hours of work. Levi surveys the space in silence, stepping lightly down the center of the hall as though it might still be hiding stains.
Then he turns to you.
“Acceptable.”
You blink. “That’s it?”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Not even a ‘nice job, cadet’?”
“Don’t fish,” he says, brushing past you.
You watch him walk away, the hallway echoing faintly behind him. Then, to your own surprise, you smile.
He's not that bad, you suppose.