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"Well?" Levi demanded. "What did she say?"
Levi watched Erwin laugh breathily as he dropped into the sofa in his office. Wine flush robbed his feigned concern of any real severity.
"It took some convincing," Erwin started gravely, and he was impressively articulate given just how much he'd had on his impromptu visit to the wealthy landowner at her sprawling villa in Rose's heartland. Erwin hadn’t specified exactly how much, but he didn't need to. There was nowhere to hide the reddened sweep of his ears and neck.
Levi put aside the memory of the commander arriving just minutes ago and striding through the night guard with all the severity and poise demanded of his office, nothing at all like this rumpled and loose-limbed toy of a man he became at the turn of the lock.
"-but when the Duchess of Rose calls on you and not the other way around," he went on, and Levi thought he ought to be paying attention, "the winds are already in your favor. All that's left is to..." He trailed off, not for any reason than to leave uninterrupted the aura of pure contentedness that radiated from him then.
"Steer the ship," Levi tried.
Erwin smiled lazily, the curve of his mouth like something Levi wasn't supposed to see.
They must have fucked. How childish to assume this display was only the conclusion of a pleasant host and an uptick in donor funding. Not that it was at all relevant. The commander gets his fun, and the rest of them have their funding. Fine.
"Go to bed," Levi said, and moved to leave.
Erwin called after him. Levi ignored him.
"Good night," Levi said pointedly.
"I see," Erwin said, bringing a hand to his forehead and laying thick the exaggerated disappointment. "My own captain. No interest in my visit. Good night, then," he ended with a ridiculous sigh. Levi was impressed. The most ruffled of Sina hens couldn't dream of being this unbearable.
Levi strode back with more force than necessary and demanded every last detail and a full scale reenactment. If the man wanted to play, Levi wasn't about to disappoint him.
Erwin rose much faster than Levi thought him capable of in his state, came to the door and pantomimed opening it before diving into the most unnecessarily intricate rendition and narration of his night that Levi thought he would ever live to hear. His patience was buttressed only by his unwillingness to give in to his own challenge.
He struggled, too, to shove aside the unreasonable lick of irritation that lashed at his spine whenever Erwin described the hands of his midnight host touching his shoulder or his wrist or his chest. Though maybe it wasn't unreasonable. She'd kept him for hours, made him into her own private dancing monkey. Not that he looked at all like he minded. That was fine. Levi could feel the churn of indignation for the both of them.
Levi hadn't thought his outburst through. Erwin was a formidable opponent. He described everything. But for the absence of the duchess herself, Levi was there, there on the intricately decorated terrace rising from hundreds of electric green acres, there in her tastefully decorated dressing room with a gun in the curtains and the floorboards and the bust of her dress and with not another man for miles. There, when she opened a second bottle.
By then, the pink of exertion joined the other culprits that plucked at his face, his neck, his ears, as he pantomimed a stroll here, a dance there, and Levi wouldn't laugh, refused to smile, but he was ridiculous, this was all ridiculous, and he felt the corners of his mouth rise even so.
And Erwin must have been tired, couldn’t not be, and still he smiled too broadly and moved too quickly, though Levi couldn't imagine how this woman could have been anything but a drain. Pulling him away from his duties at an unseemly – and unsafe – hour, and allowing him to leave not an hour before the sun was due to rise. But they had their funding. Fine.
Erwin smiled broadly when Levi said as much, and though he read the man's movements and guessed at what he was about to do, he was no less stunned when the commander brought his hand to his shoulder, took his other, and spun him round the room as if they didn't make the most ridiculous looking pair, and smiled still broader when Levi jolted indignantly, when his feet didn't quite obey, when the weight of Erwin's palm on his waist was a touch too heavy a thing for what it was and what it wasn't.
“-and then she spun us like this-” Levi heard as the cotton-eared shock faded, one he thought he'd never feel again once he'd stopped falling victim to it among twenty-meter beasts. He never imagined he'd be naive to think titans book-ended fear.
They had slowed nearly to a stop. Erwin watched him with naked concern. Levi wasn't looking up to see it, but he knew, in the way he knew he was about to hear something infuriating like What's wrong or I'm sorry.
He didn't need to know how unaccustomed Levi still was to casual touch. Thirty underground years don't evaporate when it was convenient. He'd long since deadened his instinct to throw to the ground anyone who touched his shoulder, his arm, even his back. But no one, not even those with no self-preservation to speak of – Hange comes to mind – ever thought to touch his waist. There was no shortage of adversaries in Levi's storied extralegal career who hadn't tried to wrap their sweaty, burly arms round his middle.
“Then what?” Levi pressed, because he'll be titan shit before he bowed out again. “You bored her to death with fancy hobbling and made off with her wallet, didn't you,” he added with a decisive quickening of the imagined waltz lest Erwin, infuriatingly observant Erwin, made anything of that moment, that little unwelcome reminder that Levi was a spring trap of a man.
After a moment's hesitation and a look to pierce stone, Erwin quickened his step.
"It was a fast song," Erwin said, his cadence drawing back into that faraway drawl. "She was fast-" His steps quickened still, and Levi pretended not to notice the ever shifting grip on his waist as all the world but Erwin spun, as the waxed floors and dim walls and dimmer shelves melted away and only Erwin was real in his hand and on his waist.
"-but not quite so strong," Erwin said cheekily, and Levi realized belatedly that he'd begun to lead Erwin and not the other way around.
This was ridiculous.
Erwin hummed as Levi slowed. His voice dropped, though there was no one to overhear at this late an hour.
"She tired after that," he said. Their steps slowed. Levi willed every atom in him to relax as they moved closer.
It was just the progression of the dance. Would've been awkward to prance so slow at an arm's width apart. Erwin radiated heat like something blue-hot, like something Levi shouldn't be able to touch.
"And then," Erwin mused, eyes turned skyward to better recall, "she rested her head against me. Her hair-"
Erwin trailed off. Levi hadn't realized how heavy his head had been as the commander's jacket roughened his temple.
It wasn't a new feeling. If Levi closed his eyes, he might still recall the roots digging into his chest and the miserably freezing mud soaking him to the bone on one memorable expedition when their compromised signaling system opened their base of operations to the titans' gleeful invasion.
He and Erwin had chased the beasts far enough away from the compound until his gas canisters emptied and Erwin's gear grew tangled. Surrounded and grounded, they used the last of their airborne momentum to slip into the wild exposed roots of an upturned oak until reinforcements arrived. They had pressed close. They had to. They couldn't be seen. They couldn't be heard.
So it meant nothing to feel the rapidly expanding breadth of the commander's chest behind him, to feel his breath trouble his hair, to turn around and mute his own against his chest as his punished lungs screamed for more. It meant nothing that he might have lingered there a moment longer than strictly needed.
He pressed a small smile into Erwin's chest as the seconds passed one after the other, as their feet did little more but shift now, as the game was as good as won.
A large, calloused palm carded through his hair.
"Her hair was like silk," Erwin went on in little more than a whisper. "So I touched it," he said, and when nails raked across the shorn hairs at Levi's nape, the shudder it pulled from him wasn't something he could hide from the warm, solid press of the man against him.
"I don't think she minded," Erwin murmured.
The broken moonlight with all its jagged shards plunged the room still farther into the dream all this must be. They never touched like this. And when they did, it meant nothing. When Erwin fixed Levi's tie before a gala and stood a little closer than he should, it meant nothing. When Levi swiped a missed bit of shaving cream from the underside of his jaw before a crucial meeting, it meant nothing. They were toy soldiers making toy gestures. None of it mattered.
Erwin's hands smoothed the lapels of Levi's jacket.
But it was fun, so fun, each time, to play a little longer.
“She dropped her shawl,” Erwin said.
Levi raised his head from his chest, but not so far that an errant strand of hair couldn't catch on the worn steel buckle of his gear. Erwin's mouth parted, teeth shadowed like the sheathed steel of a knife.
Levi's jacket slid down his arms. It made a soft sound against the floor.
Erwin's hands traveled luxuriously up his arms until they came to a too-gentle rest on his shoulders.
“Then?” Levi pressed when one too many seconds passed between what little space remained between them, though he almost loathed to do it. He understood this most of all. The stillness. The test of patience. The coiled expectation in every last taut string of his limbs. He understood the hunt. This wasn't Erwin's game anymore.
“Did she touch you?” Levi asked. His hands passed by the commander's abdomen, a single finger near enough to graze past the folds of his pressed shirt before his palms curved over the swell of his broad, moving chest. He watched his hands rise with every pass of the man's lungs. “Like this?”
He watched Erwin as he nodded. Levi nearly snorted at the look of him - flushed, hair awry, yet still his eyes had the look of a man in the midst of calculating one of his improbable field maneuvers, of solving some impossible thing when nothing in the world, Levi thought, could be simpler. Play the game, or don't.
They lanced hot through him, those first little glimpses of the man being a touch reckless, a bit unsure. No one else saw this, and if they did, Levi neither knew nor wanted to. And when the commander nodded with his just-so parted mouth and eyebrows drawn in some desperate reach for focus, for concentration, Levi knew instead that he had already won.
“I slipped on her dress.”
Levi blinked. Erwin gave him his straight face for only a moment longer before breaking it, laughing softly and breathing like he'd just loosened a tourniquet wound round his lungs.
Levi untangled his tongue. “What?”
The curtain of Erwin's hair fell over his eyes as he cocked his head and licked his lips with his anxious tongue, the whole show more bashful than Levi had ever known to expect. His own ears reddened.
“Her skirts were so long,” Erwin chuckled. “If she hadn't held me-” he trailed off as Levi's hands traveled to his arms.
“Like this?”
Erwin swallowed. “Like this.”
Levi's hands traveled up and down and around and he wondered if he needed a third hand or a fourth to successfully bridge the width of just one of the man's arms. It put him off before, physical largess. He'd never known a man to possess it and ever make use of it for anyone's benefit but his own. Not before Erwin.
“Then?”
Erwin swallowed again. One hand rose to Levi's jaw, touching and not touching. Skittish. Levi's skin crackled at the feather-touch. It wouldn't be long now. The toy soldier was shaking out of his mold. He'll be a commander again soon, and this will all be another dollhouse in another dream. Levi had always been the first to shake off the pieces, always the first to slam the little door. Not now.
“Then?”
Erwin's other hand rose, too. His thumb traced the swell of Levi's lip.
“Then?” He pressed. It was a whisper this time. Barely voiced.
A gale picked up beyond the window glass. It chased the moon away.
“We exchanged some words. Pointless things,” Erwin said. “None that I remember.”
He spoke like he was beset by signal interference between his mind and his mouth.
“Why? That boring?”
“No. I was...distracted.”
Levi sneered. “Decollete a little low?”
“Maybe. But that wasn't...” Erwin smoothed Levi's brows with his thumb. “She had the most... expressive...most articulate brows. The kindest eyes.”
Levi tsked. “Then?”
Erwin stepped into his space, joined the lines of their bodies.
Erwin's hands trailed along his jaw. “I think I kissed her.”
Levi hid his sneer this time. His brows fell in practiced confusion. “You think...?”
Erwin looked into his eyes with such severity that Levi might have guessed that he was trying to avoid looking somewhere else. “I kissed her.”
The windows shuddered.
Levi glanced once at the buffeted panes. Slowly, he shook his head. “Just can't hear you,” he said, though the wind had not been nearly loud enough to drown Erwin's words and Levi knew it, and Erwin knew it.
“It was a risk.”
“What was?”
“I shouldn't have-”
“Shouldn't have what?”
“I couldn't-”
“Couldn't what?”
Here he comes. The commander was returning, piece by stolid piece, as Erwin Smith faded away, and the toy soldier crumbled. He would stop it now. Excuse himself. Clear his throat, clear the air, laugh it off, step away. Take apart his toy soul.
He wouldn't take Levi's face with hands far surer than before, wouldn't lean down, wouldn't part lips that ordered men to their deaths and press them to Levi's, and Levi wouldn't press back, wouldn't tilt his head, wouldn't wrap his arms around his neck.
He wouldn't, they wouldn't, in another life.
But this was the only one he knew, this one, where the commander bruised his lips yet still summoned the shyness to give the swell of his bottom lip the most fleeting little lick, where Levi dove into him and pulled him closer, smelled him, tasted him, wanted him, and it was just fine, because none of it mattered. None of it meant a thing. His jackhammer heart didn't mean a thing.
Levi drew away just far enough to drag his bottom lip against Erwin's own and ask him what the duchess had to say to that.
Erwin said nothing.
Levi twined his wrists behind his neck and pulled.
Erwin resisted. Levi took his flushed face in his hands as Erwin shook his head.
He'd never seen horror on his face like this.
“Captain,” he said as if he'd just learned the word, and Levi had never known this voice to sound so small, had never known the game to come to such an abrupt end.
Erwin moved to extricate himself. Levi gripped him tighter. Erwin breathed faster. He took his wrists in his hands and tried to separate them. But Levi had him. He had him.
“No,” Erwin said. “She didn't.”
Erwin tried to pull away again. Levi held him.
“I know,” Levi said, because somewhere along the way, Erwin had stopped being careful. Because Levi can play the toy soldier, but he couldn't play the fool.
“She did nothing.”
“I know.”
“There's no funding.”
“I know.”
“The whiskey-”
“You stopped at a bar.”
Erwin couldn't look at him, and then he couldn't look away, and then he couldn't look at him. “I shouldn't have-” He couldn't look him in the eye. And then he could. And then he couldn't. “I shouldn't have-”
“I kn-”
“I couldn't come back with nothing. Not again. And,” Erwin huffed incredulously, “and now this. With you. My most-” He stopped, and Levi didn't get to hear the end of that. With the most tightly controlled hysteria Levi thought possible of any man, his eyes glazed over and he mumbled under his breath, “I'm not fit for this office-”
Levi grabbed him by his collar. “Hey-”
“I couldn't come back with nothing,” he repeated with a singular urgency.
“It's a slow season-”
“A slow year,” Erwin corrected, before his expression shifted into something Levi couldn't understand. It looked like fear. It looked like incomprehensible fear.
“I hurt you-” he started.
“I'll hurt you if you shit out of your mouth again,” Levi snapped. “Did you mean it?”
Erwin stilled.
“Did you?”
Erwin's throat worked. “I-”
“Course you didn't.”
Erwin stared. “I...didn't,” he repeated as if he'd never before heard those words in that order.
“Right,” Levi said. He must have downed the entire bottle. “You didn't. So all this,” Levi said as his thumb swept across his shining lips, “doesn't count.”
Erwin barely breathed. “Doesn't count,” he repeated.
What a time for the drunken stupor to kick in. Levi ignored his protests and shepherded the commander to his room. He left to fill with water the largest canteen he could find and returned to find the man where he left him: standing at the foot of his bed and head bowed and so still that he could have been made of tin if it weren't for the glaciers in his eyes.
“Drink,” Levi demanded, so the man drank. Levi watched his throat work in the flickering lamplight.
When he had his fill, Levi reached for the canteen. Erwin's palm found his wrist, and Levi considered slitting his throat just before recalling that he needn't peer through iron grates to catch starlight anymore, that hands could do more than bruise.
“What else doesn't count?” Erwin asked carefully, and as his jacket fell to the floor, Levi wondered, too.