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The afternoon sun cut a pale, heavy swath across the floorboards of the cottage, thick with dancing dust motes that floated lazily in the heat. Outside, the summer countryside hummed with a quiet, indifferent rhythm where the dry rasp of cicadas in the high grass, the low rustle of the orchard leaves, the distant, hollow clatter of a wooden cart passing down the dirt lane. This was a rare occasion in the district. Although named Utopia the weather nor its living condition reflect its name.
Inside, the only sound was the harsh, unsteady scrape of a chair.
Levi sat at the heavy oak desk, his spine held rigidly straight out of a muscle memory decades too old to break, though his left shoulder drooped under a dull, throbbing ache that never quite left him. He was seventy-eight. His left leg stretched out straight beneath the desk, thick and unbending, a permanent monument to a monster that had burned to ash in a war nobody liked to talk about anymore. His right eye was a useless, clouded marble, staring blindly into the corner of the room.
His good eye stayed fixed on the small glass well of black ink.
With slow, agonizingly deliberate movements, he lowered the tip of a duck-feather quill into the dark liquid. His hand more precisely his knuckles were swollen and skin scarred like cured leather was shaking. A tiny, fat droplet of ink hung from the nib, trembling as he tried his best to stabilise.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He hated the ink. He hated the flimsy, hollow balance of a pen. A blade had weight, leverage, and one aim; a blade cut clean where you aimed it, leaving no room for doubt. Words always felt slippery, bending and warping on the tongue before turning into something useless by the time they bled onto the page.
He pressed the quill to the coarse parchment, forcing his thumb to lock steady against the barrel.
Hange,
He paused, watching the black ink bloom into the grain of the paper. He dragged a dry tongue over his cracked lips, his chest rising in a slow, shallow breath that sounded too loud in the empty room.
The tomatoes in the south patch are late. They’re small, too. You’d probably go on for an hour about the soil acidity or some rot you read in an old book. I just think the weather’s being stubborn. It always has been. We loved to complain about it even if it was a repetition of routine.
He stopped. The quill hovered, a heavy silence settling over his knuckles. His good eye drifted to the window, to the line of hills where the shadows were beginning to stretch long and blue across the grass that looked rather green today, maybe it was the trick of light or Hange in his mind whom he always saw a ghost of her running through the green meadows.
I washed the tea mug this morning. The one with the chipped handle. I almost threw it out, but I didn't. You told me, I remember, you told me that broken things should never be thrown. And I think that is why you kept me around.
He didn't sign it and he never did. There was no use in singing a letter that never reached its intended.
Levi sat there for a long time, watching the ink dry from a glossy shine to a flat, dull black. When the last wet patch faded, he blew softly on the parchment, his breath shaking the thin paper just a fraction. He picked it up, turned toward the right side of the desk, and pulled open the top drawer.
The metal hinges gave a small, familiar squeak.
The drawer was packed tight. Dozens upon dozens of unsealed paper rectangles sat stacked in rigid, immaculate rows, edge-to-edge, perfectly aligned down to the millimeter. There was no address written on any of them. No names on the front nor at its end. Just six years of coarse paper, six years of blunt, awkward lines, and six years of a quiet, suffocating solitude beneath the shadow of the old willow tree at the edge of the property.
Levi slid the fresh page onto the top of the nearest stack, his thumb lingering on the crisp edge for three long seconds. He didn't press his face into his hands. He didn't let out a dramatic sigh. He just closed the drawer until the latch clicked shut, resting his palm flat against the cool oak wood, his knuckles white against the dark grain.
***
Levi’s good eye closed, and the memory slammed into him like a kick to the chest as he reminisced the time when both of them chose a new path.
He was flat on his back on a freezing, muddy bank, his body nothing more than shredded meat and splintered bone. The blast had turned his face into a wet mask of blood, mud, and raw agony; every ragged inhalation felt like swallowing handfuls of crushed glass. And he was struggling to breathe through the pain or through the cold and harsh water. Which? He did not know.
Hange was kneeling over him. She looked half-dead herself—hair matted with river silt, her single exposed eye bloodshot and wide with absolute panic, her fingers slick and bright red as she tried to bind the gashing tears in his chest with torn strips of canvas. He could barely discern her expression with his own hazy half blinded vision. Was she crying?
Behind her, the sky was a bruised, choked purple, thick with distant ash. The earth beneath them trembled where a low, rhythmic rumble that shook the mud under his spine echoed. He was sure that he was going to die but at that moment maybe seeing her one last time before death was a sweet gift a higher power could bestow.
She was trying to fix him up so they could move. They were supposed to find the kids. They were supposed to gather what was left of the shattered officers, march back into the meat grinder, and throw themselves into the jaws of the end of the world.
That was the duty. That was the oath but Hange’s hands suddenly stopped.
She was pulling the makeshift bandage tight around his ribs, but her fingers froze mid-motion, buried deep in the blood-soaked linen against his chest. Her shoulders didn't hold their usual rigid, stubborn posture. They just... dropped. A heavy, hollow slump that made her look smaller than he’d ever seen her. She WAS crying, Levi decided. His mind was numb from thinking and observing but somehow it was the only thing keeping him alive. Thinking about her.
She stared out over the reed bed toward the smoky horizon, her breathing coming in thin, wet hitches. The manic, blinding drive that had carried her through a hundred bloody battlefields, through Erwin’s death, through the horrifying revelation of what lay beyond the sea—it just drained out of her, pooling into the dirt.
"What if we just don't go back?" she whispered.
It wasn't a joke. There was no theatrical flair to her voice, no loud deflection. It was a raw, rasping thing that barely made it over the roar of the water.
Levi stared up at her through his swollen, blood-crusted eyelid, his throat too choked with bile and copper to form a word.
"I am tired, Levi, and I am scared. Seeing you like this. Seeing all our comrades we lost. everything…" she said, her voice fracturing down the middle. She didn't look at him; she just stared into the smoke. "I left them with everything I had. I taught them how to survive, I gave them the maps, I gave them the plan. They know what to do. They don't need another useless Commander driving them into the fire. Maybe it is better to run."
Her hands began to shake violently against his chest, smearing his warm blood over her own bruised knuckles.
"We gave them everything," she choked out, a harsh, jagged laugh breaking out of her throat before dying instantly. "Our youth. Erwin. Mike. Moblit. Every single drop of blood we ever owned. And for what? So the rest of the world can flatten itself? So they can burn it all down under a different colored flag? Yes.. yess.. This is better. Let's just run away."
She finally dragged her gaze down to meet his one open eye. Tears were spilling fast over the rim of her eye, washing stark, pale tracks through the soot and dried blood on her face.
"I'm tired, Levi, so so tired," she breathed, her forehead dropping down until it rested against his uninjured shoulder, her body trembling against his. "I am so damn tired of watching everyone I love turn into dust. I don't want a glorious death. I don't want to be a hero in a history book no one's going to read. I just... I want to stop. Just… it is better…"
It was a total, treasonous rejection of everything they had bled for. It spat in the face of the ghosts standing behind them.
But as Levi lay in the mud, feeling the ragged heat of her breath against his neck, hearing the sheer, broken exhaustion of a woman who had given up her entire soul to a cause that had devoured her whole... he felt a cold, quiet clarity settle into his aching bones.
He didn't think about the Regiment. He didn't think about humanity. He just looked at the only person left alive who truly knew the weight of his scars.
Slowly, agonizingly, Levi lifted his hand an inch off the mud, his bloodied fingers twitching until they hooked around the edge of her sleeve.
He gave a single, weak, barely perceptible nod. “Ha—nge.” he breathed out. “Let’s run away.”
He knew that if he did not give his word they would not run away but instead head back to the battlefield where the last thing they would give was their life. And seeing the oen person he loved so broken even after all this time he did not want it to be the last thing he saw of her. Shit, he wanted to live a long life besides her and even if they had to abandon their duty. So be it.
***
They managed to find a forgotten corner of Utopia which was a far-northern district where the winters stretched long and brutal, and the brief, bright summers forced the locals into dense, tight-knit cluster towns along the valleys. Up there, people cared about firewood, salted meat, and surviving the next frost. Nobody asked questions about two scarred strangers who kept to themselves on a small plot at the edge of the birch woods.
The decades that followed weren't a fairy tale. There was no miraculous healing, no sudden wash of peace that wiped away the blood.
Levi spent the first ten years waking up drenched in cold sweat, his throat raw from silent screams, his fingers twitching violently for the handles of blades that weren't there. Hange suffered from blinding phantom pains in the eye she’d lost, plagued by long, heavy weeks of a quiet, hollow depression where she couldn't bring herself to sit up, staring blankly at the frost forming on the windowpanes for days on end.
They carried an entire graveyard packed tight in their chests, and the air between them was often thick with the ghosts of men and women who had died believing in a sacrifice Levi and Hange had abandoned. But it was theirs. They owned every quiet, agonizing inch of it.
They built a rhythm out of the rubble. They cleared a garden patch, cursing at the rocks buried in the cold soil. They bickered endlessly over how long to steep wild herbs to make something that passed for tea. Hange would eventually start talking again and sometimes a mile a minute, her hands cutting through the air as she mapped out the precise migration patterns of northern hawks and then Levi would sit across from her, scowling into his cup, pretending to be annoyed while silently recording every rise and fall of her voice into his brain like a man trying to memorize a map before the lights went out. It felt peaceful. The news of war rarely reached them. No soldiers were ever stationed. There was no need. No conflict ever reached this far.
They grew old in the quiet. He watched the silver creep through her dark, wild hair, taking over until it looked like frost in the morning light. He watched the deep, fan-like lines around her single eye carve permanent map-markers of laughter into her skin.
And as the years dragged on, the world outside their wooden fence simply moved on without them.
It happened just as she’d predicted that day on the riverbank. The grand, agonizing sacrifices of the Scout Regiment drifted into thin footnotes in dusty historical ledgers, and then, slowly, into blurred myths that nobody really believed anymore. The young people who walked the cobblestone streets down in the town didn't know what a Titan was. They had never heard the thundering roar of an explosion or smelled burning flesh. They didn't know the name Levi Ackerman. They had no idea who Hange Zoe was.
To the living, breathing world, they were just two eccentric, limping old recluses living in a drafty cottage on the hill, staying out of everyone's way.
Levi didn't give a damn that the world had forgotten him. He preferred the silence. He preferred the anonymity of a world that didn't demand his steel or his blood.
What terrified him and what kept his one good eye staring up at the dark ceiling now that the mattress beside him was permanently cold was the slow, terrifying betrayal of his own body. He was seventy-eight, and his mind was growing fragile around the edges.
Sometimes, when the afternoon sun hit the floorboards at a certain angle, he would look at the patch of light and completely lose track of the decade. He would expect Erwin to walk through the door with a stack of reports. He would reach for a tea cup that wasn't there.
He could handle his stiff, ruined leg. He could handle his gasping, failing lungs and the sharp, bitter cold in his joints. But the thought of forgetting her made his chest seize with a cold, paralyzing dread that surpassed any horror he’d ever faced on a battlefield.
He was terrified that one morning he’d wake up and realize he couldn't quite remember the exact, messy shade of her hair when the sun hit it from behind, or the precise, unhinged pitch of her voice when she was on the verge of figuring out a puzzle. He was terrified that the ink in his head was fading, leaving him with an empty room and a drawer full of unread paper.
He knew that his memory was failing him ever since the day Hange passed quietly five years ago.
***
Levi forced his stiff, swollen fingers to lock tighter around the wood of the quill.
On the page, a fat, ugly blotch of ink had bled into the coarse paper where he had hesitated, blooming outward like a stain. A younger, sharper Levi would have thrown the parchment into the hearth and started over out of sheer spite for the mess. The old man just stared at it with his one milky, clouded eye, his jaw working silently.
He hated this. He hated the clumsy, scratchy noise of the nib, the bitter chemical smell of the ink, the way his knuckles throbbed with a dull, hollow ache every time he tried to form a curve. But if he didn't write it down, it existed only inside a brain that was slowly turning to gray ash. If it was trapped in the fiber of the paper, it was real. It was anchored. It couldn't slip through his fingers while he slept.
His handwriting was hideous; cramped, jagged, and harsh, devoid of the flowing curves or flowery elegance she used to splash across her research ledgers when she decided to write thoughtfully and not hurriedly. He didn't know how to write poetry. He had never learned how to wrap words in silk. He was a soldier, and he only knew how to record facts.
He pressed the nib down hard enough to bend the feather.
My memory’s slipping, Hange. I spent ten minutes searching the counter for the tea tin this morning. Found it right in the pantry where I put it sixty years ago, but my brain was just... blank. Like a wall. It scares me.
He stopped, his breath coming in a short, raspy hitch that rattled in his deep chest. He stared at the wet black letters, his thumb sliding up the wooden barrel until his fingernail bit into the grain.
I don't give a damn about the tea tin. But when I close my eyes now, I can't find your face right away. It takes me a second. Sometimes two. I have to search for the curve of your nose, or the way your glasses caught the lamp light, and it takes too long. That scares me. It scares me more than that big hairy bastard ever did in the forest.
The cicadas droned outside the glass, a mindless, endless heat-buzz that suddenly felt deafening. Levi leaned his forehead down until it almost touched the edge of the desk, his good eye fixed on the rough parchment. His chest rose and fell in heavy, deliberate cycles, forcing his lungs to work, forcing his stiff spine to stay upright.
Every morning I wake up, I ask whatever god is left out there to give me one more day before my head goes completely dark. I’m carrying you around inside my skull like the heaviest, most godawful piece of gear I’ve ever worn in my life. My knees are shot. My back aches from it every hour I’m awake.
His knuckles turned stark white against the wood.
I’m not putting it down.
He dipped the quill one last time, the wet tip catching the afternoon glare. He looked up, his good eye drifting past the dusty pane of the window toward the line of the birch trees, toward the shaded patch of grass beneath the old willow where the dirt lay quiet and undisturbed.
He thought of the freezing riverbank. He thought of the smell of her blood on his hands, the terrifying, beautiful certainty in her voice when she looked at him through the smoke and told him to stop fighting. He thought of fifty years of cold mornings, burnt porridge, and her loud, ridiculous laughter echoing off the floorboards of this drafty house.
He lowered the nib to the bottom of the page, his hand surprisingly steady for three short, jagged lines.
The world moved on, just like you said it would. The kids down in the village don't know who we are, and they don't care about the walls we broke. Let them forget. I don't give a damn about them. But, I won't forget. Through the blood, through the hell, through the quiet... it’s only ever been you.
Levi set the quill down. It rolled slightly against the aged oak, leaving a tiny streak of black ink on the worn surface. He didn't reach for a rag. He just let it sit there.
He waited for the final lines to dry, his breathing slow, shallow, and rattling faintly in his chest. When the ink faded from a wet sheen to a flat matte, he carefully folded the parchment into a neat, sharp rectangle. He pulled the top drawer open where the hinges gave that same familiar, quiet squeak and slid the page onto the top of the stack.
He closed the drawer with a soft, decisive click.
Slowly, Levi pushed himself up from the chair, his bad knee popping painfully in the quiet room. He stood there for a second, letting the sharp ache subside, before gripping his wooden cane and shuffling across the floorboards. Each step was a deliberate, heavy effort, the rubber tip of his cane thumping softly against the wood until he reached the window.
Outside, the sun was sinking below the line of the western hills, painting the sky in deep streaks of amber and bruised violet. The garden Hange had dragged him into planting decades ago was still stubborn, wild, and thriving. The patch of lavender she had insisted on, the one she swore would keep the insects away, even if it just made the porch smell like an apothecary shop was in full, vibrant bloom, its purple heads swaying lazily in the evening breeze.
Beyond the garden, the long, cool shadow of the old willow tree stretched across the grass, reaching toward the cottage like an outstretched hand.
Levi leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the windowpane, the chill soothing the dull throbbing behind his right eye. The crushing weight of his seventy-eight years pressed deep into his shattered bones, and his chest felt hollow, carved out by the vast, quiet space she had left behind.
Yet, as he watched the daylight fade from the valley, a strange, uncharacteristic peace settled over him, settling into his joints, quiet and heavy.
His body was giving out. His mind was slowly losing its sharp, deadly edge, fraying around the margins as the years tried to rub her out. But it didn't matter anymore. The letters were in the drawer. The truth was locked safe inside the wood, written down in his own crude, jagged hand where time couldn't reach to tear it away.
He was ready for whenever death finally decided to come collect its long-overdue debt. He had no lingering regrets, no remaining oaths to bleed for, completely secure in the quiet knowledge that he had fulfilled his final duty.
He had survived. He had lived for himself. He had lived for her.
Even if they did run away from everything they fought for. He had lived to see the wrinkles in her face and had loved her through every season they experienced together and he would continue to love her with every breath he draws in and out until he doesn't.