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The air reeks of mud, blood, sweat, and wet leather. I dismount slowly—my knees stiff and hands aching from the cold—as the cavalry dissolves: horses handed off, wounded escorted away, corpses carted behind the main building. Each body, or what is left, will be identified and tallied, and someone will draft a letter to the families that I will sign in the morning. I strip my gloves and walk with the reins in hand to deliver Jasmine to the stablemast. He sorts the mare without uttering a word.
I see her tucked beneath the overhang where new recruits gather to watch us return. There is no ceremony today. There are too many bodies, too many missing limbs, too few horses. Most of the greenhorns keep their eyes lowered, or worse, stare at us with open mouths, stunned by the sheer volume of blood and loss that rides in after an expedition. But not her. She’s in a clean and newly pressed unform, spine stiff, arms crossed over her chest. Her hair is pulled back into a bun but rain has soaked the edges that cling now to her forehead. I meet her eyes for only a second and move swiftly past.
I take note of her face though, the way a field officer might note unusual terrain, or Hange an aberrant titan’s behavior. Not because she stands out—she doesn’t. She’s average height, narrow-shouldered, a little lean beneath the bulk of her jacket. If I hadn’t caught her looking at me in such a way, I might not have registered her at all. She’s one of the new batch. I’ll forget her by tomorrow, probably. Still, something sticks. I’ve seen that expression before, I think. On someone who already knows they are going to die.
She starts showing up in the officers building a week later. Not with requests, or complaints, or the unearned confidence recruits sometimes try to weaponize into visibility to get my attention. I see her in the corridors outside the quartermaster’s annex, balancing a clipboard against her hip as she walks beside a supply officer twice her age. I see her in the mess, not seated with the other new soldiers, but standing at the edge of a table with ink on her thumb and a leather-bound ledger open in one hand. Then I start seeing her upstairs, in the main hallway outside the tactical offices, a place no recruit has any business being unless they’ve been given specific instruction.
At first, I assume she’s gotten herself assigned there out of error or desperation, maybe trying to avoid latrine duty or the stables. But when I ask about her, the answer I get is that she’s far too useful to be mine. She is one of my soldiers, but not one I can send off to die. She belongs to the admin department first and foremost, the one shared between all three militaries. She's good, apparently. Efficient. Reliable. She finishes tasks quickly and doesn’t linger. She doesn’t ask for reassignment and doesn’t complain when one’s handed to her. I like hearing this, but resent hearing she isn't mine.
Apparently, she’s assigned inventory consolidation one morning when I come back from a field test outside Wall Rose. I find her in my office, kneeling beside a dusty cabinet full of old topographical drawings that have been decaying in the damp since my predecessor’s time. She doesn’t look up right away. She’s wearing gloves and has three piles organized already—unusable, repairable, intact, I gather. I ask who let her in.
“Pyke,” she replies, not looking at me. “Your maps were overdue for cataloging.”
I glance at the scroll by her knee. “You’re sorting them by condition?”
“Redundancy too,” she says, lifting one edge. “This one’s an early schematic of Karaness. It should be in the archives now.”
Then she goes back to her task, quiet as you please.
I let her stay.
After that, she becomes a regular presence. She enters the room like a quiet breath and leaves the same way. I like that.
When I ask her to annotate my notes with updated casualty projections, she doesn’t balk at the request nor the numbers. More importantly, she does not try to argue it is not her job to assist me. She is mine, even if she is admin’s too.
I start assigning her more, gradually at first. Small clerical errands that could go to anyone, but I send them her way. I tell myself it’s because she won’t waste time asking for clarification, because she won’t try to curry favor, because she doesn’t need to be told twice. I also notice she works late without being asked. She doesn’t mind the silence when it’s just the two of us in the main building or my office. These are things I like.
I test her too, only a little. I give her one of Nile’s more convoluted requests for transparency, buried in red tape and coded language, and tell her to respond diplomatically but without backing down.
A few days later, she returns the letter to my desk.
“He’s going to be annoyed,” she says.
“He usually is,” I reply, scanning her wording, “but this is clean.”
“I tried to use his own phrasing,” she says. “It makes people feel like they’re winning when they see their own words sent back to them, even if the answer is no.”
I glance up at her. “That’s a useful instinct.”
“It’s not instinct. It's just good business.”
“Sir, what am I supposed to annotate?” she asks one evening, as I sift through a stack of schedules.
“Safe locations, paths of travel,” I say. “The expedition is irrelevant if we don’t know the terrain.”
She nods once, then adds without prompting, “In that case, I’ll cross-reference the terrain markers against recently confirmed Titan sightings and casualties.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Do you think that’ll make a difference?”
“Probably not,” she says, plainly, “but to the soldiers enacting the route, it could help prepare them. Mentally, mostly.”
I take a pause. Her hair is down tonight, loose curls pulled over one shoulder. A dash of freckles across her nose. A small scar on her jawline. I clear my throat and tell her, “Well done.”
At some point, I stop keeping track of how often she’s in my office. It doesn’t feel strange anymore. She moves through the space without hesitation. She never oversteps unless told and she never speaks unless something requires saying, but she pays attention. If the map weights have shifted, she straightens them. If the ink is running low, she refills the well before I ask. There are officers I’ve known for years who wouldn’t notice these things. And when she does speak, she finds me more willing to answer than I am with most. Not because I trust her, not yet, but because something about her demands it of me.
The assignments come in waves. Transfers and rotations handed down from above, reshuffling units across the districts like chess pieces. A half-dozen names I don’t recognize land on my desk each week, while others disappear, reassigned to field posts, gate defense, training corps support. Necessary, I suppose. When there are no expeditions planned, my soldiers must be useful elsewhere. But when I see her name listed under a forward logistics detail in the East, something in me stirs.
It’s not unusual. Recruits rotate constantly, especially administration detail, and she’s lasted longer than most.
“Have you seen the updated maps?” Nile asks one morning. I'm in Stohess on business, mostly, but he insists on keeping an eye. “Your new supply routing outside Maria is a fantasy.”
“It’s a hypothetical,” I correct him, brushing past to reach the shelf behind his shoulder. “And hypotheticals are what we have until we can afford certainty.”
“You’ll forgive me for wanting to keep your soldiers alive in the meantime. You’ll kill them all just to establish the first outpost.”
I don’t answer that. He isn’t wrong. Instead, I pull the aforementioned draft of the terrain model from the top shelf. I flip the corner open to where the alternate corridors have been mapped and annotated in a different hand.
Hers.
“Your girl, then,” Nile says, looking over my shoulder. “She was mine, for a time. A good girl.”
I give him a pointed look. He shrugs.
I can still hear her voice when I’d first asked for her thoughts.
“You’re trying to go through a narrowing corridor here,” she’d said, fingertip hovering over the lines. “The forest's density increases. That's a bottleneck risk.”
“Your suggestion?”
“Go around. Skirt the forest. It adds, what, an hour or two? Less chance for surprise but still able to take to the trees if there’s a titan.”
Simple. Effective. I should have thought of it first.
The soldier who replaced her is well-meaning, but incompetent. I limit him to cataloguing duties, and take over the administrative details myself.
Two weeks into her absence, when I'm visiting Trost, I ask Anita—another member of the admin team—if she’s required where she is.
“Not that I know of,” she says.
“Did she request it?”
Anita shrugs. “Most of yours do.”
The hallway is damp from the storm rolling in. Stone sweating, candles flickering. I sit with my notebook open but untouched, ink drying in the well. I stay there for nearly two hours without writing a word.
The next morning, I request her by name. I don’t specify why. The person reading it will assume it’s a matter of necessity, a skills-based gap, or an overlap in assignment windows. All just convenient enough to be ignored.
It takes another five days.
I’m alerted by the sound of boots in the corridors and then, finally, the soft creak of my office door as it opens at the usual hour.
“I was told to report here,” she says, voice flat. I look up from the pile of reports on my desk.
“You were missed,” I say before I think better of it.
She tilts her head a fraction.
“You used to annotate my maps, help me determine supply outposts. I relied on those.” I do not say ‘on you’.
“I’ll continue, if that’s helpful.”
“I requested your transfer back.”
“I know,” she says. “They said.”
A pause stretches between us. I let the silence settle.
“I just thought you should know I asked for you to be rotated back,” I say. “If you transferred away, you might be upset with me—”
“I will resume my duties, Commander,” she says.
I press my lips closed.
“I did not transfer away,” she adds.
The feeling that lingers is not exactly relief, but when the next round of administration assignments come in and her name appears in the rotation pool, I cross it out.
The meeting ends just after midnight. Levi is the last to leave. He doesn’t say much, just gives me a look and a nod, then vanishes down the corridor without a sound.
I sit for a while. The oil lamp on the desk gutters low. I lean forward to trim the wick, then I hear the knock. I know her three quiet taps.
“Come in.”
She steps inside without a word.
“You’ll want to look at the timeline,” she says, setting a folder down in front of me. “We’ll be sitting ducks while the supply outpost is built and stocked. If we time our arrival for sunset, most titans will be powering down and we’ll be safer, no?”
I scan the first page. She’s marked it with red pencil, a line drawn clean across the table.
I watch her in the dim light. She doesn’t flinch when I stare too long. Her off-duty sweater is a thin material and damp from the rain. I glance toward my coat.
“You’re cold.”
“I’m fine. About the plan—”
I reach for my coat and set it across the desk. “Sit down.”
She hesitates, but she takes the coat, tugs it on, and settles into the chair. The papers rest between us. I find myself tracing one of her margin notes with my thumb.
“You’re the only one who flagged this,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
“You’re meticulous. You see things I don’t.”
“Thanks," is all she says.
“There’s something I need you to understand,” I say, sitting forward, hands clasped, elbows pressed to the desk, “about the supply outpost.”
“I thought I understood,” she says. “A supply outpost is a good idea—”
“Most soldiers think the goal is freedom. If we just fight hard enough, long enough, we’ll win something back. Territory. Outposts.”
“It’s not?”
“No.”
Her brows stitch together.
“Then what is it?”
There’s no way to answer that question simply. I’ve tried, once or twice, but no sentence ever captures it without sounding like utter madness.
I tell her about the possibility of a world beyond the walls. And I tell her about the intended human cost of this outpost—the lives I’m ready and willing to sacrifice, no matter how hard she works to avoid it.
When she finally speaks, it's quietly. “How far are you willing to go?”
“As far as I have to.”
She nods once. She stands, the creak of her chair all too loud. She pauses in the doorway, and for a moment I think she might ask something else. Press for more. Instead she says, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Three weeks later, the operation launches. In official documents, it’s a “forward perimeter reinforcement”. What it is, in practice, is a serious gamble. A high-risk maneuver designed to secure and reinforce an abandoned outpost on the far side of the usual expedition route. If we succeed, it will mean a new tether point, a place to refuel and relay. If we fail, well, there won’t be anyone left to issue a report, and hopefully someone will replace me.
I don’t assign her to the expedition team. She is admin, she isn’t required by any means. But she doesn’t hesitate to volunteer. “When do we ride?”
We depart at first light, the southern sky pink with the promise of good weather. Forty soldiers. Six support wagons. Four scouting wings rotating right, left, back, and central approach. I lead the center. I don’t speak to her directly in front of the others, but I watch the way she scans the horizon, the way she adjusts her reins with the barest flick of her fingers to keep pace without prompting. Then she parts left with Raul.
The proposed outpost is worse than expected. The tower is half-collapsed, the supply shed burned out. Old maps hadn’t accounted for the damage done before the walls were built.
The first attack comes at night. We scatter and regroup. Two aberrant Titans breach the outer trees—small, fast, unpredictable in their movements. We kill one. The other disappears into the dark with a soldier in its grip.
She returns an hour after the breach, covered in blood that isn’t hers.
Raul is dead. So are both his flanking scouts. She’s limping, gait off by a fraction, left thigh soaked with blood, but she’s upright.
“Perimeter clear,” she says.
I don’t ask how. I just nod.
The outpost is secured, stocked, and operating by dawn. Our journey home is marked by more bloodshed and bodies.
When she does come to me after, it’s midmorning, four days later. She steps into my office quietly. She doesn’t meet my eyes immediately.
“Post-operation report,” she says, handing over a stack of pages.
“Sit,” I order.
She does.
I study the curve of her collarbone as she exhales. “Do you regret going?”
“No. You were right. It was worth it.”
I drop the report, then I lock my door, the latch clicking loudly into place.
I could say a dozen things. I stop a step away from her. She looks up at me and I crouch to meet her. My hand dusts the bruise along her jaw, the healing split at the corner of her mouth, and the old scar on her jawline.
It is the bare minimum of comfort.
She stands and her hands touch my shoulders as she guides me around the edge of the desk and into the chair I so recently vacated. Her fingers move to the buttons of her shirt. One by one, they slip free. The fabric parts down the center, catching slightly before gliding off her shoulders and onto the floor. The air in the office is cool, and she stands motionless for a moment. Then her bra follows, falling away to expose her breasts. Then her trousers. She unbuttons them slowly, but not to tease. She slides them down over her hips, past her thighs, stepping out of them without breaking from my gaze.
She stands bare before me, stripped of everything—uniform, pretense, restraint. Her body is not perfect, but real in a way that undoes me. Full in the right places, muscle beneath soft skin, scars not yet faded.
She kneels on either side of my thighs, straddling my lap. Her fingers find the fastening of my trousers. She tugs the fabric down just enough to free me, and her hand closes around my cock, coaxing it to hardness. I wonder what motivates her. Is it the nearness of death, or fear? Is it me she wants, or simply someone? Would this act mean the same if she’d walked into another room, another man’s office?
When she guides me to the heat between her thighs, when her hand steadies me and she sinks down slow, slick, and sure, I stop wondering.
Her breath catches against my neck. My hands grip the arms of the chair, knuckles white, resisting the urge to seize her hips and thrust up into her like I’ve thought of more than once in the quiet hours of early morning. She rides me slowly, deliberately, taking what she needs, her body rolling down to take me deeper, her nails leaving crescent indentations in the muscle of my shoulders.
I let her. I offer it. Whatever this is—ritual or release—I let her lead us.
She doesn’t speak, but her body begins to tremble, thighs tightening around my hips, and then she shatters silently. I feel every pulse of it. My jaw clenches. I force myself to stay still, to endure the wet heat and rhythmic flex that nearly drags me over the edge with her.
When her body stills and her gaze meets mine, her eyes are half-lidded, dazed with aftershock. There is no fear there. She trusts me. And it is that, more than anything, that undoes the last of my restraint.
I lift her in one smooth motion. She gasps softly as I rise. I lay her across the desk. The wood is scattered with half-written reports and a map from the western ridge. They crumple beneath her bare back as I press her legs apart and step between them.
I find her wrists and hold them, then I slide back inside with one deep thrust.
Her mouth opens around a gasp. Her thighs flex around my hips. Her wrists twitch in my grip. And I move—hard, unrelenting, each thrust angled to find the spot that draws breath from her throat and turns it into something needier. She is soaked, unbearably sensitive, and easy. Each time I sink into her, she tightens around me, and I can feel her straining beneath it—caught in the shock of being pushed toward pleasure again so soon.
I watch everything. The way her breasts lift with each movement, the stuttering of her breath, the flutter of lashes when I thrust particularly deep. Her fingers curl against my hold, twitching for something to cling to. Her lips part and close again.
I bring my hand to my mouth, wet my thumb, and reach between us. I circle her clit, pressing down experimentally. Her head falls back, her hips jerk, and her voice—so rarely used—cracks open.
“Erwin.”
My name.
She comes again. Her body writhing around me one last time.
When I finally come, I do so deep inside her, groaning low in my throat, heat flooding her body in slow pulses. But I don’t stop. I keep moving, slower now, drawing every shake from her with thrusts that keep my release buried inside. Her body shudders beneath mine, and when I finally still, I remain inside her.
After a time, I help her dress. I kiss her jaw and her neck, and she sighs and leans into me.
We do not speak of it again.
The next morning, she’s at her desk before I am mine. Hair tied back. Sleeves rolled. She looks up only once as I pass the admin room, and I offer a nod in place of good morning. That’s all.
She continues working under me as if nothing has changed. In many ways, nothing has. Her reports remain precise. Her observations remain remarkable. She never misses a briefing, never forgets a detail. She’s become a constant in my days, but not in the way any other subordinate or comrade might be.
I think back to Nile, and the rest of our conversation that day.
“Are you grooming her?” he asked, tone lazy.
I looked up. “Grooming?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” I insisted.
“Do you want her, or do you want her to command?”
I didn’t answer him. I hadn’t thought about it, and there was nothing else I could say that wouldn’t explain too much. He left without pushing it. That’s the way with old friends; we know where the lines are, even when we no longer walk them together.
She never asks to be moved. Never hints at it. She spends more time in the upper office than with me, fewer hours in the field, but when she is needed, the reports that come back speak for themselves. Casualty counts. Invoices. Letters for the deceased. Supply inventories.
“She's not like you,” Mike tells me once, folding his arms in the doorway after a debriefing. “She cares about us. She doesn't demand sacrifices the way you do.”
“No,” I say, surprised by my own smile. “She earns them.” And she does, because she makes sure I’m not wrong. She makes sure my plans succeed. She makes sure the bodies I stand atop are there for a very good reason.
Mike studies me for a long moment. “That’s why you like her.”
I say nothing.
Later that night, I find her asleep at her desk, head resting on her folded arms. The oil lamp beside her is still lit, burning low, dangerously close to the edge. I cross the room and trap the flame with my finger and thumb.
I let her sleep.
There’s nothing else to be done for people like us. There are no oaths, no declarations, no confessions or love letters. Only the long grind of shared work and the slow accumulation of knowledge and loss and death.
And though we never speak of it—we continue, in the quiet of night.
It’s enough. I could never ask her for more.