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The new Scout Regiment headquarters smelled aggressively of damp timber, fresh plaster, and the distinct, suffocating scent of sawdust. It was a half-renovated manor on the outskirts of Wall Rose which was a temporary fix that was rapidly proving to be an absolute nightmare according to Levi; excessive dust and loud noise. Outside, the steady clack-clack-clack of hammers and the raw shouting of workmen echoed through the drafty corridors and inside, it was sheer, unadulterated chaos.
Levi stood in the center of the cramped tactical briefing room, his arms crossed tight over his chest. A deep, permanent line was etched between his brows, deepened by a headache that had been pulsing behind his eyes since dawn. He had spent the last three hours trying to scrub a stubborn layer of construction dust off a desk that wasn't even his, only for a fresh gust of wind through a cracked window pane to coat it all over again. He tried his best hide his irritation because, really, there was nothing to be done and just wait until it was all over.
Instead, he just stared at the grime, jaw working silently, wondering if anyone would notice if he set the desk on fire.
"Attention, please," Erwin’s voice boomed, cutting cleanly through the nervous murmurs of the gathered officers.
The Commander looked exhausted, which was evident with the dark smudges beneath his eyes that gave him away, although his posture remained flawlessly, annoyingly rigid.
"Due to the structural damage discovered in the east wing, the renovations will take at least a month longer than anticipated," Erwin said, unfolding a map of the manor with a crisp snap of paper. "Space is, as you can see, a luxury we do not currently possess."
A collective groan rippled through the small room. Someone in the back muttered a quiet curse about the Royal Government's cheap budget.
"The lower-ranking soldiers have already been assigned to the communal barracks," Erwin continued, entirely unfazed by the misery in the room. "As for the officers... we have exactly half the number of private quarters required. Therefore, we will be doubling up. To ensure fairness, we will draw lots."
Levi’s left eye twitched.
Doubling up.
The very concept made his skin crawl. He valued his solitude almost as much as he valued a sterile environment, and the thought of sharing a few square meters of space with another human being's filth, breathing, and gross habits made his stomach turn. He glanced around the room, mentally vetting his options with cold calculation. Mike was quiet, at least. He smelled like horses, but he kept to himself. Erwin was tolerable, if a bit prone to pacing the floorboards at three in the morning when his mind wouldn't shut off.
Erwin held out a heavy wooden box, resting it on the edge of the dust-covered table. One by one, the officers stepped forward, shuffling nervously as they drew small slips of rolled parchment.
Levi waited until the initial rush thinned, then stepped up, his movements precise and sharp. He didn't bother praying to whatever gods were listening—he knew his luck was notoriously shit. He reached into the dark interior of the box, pulled out a single slip, and unrolled it with a flick of his thumb.
His face instantly dropped. His jaw tightened so hard a muscle jumped violently in his cheek.
"Oh? What did you get, shorty?"
Before he could shove the paper into his pocket, a heavy chin hooked right over his shoulder. A mass of messy, unwashed brunette hair brushed against his cheek, carrying the faint, unmistakable odor of formaldehyde, old tea, and dry sweat.
Hange Zoe squinted at the faded numbers on the paper, her breath warm against his neck, then let out a sharp gasp that quickly devolved into a loud, booming cheer.
"Ha! Yes! It’s destiny, Levi! We're roomies!"
She clapped him hard on the back, a solid, open-palmed thwack that nearly knocked the breath out of his lungs, her eyes gleefully wide behind her smudge-covered glasses.
"Think of all the late-night brainstorming we can do! I can show you my new theories on Titan sleep cycles right before bed! Oh, and I brought my preserved specimen jars… you know, the ones with the skin tissues. Oh my god, they'll fit right on the windowsill! The possibilities are endless!!!" she squealed.
"Get off me, four-eyes," Levi hissed, swatting her arm away with enough force to send her taking a step back. He turned his glare onto Erwin, his expression a mask of pure, unadulterated dread. "Erwin. This is a joke. Change it." and for more effect he added, “please.”
Erwin didn't even look up from his paperwork, though a faint, almost imperceptible smirk played at the very corner of his mouth. "The draw is final, Levi. Adapt. Please." he added with a smug look.
Levi let out a low, dangerous growl, the paper crumpling into a tight ball inside his fist. He turned on his heel and stormed out of the room, Hange’s cackling laughter ringing down the hallway behind him like a threat.
He marched down the drafty corridor, his boots striking the uneven floorboards with lethal precision. Inside his head, he went into a quiet, internal panic.
The woman was a walking natural disaster. She didn't wash her hair for weeks on end unless forced (by him), her fingers were constantly stained with ink or volatile chemical residue, and she had the sleep schedule of a rabid bat. He was going to murder her within forty-eight hours. He’d be hanging from the rafters by his own cravat by the end of the week.
He reached the door labeled with their shared room number, shoving the heavy brass key into the lock and turning it with a vicious click. He pushed the door open, bracing himself for the sight of the cramped, dusty space they were supposed to inhabit together.
He stood in the doorway, staring at the two narrow cots pushed against opposite walls, the draft whistling softly through the gaps in the window frame.
Slowly, as he listened to the distant sound of Hange still chatting loudly down the hall, a quiet, buried thought slipped through the thick wall of his irritation which was blunt, heavy, and deeply unwelcome.
At least she's where I can see her.
Levi swallowed, his thumb tracing the jagged edge of the key in his pocket.
***
Things were getting ugly outside the Walls, but inside was turning into a different kind of battlefield. With the Military Police and the government sniffing around their operations, making quiet threats, and the constant, lingering danger of Titan encounters, Hange’s reckless disregard for her own safety was a perpetual, suffocating source of anxiety for him. She treated her own life like an acceptable casualty for the sake of a breakthrough.
If she was in his room, under his nose, she couldn't accidentally blow herself up with volatile compounds at two in the morning. She couldn't wander off into the woods alone to track a stray scent. She couldn't get ambushed in the dark by some corrupt MP looking to quiet the Scouts' brightest mind.
He’d have her in arm's reach. He could keep her alive, even if it drove him completely insane in the process.
Levi gripped the room key tighter, feeling the sharp metal dig into his palm, and let out a long, exhausted breath. His scowl deepened, but as he stepped into the room and kicked the door shut behind him, he’d never admit it aloud: a small, fiercely protective part of him felt a profound, quiet sense of relief.
***
The division of the room was immediate, visual, and absolute.
Levi’s half was a masterpiece of military discipline. His cot was pulled so taut with hospital corners they could cut glass. His spare uniforms hung at precise two-inch intervals, his boots were aligned down to the millimeter, and his small collection of teacups sat in a flawless, gleaming row on a freshly scrubbed washstand.
Hange’s half was an active war zone.
Within three days, her cot was completely buried under a mountain of scattered research papers, charcoal sketches of Titan anatomy, and discarded gear. A half-eaten loaf of bread sat perilously close to an open bottle of black ink, and her mud-caked boots were dropped carelessly in the absolute center of the floor, tracking a fine layer of dust onto the floorboards Levi had spent an hour on his hands and knees scrubbing.
"That's it," Levi snapped on the fourth night. He had tolerated enough. It was surprising that he let half of the room turn into a pile of garbage. Hange’s constant promise of cleaning it up should never have been trusted.
He stood at the foot of her cot, holding a sloshing wooden bucket of scalding water in one hand and a harsh bar of lye soap in the other, looking for all the world like an executioner delivering a final verdict. "Out. Now."
Hange didn't even look up from her desk, her quill scratching furiously against parchment, leaving little splatters of ink in its wake. "Not now, Levi, I'm right on the verge of calculating the correlation between Titan mass and heat dispersal during—"
"You smell like a rotting carcass, four-eyes," Levi interrupted, his voice dropping an octave into a low, dangerous register. “Do you and us, your comrades a favour and please for the sake of the Walls, wash up!”
Before she could protest further, he reached out, grabbed her by the thick collar of her undershirt, and physically hauled her out of the chair.
"Hey! Unhand the pursuit of knowledge!" she squawked, flailing slightly.
"The bathhouse is empty," Levi growled, marching her toward the threshold. "You are going to scrub yourself until you're pink, or I will throw you out the window and let the rain do it for you."
"You're a tyrant!" Hange yelled, though a bright, breathless laugh escaped her as he practically shoved her out the door, tossing a rough linen towel right at her face. "A clean, obsessive tyrant!"
"Don't come back until your hair stops looking like a bird's nest," he slammed the door shut, leaning his head against the wood for three long seconds before grabbing a broom to tackle her boot prints.
The irritation, however, went both ways. Levi quickly realized that Hange simply did not sleep like a normal human being.
Hours later, the room was shrouded in heavy darkness, save for a single, flickering candle stub sputtering on Hange’s desk. Levi lay awake on his back, staring up at the shadows on the ceiling, listening to the soft, endless scratch-scratch of her quill and her occasional, muttered self-conversations. Every few minutes, she would sigh heavily, run both hands violently through her hair, and shift in her creaking chair. He usually took his night’s rest on his own chair in the private of his room but in hopes of having his roommate take proper rest on bed he had found himself lying on his usually immaculate bed.
He should have told her to shut up. He should have blown out the candle and threatened her with duty.
Instead, Levi quietly threw off his thin blanket, slipped his bare feet onto the cold floorboards, pulled on his trousers, and padded silently out of the room.
Ten minutes later, he pushed the door back open, carrying a steaming wooden mug of black tea. He stepped over a stray stack of ledgers and set the mug on the absolute edge of her desk, carefully shoving a cluster of loose notes out of the way to avoid a spill.
"Drink," he grunted.
Hange blinked up at him, her eyes bloodshot and watery, her glasses sitting ridiculously crooked on the bridge of her nose. She looked utterly disoriented, as if waking from a trance, before a soft, weary smile touched her ink-stained lips.
"Levi... you're awake?"
"Hard to sleep with a manic gremlin muttering to herself in the corner," he muttered, leaning his shoulder against the edge of the desk, his arms crossed over his bare chest against the chill draft. "You skipped dinner again. You're an idiot, four-eyes. You'll faint on the field if you keep this up. The Scouts need your expertise with you alive not dead."
"Awww… Levi you are sweett," she admitted softly, her voice dropping its usual boisterous volume. She wrapped both hands around the warm clay of the mug, soaking in the heat. "Thank you."
Levi looked down at her, the harsh, sharp lines of his face softening just a fraction in the dim, golden glow of the candle. "Just drink the damn tea."
As the days slowly bled into weeks, the forced proximity began to chip away at the heavy walls they had both spent years building. The room was far too small, and avoiding each other was a physical impossibility. There was a thick, unacknowledged intimacy that grew in the quiet spaces between their relentless bickering.
Levi would catch a fleeting glimpse of her bare shoulders as she pulled off a sweat-stained shirt to change into her nightgown, the pale skin marred by pale, jagged scars left behind by leather ODM straps. Hange would watch him brush his dark hair back from his forehead in the quiet morning light, fascinated by the rare, completely unguarded softness in his eyes before he put his stern captain’s mask back on for the world outside.
***
The breaking point arrived on a Tuesday evening, brought on by a torrential downpour that trapped everyone indoors. The rain beat a relentless, rhythmic tattoo against the leaded windowpane, and the humidity trapped inside the small room was thick enough to feel suffocating.
Hange was pacing the length of her half of the room, bursting with a nervous, restless energy that made the floorboards squeak beneath her weight. On the opposite side, Levi sat cross-legged on his perfectly made cot, meticulously cleaning the triggers of his blades with a soft, oiled rag, his movements practiced and rhythmic.
"Levi, Levi, Leeee-vi," Hange chanted, turning on her heel and deliberately stepping right through a small patch of dried mud she had tracked in from the main hallway earlier. Her heavy boots left a fresh, faint brown smudge across the pale wood. "I'm bored. Let's do something. Teach me that weird tea-pouring grip you do. The one where you hold it from the rim like a psychopath."
Levi’s eyes snapped up from the steel blade in his lap. His gaze dropped to the smudge on the floor, traced the line of it up to her mud-flecked trousers, and finally settled on her face.
He saw the tiny, triumphant smirk playing at the corner of her lips. She was doing it on purpose. She was goading him.
"You're testing my patience, shitty glasses," he warned softly, his voice dropping into that quiet, flat register that usually made recruits break out in a cold sweat.
"What are you going to do? Clean me to death?" She grinned, taking another deliberate step closer into his territory. Her boot caught the edge of his pristine, crisp white blanket, crinkling the smooth fabric he had spent five minutes smoothing out that morning.
Levi didn't say another word. His hand shot out with lightning speed.
He didn't reach for his blade or his rag instead, his fingers closed tight around the firm feather pillow at the head of his cot. In one fluid, practiced motion, he chucked it directly at her face.
Thwack.
The pillow struck her square across the nose and cheek. Hange stumbled back a step, dropping her hands to catch the pillow as it bounced off her chest, letting out a loud, ridiculously theatrical gasp of mock offense.
"Oh," she whispered, her eyes wide behind her lenses. "Oh, it is on."
She snatched the pillow tightly by the corner and hurled it back at him with alarming force. Levi ducked it effortlessly, the pillow smacking harmlessly into the wall behind him, a rare, sharp glint of dark amusement entering his eyes. They were two of humanity’s most elite soldiers; even a childish, petty squabble was executed with terrifying speed, sharp reflexes, and tactical dodging.
Hange grabbed her own oversized pillow from her cluttered cot, using it like a riot shield as she lunged recklessly across the invisible border into his half of the room. Levi sprang off the bed with effortless grace, dodging her wild swing by a mere fraction of an inch, his movements a fluid blur in the dim room.
They were laughing now or at least, Hange was cackling loudly, and Levi was letting out raspy, breathless huffs of air that felt so foreign in his chest it almost surprised him. The suffocating stress of the past month, the looming threats, and the weight of their duties melted away into the sheer, glorious ridiculousness of the moment.
"Surrender, Captain!" Hange yelled, laughing so hard her glasses slipped down her nose as she lunged forward, raising the pillow high for a final, heavy finishing blow.
"In your dreams, four—"
Levi started to step back to pivot around her attack, but Hange didn't see the thick, heavy-bound reference book she had left lying open on the floorboards behind her.
Her boot caught the hard spine of the ledger. Her eyes went wide, her arms flailing as her balance completely shattered.
"Whoa—!"
She tumbled forward, her momentum carrying her weight straight into him. Levi instinctively reached out to grab her shoulders, to steady her, but the sheer force of her momentum sent them both crashing backward together.
They hit Levi's bed with a heavy, bedspring-creaking thud.
The breath was completely knocked out of Levi's lungs as they landed in a chaotic, tangled mess of limbs, small white feathers from a split pillow seam drifting quietly through the air around them like slow snow.
When the dust settled, the room went abruptly silent, save for the heavy sound of their breathing and the rain hammering against the glass.
Hange was pinning him firmly to the mattress. Her hands were planted flat on either side of his head, her hair falling in dark, messy strands around her face, and her knees were resting snugly on either side of his hips.
The laughter died instantly.
The silence that followed was deafening, heavy and thick, broken only by the steady drum of the rain against the glass and the sound of their own ragged, uneven breathing. The sudden weight of her on top of him knocked the last breath straight out of Levi’s lungs, leaving them both stranded in the heavy quiet of the room.
Outside, the rain kept pounding against the glass, but in here, everything had shrunk down to the space between their chests. Hange’s heat bled through the damp wool of her shirt, rising and falling in sharp, jagged hitches right against his ribcage. Her dark hair spilled around them like a curtain, messy and smelling faintly of rain and dry paper, the stray ends tickling the sensitive skin along his cheek and temple.
His hands were still locked onto her hips, instinct having snapped them there the second she started to fall. Through the thick fabric of her trousers, he could feel the tense, rigid line of her muscles, his fingers involuntarily digging in deeper—not to push her away, but to keep her anchored right where she was.
Neither of them breathed. Neither of them moved.
The wide, frantic grin she’d been wearing a second ago melted off her face, leaving behind a stark, quiet pale. Her eyes behind her smudged lenses weren't dancing with their usual reckless excitement. They were wide, dark, and utterly unguarded which was a rare, terrifying window into the woman whom he had been admiring in secret.
Levi didn't shift away. He didn't make a sound. No, he could not. He feared that this moment would not last longer.
His pulse thrashed violently against his collarbone, a quiet wildfire catching in his blood and burning down every defense he’d built over years of quiet nights and stolen glances. All the unspoken words trapped in the back of his throat, the sharp terror that ate at him every time she threw herself into danger, the quiet hours they’d spent breathing the same stale air, it all gathered right here, heavy and suffocating in the scant inch of space between their mouths.
Hange’s gaze dropped. Her eyes dragged over his parted lips, her breath hitching softly, warm and unsteady against his chin. Her fingers trembled where they rested flat on the mattress beside his head, her shoulders dropping just a fraction as the brilliant, unstoppable scientist suddenly looked completely lost.
Levi’s jaw tightened. The cool, detached ice in his gray eyes shattered, replaced by something dark, raw, and fiercely possessive. He flexed his hands against her waist, his knuckles straining as he dragged her down that final, agonizing fraction of an inch, until there wasn't even air left between them.
His voice came out low, a rough, gravelly rasp that buzzed right against her mouth.
"You don't know how long I've been waiting for this.”
Before Hange could even process the shock of his words, Levi closed the remaining distance.
He pulled her down and kissed her.
It wasn't a gentle, tentative thing. It was a collision of years of built-up desperation, a fierce, consuming release of tension that had simmered between them through countless bloody expeditions, silent night watches, and near-death experiences. Levi’s hand slid from her hip up to the warm skin at the back of her neck, his fingers tangling in her messy hair, holding her tight to him as if she were the only anchor left in a collapsing world.
Hange let out a soft, sharp gasp against his mouth before she completely melted into him. Her hands slid up his chest, burying her fingers into his short, dark hair, pulling him closer and returning the kiss with a matching, passionate fervor. The familiar scent of ink, old paper, and rain mixed with Levi’s sharp, clean soap, grounding them both firmly on the mattress.
When they finally broke apart for air, both of them were thoroughly breathless, their chests heaving together in the quiet room. Hange’s glasses were completely askew on her nose, and Levi’s usually immaculate hair was a delightfully disheveled mess.
Levi looked up at her. The permanent, stony scowl he wore like armor was entirely gone, replaced by a rare, incredibly soft expression that he saved only for her. His thumb moved gently across her cheek, brushing away a stray smudge of charcoal left behind from her sketches.
He cleared his throat, his voice returning to its usual blunt, slightly gruff tone, though the heat in his dark eyes remained entirely unbroken.
"Your side of the room is still a total disaster, shitty glasses." He slid his hand back down to rest heavy on her waist, securing her firmly against his side. "But you can stay on my side of the bed from now on."
Hange stared down at him for a quiet second, the lingering shock giving way to a massive, radiant smile that lit up her entire face. She leaned down, pressing her forehead softly against his, her breath warm against his skin.
"Is that an official order, Captain?"
"Yeah," Levi muttered, his hand tilting her chin back up to pull her down for another kiss. "So don't make me repeat myself."