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Hanji is a doodler.
She writes her notes on coffee-stained papers, in leather-bound notebooks and on used envelopes, scribbles her loopy R’s and narrow L’s on every piece of paper she can get her hands on. When she’s done, or when she just needs to think, she draws.
Sometimes it’s just a small flower in the corner of a book, sometimes an intricate sketch of the courtyard outside her office window.
The drawings are never very good. She’s never claimed to be an artist.
It doesn’t really matter, she thinks as she turns the page in her most recent notebook as quietly she can and starts a sketch of the back of Levi’s neck. It quickly gets larger than she intended it to, soon taking up the whole yellowed page. Hanji notes the wired muscle under the skin, the very subtle tan line where his shirt has cut off his back from the sunlight and how his undercut, usually kept neat and trimmed, definitely needs a touch-up.
Levi doesn’t note anything, fast asleep and curled up next to her in the bed.
Hanji draws.
It’s the calm before the storm, she muses, filling in the shading just below Levi’s ear. We’ve waiting for the other shoe to drop, Erwin had told them and it’s unnerving, not knowing what will happen. She’s a much of a strategist as their Commander, knowing very well every possible outcome of their situation, but she’s also a scientist. She needs to have her hands in action to know, to understand, but on something this large-scale, there’s no way to experiment, to try out different solutions and see what fits.
It’s all or nothing, and she’s scared.
(“It’s not the calm before the storm,” Levi told her before they went to sleep, hushed conversation over candlelight to make sure none of the kids woke up. “We’re already in the middle of it. The eye of the storm, maybe. If you have to get metaphorical about it.”
Hanji listens, nods intently. She always liked metaphors.)
It takes another hour before Levi wakes up and even then, there’s still one to go before sunrise. He shifts slowly and she puts the notebook on the nightstand as he rolls around ungracefully to face her, one eye open.
“Hi,” she whispers and he drags a hand through his messy hair.
“Hi.”
The circles under his eyes look heavier every day and she wonders idly if he’ll ever crack, like she did. If he would push through and come out on the other side alive but with something missing, like she did.
“It’s too early,” Levi mumbles and she loves how raw his voice sounds at this hour, no responsibilities or duties of the daytime yet to weigh him down. “How long have you been awake?”
Hanji shrugs. “An hour, at most.”
Levi rolls back over to face the wall, pulling the covers up to his chin. It looks cute, but she’s not going to tell him. She doesn’t feel like having her backside collide with the cold wooden floor just yet.
“Go back to sleep,” he says, and she looks over at the window. It’s still pitch black.
Hanji drops the pen and wiggles her way back under the covers, pressing her freezing toes against Levi’s ankles and giggles quietly as he shudders in response.
It’s the eye of the storm, and Hanji drifts back off into light, blessed sleep.
-
“I don’t really know what to think about him,” Eren tells her with a resigned sigh. “I mean, we lived in that castle for a month, but I still can’t figure out what he’s thinking-“
Hanji cuts the boy off.
“No one knows what he’s thinking!” she exclaims. It’s lie, of course, but she doesn’t feel like elaborating. “That’s his whole stick, you know. Keeping up the mysterious façade and all that. Don’t worry though, I think you’re getting along just fine.”
Another sigh. “I guess. I mean, I don’t think he hates me, I just…”
“You want him to like you.”
Eren furrows his brows. “I want him to accept me.”
Hanji smiles, almost fondly. “Well, in that case, you’re in luck. You’ve been picked for the Special Ops twice, which automatically gives you the ultimate Levi stamp of approval. It’s done, don’t worry about it!”
“But-“
“No buts.” She cuts him off again, hand covering the boy’s mouth. “Teammates have to trust each other, so you can start off by trusting the fact that Levi trusts you. Sometimes, that’s enough.”
Eren nods, dragging her hand along for the ride, and she gives him another smile in return.
“Now, where were we? Was it your molars I was examining or the incisors?”
-
The truth is that Levi is no mystery at all. He just doesn’t know what he wants.
Recruits who join the Scouting Legion with their fist over their heart usually have a clear set goal, a cause to work towards. They want personal freedom or the liberation of the human race, they want fresh air in their lungs and most importantly, they want change.
(Some want glory, but they’re always the first to fall when the gates go up.)
Levi’s never been that way.
He stumbled into the Scouting Legion by chance, worked his way upwards through long hours of training and a little touch of luck. Levi’s mind works astoundingly fast in life or death situations, but it’s his place to follow orders, either act on them or hand them down. He doesn’t make plans for the future of humanity, hunched hour after endless hour over reports and maps and spinning compasses, but they need him.
People started calling Levi a hero after the fall of Wall Maria, and he loathed it from the start.
“You can’t put people on pedestals,” he said, “because sooner or later they’ll come tumbling down and you'll end up breaking your fucking neck.”
Hanji understands. She always liked metaphors.
-
The sky has shifted into a dull blue, and Hanji thinks it’s going to rain.
“I don’t think the kids are up yet,” she says, awake for the second time the same morning. It’s around five, she guesses, judging from the light.
“Still too early,” Levi grumbles, but pushes himself into sitting position nonetheless.
“Breakfast?” she asks after a moment and Levi nods, rubbing the sleep out of his left eye.
They toe quietly around the kitchen on bare feet, careful to not touch the floorboards they know to creak. The others are asleep, after all, and by heaven do they need it after the month they’ve had.
Levi makes tea first, to no ones surprise, and scrambles eggs (unseasoned, because there’s no seasoning left to spare). Hanji watches from the sidelines at Levi’s insistence that she’ll just end up burning everything and wasting food. He’s probably right.
They’re done with scraping the food form their plates when Armin stumbles into the kitchen, still in his pyjamas and groggy from sleep.
Hanji smiles instinctively. Armin, she adores.
“Good morning,” she says, pulling out the chair next to her and gesturing for him to sit down. “Have a good sleep?”
Armin sinks down into the chair and makes a non-committing sound, the universal noise for “I had a terrible nightmare and I don’t want to talk about it”.
Levi rises from his seat in a single fluid movement and turns to prepare another cup of tea.
-
Hanji knows exactly what she wants.
Why she’s here.
She wants (craves) knowledge, to dissect, pick apart, dissolve, understand. If there were no titans left in the world, she’d just find something else to devote herself to, another cause to fight for, another challenge to conquer.
Don’t make Levi into your project, Erwin had told her with his Stern Face in place when he’d brought the kid her age in from Sina and she’d crossed her heart and swore that she wouldn’t.
She hadn’t counted on the fact that Levi was magnetic.
He’s surprisingly easy to figure out, which is almost a bit of a let down. She’d wanted a challenge, a nice puzzle to solve to pass the time. But he pulls her in nonetheless, reluctantly but unconditionally accepts her for all the cracks, flaws and broken pieces of her being coming apart, and she loves him for it.
He saves her from a close call on their first expedition together, the recklessness her superiors are always telling her off about getting the better of her and then he’s there, pushing her out of the way.
She does the same for him on the second expedition and they strike up a comradeship of sorts. They’ve got each other’s backs. It feels like it matters, which means the world to two lonely people chipping at the edges, and so they hold on.
To hope, to their 3DMG triggers, to the feeling of clean air in their lungs, but mostly to each other.
If it’s the real thing or just another means to survive, Hanji doesn’t know.
-
Surprisingly, Mikasa is the first one of the new squad to ask.
“So are you two together or what?” she blurts out in the middle of hand-to-hand training.
Levi stops and shoots her a dirty look, but it’s not mean-spirited. Mikasa stares right back, and Levi snorts.
“You looking for relationship advice?” he asks in a teasing tone and the girl goes three different shades of red, pulling her scarf up to cover the lower half of her face.
“That’s stupid,” she says. “Show me the throwing move again.”
She successfully throws Levi to the floor with a thump after six tries and Hanji whoops loudly from somewhere behind them.
-
It’s the eye of the storm, and Hanji needs to plan for the future.
It’s something she’s never done before, and she’s not quite sure how to do it.
“What’s going to happen to us,” she asks, “if we get through this in one piece?”
Levi doesn’t look up from his book.
“I guess we’ll explore, reclaim the land or some shit. I bet Erwin’s got a million plans already.”
“Not the Scouting Legion,” Hanji says, voice suddenly urgent. “Or humanity. What’s going to happen to you and me?”
Levi meets her gaze and holds it.
“What do you want to happen?”
“It’s rude to answer a question with a question.”
He shrugs. “I’ve never had any qualms with being rude.”
“Oh, I know.”
They’re silent, both waiting for the other one to speak first.
Hanji breathes.
Time to take the road less travelled.
“I can’t really see this end,” she admits. “Whatever this is.”
Levi hums. “Me too,” he says, and turns back to his book. “I guess we’ll figure it out.”
It’s enough.
-
The kids wake up one by one, each one with heavy heads and drowsy eyes, squinting at the sun rising through the kitchen window.
Hanji feels her heart swell when she looks at them (but it’s the eye of the storm, she can’t afford to get attached) and she doesn’t burn the eggs when she makes more breakfast for them, which makes Levi smile.
Sasha finishes her plate in two bites, Jean pushes his food around until it goes cold and eventually passes his plate over to the brunette girl.
They’re not all right, she knows, but she hopes that they will be.
Hanji’s back in the small room she and Levi temporarily shares after all the food business is done, and she picks up the notebook she left earlier on the night stand.
It’s not a very good drawing. The details are all there though, the small scar just under Levi’s hairline and the way his earlobes are shaped and the way the candlelight reflects in his pitch-black hair.
She decides to keep it.
The paper tears neatly form the back of the book and she turns it over in her hands, spotting the notes she made on the moss culture she found during a break in training the day prior.
Symbiosis: a long-term relationship, both parties benefitting from the presence of the other.
It makes her giggle, and she makes a mental note to remember to tell Levi what they should call their relationship from now on. He’ll roll his eyes and call her stupid, for sure, but maybe she can persuade him to agree. It doesn’t sound all too bad.
She always liked metaphors, after all.