FicWad

Levi
Time with Hanji went fast. Before I knew it, New Years passed with fizzing champagne and bursts of shimmering confetti, and January came with heavy snow. Erwin Smith rescheduled
an expedition due to all the snowfall that came almost to my hips. And with January snow came intense therapy to get me on my feet again, and my absence gave Hanji time to give her experiments and reports their much needed attention. When she asked about my progress, I never gave her much, just gruff answers of, “good” and “better than yesterday” and “very sore”. She never meddled more in Levi
The next day, I woke on the couch from last night to the smell of hot white tea and sizzling bacon, Hanji banging pots and pans and dishes in the small kitchen in her work room, which was really her makeshift laboratory. I rubbed my groggy, sleep-encrusted eyes and yawned long and deep before I sat up on the couch, and I looked over its back at loud Hanji, my arm draped over the back of it.
“Hanji, why are you up so early?” My throat was thick with sleep still, and very dry.
Hanji
So Levi was in love with a woman, but who could it be? He was rarely around people after the last expedition in early June, and I was very sure he hadn’t visited with many other women beside myself since he was entrusted in to my care. Could the woman be one of the nurses that cleaned his wounds and helped him through therapy? They always doted on him, as if he was a prize to be won- how the King treated him- and it made me so angry-so jealous! They weren’t the ones who held him, dying, in their arms and begged him to come back! They weren’t the ones who stayed by his side all night long while he was in a coma in the Infirmary after he attempted suicide! They weren’t the ones that wheeled him about everywhere and did everything to make him comfortable! How could he take my care for him for granted? Unless…
Unless I was the woman he talked about last night, but that was wishful thinking. He saw nothing in me, nothing I dreamed for him to see in me.
‘Don’t get your hopes up, Hanji,’ I thought to myself after he fell asleep and I, still on the floor holding his hand, admired his handsome sleeping face. I sat on my knees and, with tremors racking my body, gingerly kissed his forehead before sitting back down like before. With my free hand, I brushed his hair from his sleeping face timidly, and I couldn’t remember how long I stayed there awake. When I woke up, I was still next to him, my head on the couch and our fingertips mere inches apart.
That morning while Levi still slept, I concocted a devious plan to win his heart.
Levi
Hanji turned from the sink to the kitchen bar that faced the couch and myself, and she smiled devilishly. She was up to something; I could tell by the mischievous gleam in her wild eyes and how her smile touched her ears- her mad-scientist grin. I frowned.
“I have a surprise for you,” she crooned, winking at me. I raised my eyebrows, taken aback. What on earth could Four-eyes plan for a cripple?
“What is it,” I asked callously.
“It’s called a surprise for a reason.” I rolled my eyes at her.
“What are you making?”
“Breakfast, wise one. It’s morning. People eat it in the early hours of the day.”
“Apparently you had sassflakes and a cup o’ snark already.” She grinned wider and went back to the sink, voraciously washing out what I suspected was a greasy pan.
I smiled to myself; Hanji cooking. Such a domestic thing for a wild woman. I couldn’t imagine what the infamous Hanji Zoe could have in store for me that day as she came to the couch and set a plate of breakfast down for me and herself with a cup of tea for me and black coffee for herself. I was never much of a coffee drinker, but it never felt quite like morning without the smell of it and its loud perkling in the early hours.
I sipped the hot tea and watched Hanji devour a slice of buttered toast. “Thank you,” I murmured. Suddenly, I felt embarrassed at my incompetence and color rushed to my cold cheeks.
“No problem!” She practically chirped in the mornings. “Finish that up and then I’ll give you a bath.” She paused. “It’s like I have a pet Levi or something, a grumpy bear maybe…or mouse.” I choked on my tea.
“What?!” I was indignant, “I’m no mouse!” She snorted at me.
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“And what do you suppose yourself? A tigress?”
“Yes.”
“You look more like a goat to me.” She smacked me with a slice of bacon.
“Whoops, it slipped.” I was fuming.
“Watch it,” I growled but she only smiled more.
Hanji
After Levi was washed up (he couldn’t properly bathe himself still, so I was in charge of giving him particularly bubbly bathes regularly) and properly dressed, I wheeled him to the Infirmary to have his wounds checked for infection. The doctor (no nurses that morning- good riddance!) said all was fine, and the two of us were on our merry way.
It was brisk and cold outside the bulwark in the streets of Wall Rose, with its fresh snow and faint breezes. Children ran about with sleds and thick mittens and many a snowman was erected in front of brick and stone houses with black smoke rising from their old stone chimneys. The Wall was alive. I could feel Levi shiver in his chair, and his nose grew redder and redder.
“I told you you’d want that scarf!” I scolded him-we’d fought all morning about a scarf I wanted him to bring, but he refused to wear such a fluffy thing.
“It smelled like a dead cat! It hadn’t been washed since before the titans first appeared!”
“I promise you I washed it last Christmas.” He was horrified.
“That’s disgusting.”
“That’s called clean-“
“You’re insane!” I laughed and looked down at him. A light snow began to fall and white flakes powdered wisps of his black hair. “Are we there yet?”
“Almost,” I smiled.
Everyone liked music, right? Levi hummed a thousand carols over the past week alone, and I was sure he had sung many concerts alone in the shower before- I couldn’t help but grin at the thought of him dancing naked in the shower, singing at the top of his lungs- so he’d like my surprise. Right?
We turned the corner of a pastry bakery and stopped in front of a black-painted shop. I helped Levi out of his wheel chair so he could sit on the steps in front of the shop while I carried it in, and then I half carried-half dragged him in to sit in his chair.
“Why are we in a music shop?”
Levi
The music shop was dark and cold from the ice and snow outside, and its wooden floors were scuffed from age and the metal shoes of customers. The walls boasted a menagerie of sheet music-mainly piano and flue. The front room had a sleek black grand piano opened in the middle on top of a withering mothball rug, and, in the second room, the old shop owner sat asleep, a drooping tobacco pipe falling from his cracked lips.
I looked to Hanji, and she was crest fallen, her brows furrowed as she looked to the piano and then to the sleeping shop owner. I reached for her wrist from my chair to draw her back to the present.
“Oi, what’s th’matter, Hanji?” She looked around the room again and sighed.
“There’s usually a pianist here who plays for the holidays, and hot cocoa for customers.” She paused and looked at me apologetically, and my fingers slipped from her thin wrist to her hand. I held it tentatively, gauging her face. She pursed her lips. “I’m sorry, I brought you here for nothing then.”
I bit my cheek, “No, not at all. Here, push me to the piano keys.” She let go of my hand and pushed me to the ivory piano keys. They were yellowed with age, but still glossy with good care.
I touched the keys and played a chord, knowing Hanji would recognize the song. I heard her gasp.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord, what have I done? I’ve fallen in love with a man on the run. Oh Lord, oh Lord, I’m begging you please, don’t take that sinner from me,” she sang softly as I played the song; the song she sang to me as I languished in her arms not long ago. I kept playing while she sang, and, quietly, I sang the duet with her.
I ended the song and looked over my shoulder at her wide eyes, a faint smile playing at my lips.
“I didn’t know you could play,” she breathed.
“I lived above a music shop for a moment while on the run,” I explained. “I learned from the owner, who washed away his troubles in booze and the piano all night long.”
“I wish I could play like that.” I paused and looked back at my hands on the keys as my heart leapt in to my throat. Why did she make me so nervous?
“I could teach you sometime, if you’d like.” Never in my life had I spoken so much to one person in such a short time as I had to Hanji. I looked up to her again and followed her as she moved to my side.
“I’d like that very much.”
Hanji
I didn’t know couples who spent their whole lives together and died together. I didn’t know new couples whose fondness blossomed in to love over time. I didn’t know people who hated each other because they were scared of their feelings of one another. I didn’t know love and how it affected its enthrallers, made them feel like stars popped inside of them and consumed their minds with thunder and lightning.
As he sang husk and low beneath my breathiness and caressed sound from the ivory and ebony of the elegant piano, I fell in love with him completely.
It was never a part of my plan, but who plans to fall in love?
We sang and played until late in to the evening and the shop owner shooed us away, mumbling profanities beneath his breath at our meddlesomeness.
“Thank you, Levi,” I whispered in to the night. The dark was brilliantly lit with yellow and red and green Christmas lights, and the air smelled like burning wood and steaming chocolate cookies. Levi’s head rested on his shoulder, asleep, while I took us back to the bulwark.
to it; it was a sensitive topic for me. But I was doing very well.
One particular night, I convinced- more of flirted to get my way- the nurses to let me go off on my own to Hanji’s work room alone; I wanted to surprise her. I was fine walking from the Infirmary to the Dining Hall, but once I passed its tall closed doors, my legs felt stiff and weak, like I would collapse at any moment. The halls were empty with all the Scouts and whatever Military Police that passed through the bulwark asleep in their quarters, and I was alone to my own devices. But I was a soldier, a Scout, the Lance Corporal Levi Heichu Ackerman: what was a long walk from the Dining Hall to Hanji’s place to Humanity’s Strongest? Apparently the greatest battle to my old wounded legs, but, using the tall unforgiving walls and careful steps, I made it to her- of course- locked door.
I braced myself and stood away from the wall, as straight and as tall as I could manage, and I fixed my shirt a bit before I knocked on the door.
“Just a minute!” I heard her call from the room, but I was impatient and tired, so I knocked again. And I continued to knock until she answered. I practically fell on her when she opened the door, and I had to hold myself up with the support of the door frame. I pathetically smiled at her.
“Thought I’d surprise you,” I said as her eyes grew to the size of milk saucers and her jaw dropped.
“LEVI WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” she hollered at me before taking me in her arms. I draped my arm over her shoulders and she led me to the couch to sit. I groaned as I forced my legs to bend before the fire and I laughed at Hanji while she fussed over me.
“What were you thinking?!”
“I thought, ‘why not’?”
“Levi, no!”
“You mean, ‘Levi, yes’!” She rolled her eyes at me and hugged me tight. I rubbed my hands up and down her back and buried my face in to the crook of her sweet neck, my face full of her thick hair. She let it down from its usual high pony, and she smelled of vanilla and anthrax, my favourite pick of poison. I let her warmth envelop me, and I indulged in the tender kiss of her soft skin on mine.
Too soon she let go and placed her hands on her hips in front of me. Even in the dark of the room, only lit by the flickering fire she made, could I see the dark outline of her black bra in her white shirt, and I looked away from her as color rose to my cheeks. I hoped she couldn’t see it in the dim light.
“Would you like some tea before bed?” She asked sweetly.
“Yes please.” I looked back up at her, and my eyes rested upon the supple curve of her pale upper lip. We locked eyes and she playfully bit her bottom lip before leaving me on the couch for the company of the kitchen and my black tea kettle. I looked over my shoulder and admired her with a sigh and a smile tenderly kissing my lips so used to a grimace.
Hanji
After Levi walked his first time alone to my room, it became a routine. I’d leave the door half open for him to push as he entered the room and I pushed the couch closer to the door so he could quickly sit down before he collapsed. As January quickly died with the brown grass, with green slowly ebbing in to its roots, February came with melted snow and grey rain. Every day, Levi grew stronger and walked farther each time he came back to the room. Eventually, I let him walk to the Infirmary alone before his therapy. It was almost disheartening to know that Levi didn’t rely on me as much as he had before, but I was happy for him because he was finally regaining some of the freedom he stolen from himself.
It felt so long ago that he threw everything away.
Valentine’s Day
Levi
The only people who cared about Valentine’s Day within the bulwark were couples, and they gifted each other flowers and chocolates and stolen jewelry. Some even stole hearts, and that was my plan for the night. I had a heart to steal, a heart so fair and poisonous I was addicted.
I left the Infirmary but walked away from the Dining Hall and away from Hanji’s room. I walked past the Mail room and past the Maintenance room, to broken windows on the first floor. I looked through the foggy pane up to the full moon that lit the night sky, stars above smiling down on my head. I lifted the glass from the windows and easily pushed its netting in to the dewy grass outside. I looked down the hallway to see if anybody saw me, and, cautiously, I went outside through the hole.
The night was cool and damp, and I walked as fast as I could to the other side of the bulwark, to the windows of the Infirmary so far away from the window I left broken. My heart beat fast in relief when I saw all the yellow and white daffodils still growing beneath the lit window, and I crept to them. I stole one yellow for the golden girl who stole my heart, and I returned to the window on aching legs.
By the time I made it to Hanji’s work room, my legs were screaming in agony with my burning scars. Sweat beads formed on my brow and wet my clothes. I was filthy, and Hanji would be upset when I would insist on a bath.
I pushed the cracked door open and limped in to see Hanji asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace. Quietly, I closed the door behind me and went to her sleeping side. I collapsed on to my knees next to her and gingerly placed my hand on her shoulder.
“Hanji,” I whispered.
“Hm,” she mumbled and scrunched up her nose. She looked so young without her glasses on.
“I have to tell you something important.” She rolled on to her back and opened her eyes as she stretched and yawned. She looked at me and then to the flower before propping herself up on her elbows.
“What’s wrong? Why do you have a-where did you even get that flower from?” She quickly woke up, and I shook my head.
“I have a lot to tell you.”
Hanji
I helped Levi up and on to the couch and he gave me the daffodil. It smelled of spring and new life. I filled a glass of water for it while I made Levi and I a kettle of jasmine tea to sip while he talked to me. He told me to take my time, and I was trembling so hard I spilled half of his fresh tea on the table rather than in to his cup; I had an idea of what he wanted to tell me, or, at least, I hoped I was right. I brought our two cups of tea and the flower in its clear glass to the coffee table in front of the couch, and I sat next to Levi, who wrung his hands together almost in prayer.
I handed him his cup and he held it on its lip.
“Be careful not to spill it; it’s very hot.” He nodded and took a sip. He held it in his hands between his strong legs and I gulped mine down to fill the tense silence. It burned my throat but it wasn’t as hot as my blushing face. For a long time, we sat in silence, but he kept glancing at me every so often.
I turned to him and said, “What’s wrong?” He paused.
“There’s nothing wrong, Hanji.” He turned to face me and our eyes locked, the room ringing with his voice on my name. He looked to the floor and then back to my face.
“I don’t know where to begin…”
“Begin with the beginning.” He smirked and nodded.
“I guess that’s where everything starts.” He took a sip of his tea and set it down on the glass coffee table, and we watched the steam rise from the porcelain cup. I set mine down as well and turned to face him. He looked at me and took a deep breath.
“I guess it began after Thanksgiving when I…” He gulped. “I thought I was dead and seeing an angel that sang to me, begged me to stay with her. I thought I died, but I woke up- alive- and there was my angel, coming to my rescue. And then I saw you, Hanji, for truly the first time. I saw your eyes. I always thought they were brown, but in the sun, they looked like brilliant red rust. They’re beautiful.” He looked to the fire, and I patiently waited for him to continue.
“I was scared for a very long time…I’m still scared…Christmas came and I got drunk. I don’t remember much of what we talked about- only things about shovels and Walls and run-aways- but I do remember your freckles.” He smiled and reached for my arm. He traced his fingers on the skin of my arm to my elbow where my freckles were darkest. “It looks like you were seasoned with cinnamon.” I smiled and he chuckled. “They’re beautiful,” He said, and he took a sip of his tea.
“I can’t tell you the day I fell in love with you, but I do know I love you Hanji. I love you, more than anything, and I would do anything for you. I would be anything for you.” His hand slid down my arm to my hand, and he held it tight. I stroked the top of his hand softly with my thumb, and my eyes never left his.
He loved me.
Levi
We sat in silence for a moment while my words hung in the air like chiming church bells. I held Hanji’s hand and then, with my free hand, I slid my arm around her slim waist and pulled her close to me. My scars ached, but they weren’t important, not anymore.
We looked in to each other’s eyes, and I leaned in. She followed, but I closed the distance between us, and our lips met. At first, it was slow and lovely, but, as the crackling fire in front of us slowly ebbed away, we burned with passion and lust. My hands traveled up and down her waist and my kisses lingered down her jaw, her neck, the freckles on her collar bone, down her bare chest...She signed and looked up to God with eyes closed with bliss.
“I love you too Levi,” she breathed.
My hand went down under her legs and held her back tightly and I picked her up. She broke our kiss and gasped as I stood up with her in my arms.
“Levi, what are you doing!?” I kissed her neck up to her lips.
“Shhh, just relax.” I walked us to her room and we let our love blossom as we stole each other’s hearts.