Chapter Text
"I forgot to clarify something. In one part, you'll read that there are foreign soldiers training in Paradis, and that's because under Erwin's command, it became a kind of military power that sells its services to formalize alliances. So they train the other nations to fight against Titans. :p Crazy, but I needed it hahahaha"
Look, if you're only here for the smut, you'll need to scroll almost to the end of the chapter hahahahaha
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Eren
Levi
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"
"SOLDIERS, CHARGE!"
The shout was still hanging in the air.
The charge was a chaos of dust and helmets pounding the ground, of horses whinnying and soldiers dying before they could even scream. Rocks fell like meteors from the Beast Titan's hands, tearing bodies apart, erasing names. Erwin Smith rode at the front of it all, splattered with the blood of his men, seeing his own death drawn in every projectile that whizzed past.
He didn't care. He kept advancing.
"KEEP MOVING FORWARD!"
Zeke watched the human charge with the indifference of someone watching ants run toward a fire. He raised his arms for another barrage, and it was at that moment he noticed something. Several of his Titans were dead.
He frowned, scanning the field with his gaze until he found him: a lone soldier moving among his Titans with a speed that didn't seem human. No Titans around to stop him. No visible fear in his trajectory.
"He must be careful of one soldier. Captain Levi is dangerous." He remembered Reiner's warning too late.
Zeke didn't finish the motion. Levi was already on him. There was no time to react.
The rocks stopped falling, and the entire field fell into a silence that was almost deafening.
Levi defeated the Beast Titan with the same speed he did everything, driven by hatred and a thirst for revenge. At his feet, the giant that had been massacring his soldiers for hours lay on the ground, motionless.
From the ground, Erwin saw it all. The pain was enough to cloud most of his thoughts, but not that one. Not the sight of Levi standing among bodies, smoke, and blood, searching for survivors with a desperation that very few people would have recognized in his rigid posture.
When those grey eyes found him, Erwin couldn't help it. He smiled.
"...Erwin, you goddamn suicidal maniac." – It wasn't an insult; they both knew it.
That second of distraction was enough. From within the thick smoke, a Titan emerged, moving on its hands and knees, fast as something that size should not be, and before Levi could react, it took the mutilated body of the Beast Titan's shifter into its mouth.
Zeke's voice came through, distorted and furious, from somewhere among the trees, promising revenge, ordering the remaining Titans to attack. Levi clenched his jaw.
Being humanity's strongest, he thought as he raised his swords again, gave him too many headaches.
…………………………………………………
When they were finally able to cross back to the Wall, carrying the few survivors and Erwin, Levi was greeted by the sight of Eren with a blade at Bertholdt's throat. And that goddamn monkey standing in front of him as if he still had any right to keep breathing.
The moment the bearded bastard saw him, he took off running.
"Good," Levi thought, without lowering his guard. "Next time he won't be so lucky."
He sat down, and it was because his legs simply stopped responding. He didn't know how many Titans he had killed today. Everything hurt — that dull kind of pain that sets in when adrenaline finally leaves the body.
"Captain Levi! The titan serum!"
God, Eren shouted so much. Under any other circumstance, Levi would have said something about it, but he had a headache that threatened to split his skull in two and no energy left for sarcasm.
He looked at the titan serum in his hand, then at Erwin beside him.
The son of a bitch was still breathing. He would keep breathing without an arm — that Levi knew better than anyone because Erwin Smith was too stubborn to die on a battlefield without learning the truth about the Titans and what lay beyond the Walls. And he couldn't imagine, under any circumstances, that same son of a bitch turned into the Colossal Titan. He was already insufferable enough at his normal height.
The way Eren was looking at him — not with the hysterical desperation Levi might have expected, but with something that looked too much like confidence. As if he already knew what the answer would be before Levi even gave it.
That irritated him, but he still handed over the syringe without a word.
Watching afterwards as the brats threw themselves at Armin with tears in their eyes made something in his chest tighten for a moment. Something small and quick that he had no intention of examining or mentioning ever again, under any circumstances.
...................................................................
The room was silent.
Erwin had read many reports in his life. He had processed losses, betrayals, truths that rewrote everything he thought he knew, but this was different. This wasn't a report. It was a father's journal, and what it contained was enough to shake the foundations of everything they had fought for.
There is a world outside. Marley is the enemy. The Titans were human. The entire time, they had been killing humans turned into Titans.
He set the journal down on the table more carefully than necessary, as if placing it too harshly might break something that was already broken.
"This is bullshit." Levi stated. Erwin exhaled something that under other circumstances might have been a laugh.
"Yeah," was all he replied.
"Hey, Erwin." Levi leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and that expression of his that could mean twenty different things depending on who was reading it. "I need a raise after all this. Some goddamn tea, and right now I'd kill for a bath because I smell like shit."
That was when he heard the laugh.
Everyone turned at the same time. Eren was on his knees, his face in his hands, tears streaming down his cheeks and his shoulders shaking with a laugh he clearly hadn't planned on having. The kind of laugh that arrives when you're in shock.
"Hey, brat. What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Captain Levi..." Eren looked up, his eyes bright and red, the laugh still shaking his chest. "That's the most important thing you have to say at a time like this? That you smell like shit?"
No one answered for a moment, and then, as if someone had broken something, the laughter spread. First Eren, then Armin, then Jean even though he clearly didn't want to, then everyone.
Erwin looked at Levi.
And he could see it. It wasn't something he had seen on that face before. Levi watched Eren laugh with an expression that had completely abandoned its usual neutrality. It wasn't exactly tenderness — Levi didn't operate in tenderness — but something closer to recognition. Like someone seeing something they had been searching for without knowing they were searching for it. His grey eyes followed every one of Eren's movements with attention, he looked captivated.
"It can't be. How did I not notice before?"
That was what made him laugh. Not the collective chaos of his soldiers losing themselves in a bottomless laugh. But that. Humanity's strongest, the man who commanded fear just by entering a room, completely lost watching a boy cry with laughter.
*************************************
The hall of the kingdom was silent when Eren finished speaking.
Erwin had heard difficult confessions in his life. He had sat broken men in front of him and extracted truths no one wanted to say out loud. But this was different. This wasn't a confession — it was a sentence, and the one pronouncing it was a boy trembling with his face in his hands while sobs shook his shoulders.
Kruger's memories. The ability to see the future and the past. The Rumbling. Total destruction.
The Eren of that future hadn't found a way out. That was what weighed most heavily in the air — the horror of what he had done, the loneliness that forced him to decide.
No one knew what to say. Erwin didn't either, and that was unusual enough for him to recognize it. He looked around him: Jean with his jaw clenched, Mikasa with her eyes fixed on Eren and her hands closed over her knees, Armin with that expression of his of someone processing too much information too quickly. Hange was biting the end of her quill without writing anything.
The shame in Eren's crying was almost unbearable to watch. He cried like someone asking for forgiveness for something they haven't done yet, that perhaps they will never do, but that is etched into their memory like a scar from another time.
It was Levi who moved first.
There was no announcement. No glance at the rest of the room. He simply got up from his chair with that poker face he had for everything and crossed the room in silence. The space opened for him as he walked without anyone consciously deciding it, as if the entire hall knew it was better not to interrupt him.
He stopped in front of Eren.
With a calm that admitted no negotiation, he took Eren's hands and pulled them away from his face. It wasn't rough, but it wasn't gentle either — it was simply firm, the kind of firmness that doesn't ask but establishes itself, and Eren let him do it without resistance, as if something in him also knew it was better not to interrupt him.
Eren's cheeks were wet. His lashes, clumped together from tears, made his eyes look bigger, brighter, like gems that somehow still caught the light. It was almost irritating, Erwin thought, how unfair it was that someone could still look that good after crying.
From the look on Levi's face, it was clear he was thinking exactly the same thing.
"The only way you could kill someone is with your screaming, brat," Levi said, his voice low enough to sound almost private in the middle of the crowded hall. "You've got some dangerous decibels for the human ear."
Eren blinked. Once. Twice. As if his brain needed several seconds to process that this was what the captain had chosen to say to him in that moment.
"Captain Levi!" — Then Eren stood up and hugged him.
The silence that followed was of a completely different tension than before. Jean looked like he was about to whinny. Armin's eyes were wide as saucers. Even Hange had stopped biting her quill.
Erwin looked at Levi over Eren's head and saw something that very few people would have recognized in that rigid posture: the briefest instant when humanity's strongest didn't know what to do with his hands.
Then he moved them. With a slowness that was completely deliberate, as if he were making a decision, he placed one hand on Eren's hair and ruffled it gently. That was his way of hugging back — because Levi Ackerman didn't know how to show affection in any other way, or if he did, he had no intention of demonstrating it here.
"Eren," he said, with the same tone he would have used to give an order, "if you get snot on my jacket, I'm kicking your ass."
Eren pulled away abruptly. He covered his nose with both hands and looked at the captain with the genuine terror of someone who knows perfectly well that threat wasn't empty.
"See what I mean?" Levi continued, not moving. "A genocidal maniac wouldn't be afraid of getting snot all over my jacket."
As if by magic, the tension that had been crushing the hall for the past hour dissolved. The laugh came first from Armin, then Jean, then everyone — the kind of laugh that isn't exactly joy but relief.
Mikasa was the first to move toward Eren, and after her came everyone else, wrapping him in a collective, noisy hug that made him disappear among his comrades.
Erwin walked over to Levi along with Hange while the kids were distracted.
"What a way to lighten the mood, Levi," Hange said, elbowing him in the ribs with a smile that promised nothing good. "Would you hug me too if I cried a little?"
"Try it and I'll kill you, four eyes."
"It seems your hugs are only worthy of certain people," Hange said, with an unnecessarily dramatic emphasis on the last two words.
Levi looked at her. And on that face that Erwin had learned to read over years of campaigns, he saw something he hadn't expected: a small, almost imperceptible smile that came and went in less than a second.
"I'm leaving."
Erwin and Hange watched his back as he left the hall. Then they looked at each other.
When Erwin turned his gaze back to the kids, he found Eren staring at the door through which Levi had left, with an expression that was hard to name but easy to recognize.
"Looks like our captain's feelings are reciprocated," Hange murmured, winking at him.
"How interesting," he thought.
He was going to enjoy this a lot.
..............................................
THREE YEARS LATER
Paradis changed.
Not suddenly, not with the thunder of a revolution declared in a public square. It changed the way important things change: slowly, with intention, in the margins where no one was looking.
The trains came first. Lines of steel traced over land that until recently had only known the weight of horse hooves and the shadow of the Titans.
Then came the forts, built in strategic points that Armin had marked on maps during nights that stretched until dawn, with Erwin watching over his shoulder and suggesting adjustments that the young man incorporated without asking where they came from. He learned fast. Too fast not to recognize in him the commander he would one day have to become.
The weapons were Hange's doing.
No one in Paradis had seen Hange Zoë work with a clear goal until then, and it turned out to be something between fascinating and terrifying. With the knowledge Eren had poured out from the previous shifters as raw material, and with Nicolo providing an outside perspective that none of them could replicate, the workshop became the loudest and most dangerous place on the entire island. There were three explosions in the first month. Hange documented every single one with the same enthusiasm.
The underground work was Levi's doing.
Erwin would never have admitted it out loud, but that had been his smartest move: giving Levi not just military command but a purpose that went beyond the blades.
The asylums, the orphanages, the reintegration of people the rest of Paradis preferred not to see — all of it passed through his hands. And Levi, who didn't know how to do anything halfway, built it with the same methodical precision with which he cleaned his blades after every battle.
Historia signed the decrees. Levi made sure they were enforced.
No one argued with either of them.
Annie Leonhart was another matter.
Erwin had watched the girl for weeks after they pulled her out of the crystal, calculating how much time she would need and who was the right person to make the first move. The answer to the second question was obvious before he had even finished formulating it: Armin. Always Armin, with that ability of his to find humanity where others only saw enemies.
The conversations were long. Erwin wasn't present for all of them — he didn't need to be — but he knew the breaking points of a negotiation well enough to know when to intervene and when to pull back. Armin planted the seed. Eren, to more than one person's surprise, was the one who watered it, sitting across from Annie with a raw honesty that Erwin suspected the girl hadn't received from anyone in a long time.
They told her about Ymir's curse. About what they were searching for. About the possibility, still fragile and without defined shape, of finding a way out that didn't require the world to burn.
Annie listened. She didn't answer immediately — because Annie Leonhart didn't do anything immediately if she could help it. But Erwin had learned to read silences, and hers was not the silence of someone rejecting but of someone recalculating.
When she finally decided to fight for Paradis, she didn't announce it with any kind of ceremony. She simply showed up at the training ground one morning and took her place as if she had always been there.
Erwin considered that a sufficiently eloquent victory.
..................................................................
Erwin learned during those three years that the most effective manipulation wasn't the kind that imposed but the kind that left space.
Taking Zackley's place as Commander-in-Chief and highest military authority of Paradis had given him access to levers he had only been able to intuit from the outside before. It wasn't a position he had sought out of ambition — or at least that's what he told himself when he had time to question his own motivations — but because someone had to sit in that chair and know exactly what they knew. Someone who could bear the weight of that information without breaking and use it with surgical precision.
Yelena was intelligent. Too intelligent to be underestimated, but not enough to see the whole board. Erwin let her believe for months that she had the upper hand, that her infiltrators were operating undetected, that the information reaching Marley was what she chose to leak. In reality, every piece of data that left Paradis had first passed through his hands and Armin's — Armin, who had a particular talent for constructing half-truths that held up on their own.
Grisha's journal was his masterpiece in that regard.
A torn page here. A paragraph cut there. Just enough for the other nations to believe they knew, without ever giving them the pieces that actually mattered. It was a delicate balance, the kind of balance that breaks with a single mistake, and Erwin spent the first eighteen months sleeping no more than four consecutive hours, calculating where the edges were.
The other nations watched Paradis grow and interpreted it as desperation. A small people clinging to their island, building trains and forts because they had nowhere else to go.
Erwin let them think that.
It was easier to negotiate with someone who underestimated you.
By the time it came to sit at a table with representatives from other nations, Paradis was no longer the isolated, vulnerable territory the world remembered. It was a power that had learned to move in silence, with a queen who spoke with the authority of someone with nothing to prove, a military apparatus that no outside report had managed to accurately gauge, and a network of alliances built brick by brick over three years of calculated patience.
Erwin took his place at the table as Commander-in-Chief and looked at the delegates across from him.
Everything was going well.
Until it wasn't.
****************************************************
No one in the Alliance had seen them truly fight until then.
The first battles had been clean victories, forceful enough to secure alliances from those who still didn't fully believe in them, but not enough to show everything Paradis had built in three years. Erwin had calculated it that way. It wasn't convenient to show all your cards at once.
What they didn't calculate was Marley.
No one calculated that they would bring the War Hammer Titan's shifter.
When Titans started falling from the sky onto the allied nation, it caught everyone by surprise — even them. The War Hammer, the Jaw, the Armored, the Cart, and the Beast Titan falling at the same time on allied territory was a blow that reminded them, with a brutality that allowed no nostalgia, of the days of the early expeditions. Of the soldiers who didn't come back. Of the names that piled up on graves no one had time to visit.
It cost them soldiers. More than Erwin would have wanted.
But they didn't lose.
Armin was the first to tip the scales.
The Colossal Titan emerged with that devastating heat that turned the air into something solid and unbreathable, and the Marleyan fleets — the very ones that had bombarded the allied nation with ruthless precision — burned before they could regroup. From his position, Erwin saw the explosions chain across the water like a row of dominoes and knew that Armin had calculated the angles with the same meticulousness he did everything.
On the ground, Eren and Annie held back the War Hammer, the Jaw, and the Armored. It wasn't a clean fight — it was a fight of endurance, of staying on their feet long enough for the rest of the pieces to move. Levi's Squad covered them with an efficiency Erwin knew well: Mikasa, Jean, Connie, and Sasha moving in tight formation, cutting tendons, distracting, protecting them with a ferocity that the allied soldiers watched without being able to hide their astonishment.
And Levi.
Levi had taken care of the Beast Titan by himself. As always.
Erwin had seen Levi fight hundreds of times. He had learned to read his movements, to anticipate his tactical decisions, to recognize when he was calculating and when he was simply letting himself be carried away by that combat instinct that no training could replicate. But there were occasions — rare ones — when Levi crossed a line that was hard to name, when anger reached him in a particular way and something in him changed.
This was one of those occasions.
He watched him tear the Beast Titan apart with a methodology that was more savage than tactical, cutting limbs with the precision of someone who knows exactly how much pain they can inflict before the target loses consciousness, subduing him with a Thunder Spear when there was nothing left to cut. He pulled Zeke's body from his Titan's nape completely mutilated, delirious, reduced to something that was hard to identify as human.
Beside him, one of the Alliance leaders had stopped breathing normally.
Erwin couldn't blame him. There were occasions when he thought humanity was in more danger in Levi's hands than in Eren's own when that side of him surfaced. The aftermath of being raised by Kenny Ackerman, he supposed, wasn't just visible scars.
The look of terror on the Marleyan shifters' faces said it all. Even his own people had taken a step back without realizing it.
It was the Cart Titan that appeared at the last moment.
A burst of bullets from a turret mounted on the Titan, fired the instant Levi raised his arm for the final blow. He saw him dodge with that speed that was still difficult for the human eye to process, but one bullet struck a Thunder Spear.
The explosion was sharp and brutal.
Everyone turned at the same time.
"CAPTAIN LEVI!"
Connie's scream cut across the field. Erwin saw it before he fully understood what he was seeing: Levi's body flying through the air, Connie lunging to catch him, the impact against the ground. Connie shook him, called his name, and then Levi vomited blood and lost consciousness.
The silence that followed lasted exactly one second.
Eren saw it.
Erwin knew it before anything happened because he knew that expression — or rather, because he had never seen it this close on Eren's face and didn't need to see it twice to understand what it meant.
Eren screamed. A bone-shaking sound that made everyone cover their ears from the pain. The sky darkened. The lightning came without a preceding storm. The ground trembled beneath their feet with a frequency that wasn't natural, and on the skin of Eren's Titan, the veins began to glow — that same light Erwin had seen only once before, when Eren had fought against Annie for the first time.
"GET BACK!"
The order left his own mouth before his mind had finished formulating it. Everyone obeyed — Levi's Squad, Annie in her Titan form, the allied soldiers who understood nothing but recognized the tone of an order that allowed no negotiation.
What followed was difficult to describe with precision.
Eren stopped fighting with strategy and started destroying. Fists, kicks, bites — a force with no apparent direction that nevertheless found its targets with a blood-chilling efficiency. The Marleyans began to be decimated. The shifters, already exhausted from hours of combat, began to lose ground. And when only the War Hammer Titan was left standing, Erwin saw the intention in every movement of Eren's Titan with a clarity that turned his stomach.
He was going to devour it.
No one moved to stop him.
When the jaws of the Jaw Titan — forced by Eren against the shifter's crystallization — cracked and exploded, Erwin looked away. There were things he would never get used to, no matter how many battles he survived.
Beside him, Connie had laid Levi's body on the ground.
The bastard was still breathing. Erwin exhaled.
Apparently, he had managed to dodge most of the explosion, but his right side had absorbed the impact: shrapnel embedded in his leg, wounds on his hand, and one that ran across his face from forehead to chin with the kind of cruel cleanness that scars which are going to stay have. He was bleeding, but not profusely. His Ackerman lineage, or his stubbornness, or both, had kept him on the right side of the line.
"Hange!"
Hange came running and knelt beside him. Erwin read her expression with years of practice and felt something in his chest loosen. There was no life-or-death urgency in that gaze — only the concentration of someone who knows what they have to do.
Scars. Time in bed. Nothing he couldn't survive.
At that moment, Eren's Titan collapsed.
"RETREAT!" — The cry came from the Marleyan ranks, disorganized and without dignity, the sound of an army that had just lost more than it had calculated it would lose.
Erwin watched them pull back.
It was a victory. An expensive, dirty, exhausting victory — the kind you don't celebrate, but simply survive.
But a victory.
He had been in bed for weeks.
Three weeks was too much. Three weeks was an eternity. Three weeks was long enough for Levi Ackerman to go from being grateful to be alive to seriously considering whether death wouldn't have been the more dignified option.
He couldn't move without something on his right side protesting with an intensity that would have doubled any other man over. He couldn't get up without someone running over to stop him. He couldn't do absolutely anything by himself without a tall presence, with green eyes and an irritatingly infinite patience, materializing at his side before he could even finish trying.
Eren Yeager turned out to be, against all odds and against all logic of the universe, the best nurse Levi had ever had in his life. And that was a problem.
The room smelled clean.
That should have calmed him down. Under normal circumstances, it would have calmed him down. But there was something deeply unsettling about realizing that the person responsible for everything being in order — the bandages folded with precision on the table, the floor without a speck of dust, the tea at the exact temperature Levi preferred without anyone having told him — was the same brat he had kicked the shit out of more times than he could count.
"Tea's ready," Eren said from the doorway, in the same neutral tone he would have used to report the weather.
"I didn't ask for tea."
"I know." — He set it down on the table anyway and sat in the chair beside the bed with that posture of his, back straight, hands on his knees, as if he were standing at attention, but completely naturally. — "Hange says you need to stay hydrated."
"Hange can shove her instructions up her ass."
"I'll tell her you said that."
Levi looked at him. Eren held his gaze without blinking, with that serious expression that lately Levi found increasingly hard to read, and after a second that stretched longer than necessary, Levi took the goddamn tea.
Erwin showed up mid-morning with Hange glued to his heel, which never boded well.
Levi knew it the moment he saw them exchange a glance at the doorframe — that kind of look they had when they were about to enjoy something at his expense.
"How's the patient?" Hange asked, turning to Eren with a completely fake solemnity.
"Difficult," Eren replied, with equal seriousness. "He tried to get up this morning."
"Traitor," Levi said.
"This morning and yesterday," Eren corrected, without looking at him.
"Such dedication from you, Eren," Erwin murmured, and there was something in his tone that Levi couldn't quite identify but that gave him an immediate urge to throw something at his head. "The room is impeccable. The tea is served. It almost looks like a home."
"It's just that Eren is very domestic," Hange added, leaning against the doorframe with a smile that promised nothing good. "Very attentive. Very... devoted to housekeeping."
"Four eyes."
"Tell me, Levi, what time is dinner? Does he cook that too?"
Eren, who had been ignoring the exchange with suspicious concentration, looked up.
"Six o'clock. It's soup." — He paused. — "Are you staying?"
The silence that followed lasted just long enough for Erwin and Hange to glance at each other out of the corner of their eyes with an expression Levi had seen before. The same one they'd had in the basement, the same one from the meeting hall — that look that meant they were filing away information to use later for purposes that were not going to be to his liking.
"How kind," Erwin said finally. "But I think we'll let you rest."
"Yeah, just this once we'll pass, Eren," Hange agreed.
They left before Levi could say anything. Their laughter drifted in from the hallway with unnecessary clarity.
Levi stared at the ceiling.
"If you two ever do that again," he said, in a perfectly flat voice, "I'll kill you both."
"Uh-huh," Eren said, and picked up the clean bandages from the table.
Changing the bandages was the moment Levi had been avoiding admitting he looked forward to, which was a problem in itself and information he planned to take to his grave.
It wasn't about the pain. The pain was manageable — it was the kind of dull ache a trained body learns to ignore. It was about something else. About the proximity. About the way Eren moved when he worked, without the nervousness anyone else would have had, with that calm of his that was disconcerting coming from someone who four weeks earlier had destroyed half a battlefield in a fit of rage.
"Hold still," Eren said, without looking up, when Levi involuntarily tensed his shoulder.
"I am holding still."
"You were about not to."
Levi clenched his jaw and didn't respond.
Eren removed the bandage with deliberate slowness, careful with every inch, and Levi kept his gaze fixed on some neutral point on the wall because watching him work was worse. The wound that ran across his face from forehead to chin was healing well — he knew that from Hange's expression when she checked it — but under Eren's fingers, every centimeter of that scar felt in a way Levi couldn't name.
"It's going well," Eren said, quietly. It wasn't a question.
"I know."
"You're going to have scars."
"I know."
Eren looked up then, and for a moment his eyes were too close and too still, with that expression Levi had learned to identify over the past few days as the one Eren wore when he was thinking something he had decided not to say out loud.
"What?" Levi said.
"Nothing." — Eren looked back down and began placing the clean bandage with the same precision as always. — "It suits you."
The silence that followed was completely different from all the previous ones.
Levi didn't respond. Eren didn't add anything else. And Eren's fingers finished securing the bandage with a delicacy that was completely unnecessary for just a bandage, and that Levi felt long after Eren had removed his hands.
"Your leg," Eren said, without looking at him. "Hange said they need changing."
Levi looked at him.
"I can do it myself."
"Last time you said that, you couldn't." — Eren looked up then, with that expression of his that didn't ask but established. — "I'll do it."
Levi clenched his jaw and didn't respond. Which was, if anyone had asked him, a response in itself.
The problem was that Eren had settled on the floor with the bandages in his hand and was now leaning over his lap with absolute concentration, his brow slightly furrowed and his fingers moving with that infernal delicacy Levi had learned to hate over the past few days, and the distance between them was completely unreasonable for just a bandage.
Levi fixed his gaze on the ceiling.
The ceiling was safe. The ceiling was neutral. The ceiling didn't have green eyes or long eyelashes or an expression of concentration that was, for some reason Levi refused to examine, completely devastating at that distance.
Eren's fingers brushed the inner edge of his thigh as he removed the old bandage, and Levi controlled his breathing with the same discipline he controlled everything else.
"It's healing well," Eren murmured, more to himself than to Levi.
Levi didn't respond.
Eren didn't realize it. That was the worst part.
He didn't realize the way he was leaning, his hair falling slightly forward and his shoulders tense with concentration, nor the position he occupied between Levi's legs. He didn't realize that every time he changed angle to better reach the wound, his hand brushed territory that wasn't strictly necessary to brush.
Or at least that was what Levi was telling himself.
Because the alternative was that he did realize, and that was a line of thought Levi couldn't afford to follow under the current circumstances. Not with the sheet barely covering half of him and his boxers being the only barrier between his lack of control and a completely irreversible situation.
He thought about reports. About meetings. About Erwin's face giving bureaucratic instructions for three straight hours. He thought about Hange. He thought about Zeke and how horrible he was in comparison to Eren.
Eren brushed the deepest scar with the tip of his thumb, checking that it was healing well, and Levi exhaled through his nose harder than necessary.
"Does it hurt?" Eren looked up.
His eyes were too close. His face was too close. And there was something in that expression, that mix of concentration and genuine care that Eren wore, that was considerably worse than any physical pain Levi had ever experienced in his life.
"No," Levi said. His voice came out perfectly flat. He was proud of that.
Eren held his gaze a second longer than necessary and then looked back down at the bandage. And it was at that moment that Levi noticed something he hadn't noticed before.
The color in Eren's ears.
That subtle pink that rose from his neck and settled on the tips of his ears and the edge of his cheekbones with the discretion of someone who hoped no one would see it. Eren's hands kept moving with the same precision as always, but there was something slightly different in his breathing, something more contained.
So he did realize.
That information didn't help at all.
Levi looked back at the ceiling with renewed urgency and thought about Zeke. About three hours of bureaucracy. About reports, about goddamn Nile. About everything that wasn't the temperature of Eren's hands through the clean bandage or the exact angle of his jaw when he was concentrating or the fact that he had been taking care of him for days without anyone asking him to and without asking for anything in return.
"Done," Eren said, his voice low enough to sound almost private.
He didn't move immediately. He kept his eyes on the freshly placed bandage, his hands still on Levi's thigh, and the silence between them had a density that hadn't been there at the beginning of the scene and that neither of them was naming.
Then Eren removed his hands, stood up, and gathered the dirty bandages from the bed with an efficiency that seemed slightly more hurried than usual. The pink in his ears hadn't disappeared.
And that, Levi decided as he watched Eren's back while he arranged the table with movements more careful than necessary, was a problem he wasn't going to be able to keep ignoring for much longer.
****************************************
Eren was not having a good afternoon.
It had started out completely normal. The mess hall, the usual table, his usual friends. Soup that wasn't terrible for once. A conversation that should have been completely harmless about the training rotations for the following week.
And then Jean opened his mouth.
"Hey, Eren, did the Captain tell you what time your training is tomorrow, or is he going to tell you tonight during chess?"
Eren looked at him.
"We play chess on Tuesdays and Thursdays," he said, with the same naturalness he would have used to say anything else. "Tomorrow is Monday."
The silence that followed was of the variety designed to make him feel uncomfortable.
Armin was staring at his soup with suspicious concentration. Connie had the expression of someone holding something in for days. Mikasa, who was beside him, said nothing — which in Mikasa's language meant she had a very formed opinion that she had strategically decided not to share yet.
Jean, on the other hand, was smiling.
"Tuesdays and Thursdays," he repeated. "How specific."
"So?" Eren frowned. "The Captain plays chess. I play chess. It's not complicated."
"The Captain," Connie said, with completely fake solemnity, "doesn't play chess with anyone but you."
"That's because none of you know how to play."
"Jean knows how to play," Armin pointed out, still staring at his soup.
"Armin."
"It's a fact that needs to be stated."
Eren went back to his food with the firm intention of changing the subject, which would have worked at any other table with any other group of people who hadn't spent years learning exactly when he was trying to change the subject.
"He also shares his tea with you," Sasha said, with the same energy she would have used to comment on the weather. "The officers' tea. The good stuff."
"He offered it to me once."
"Eren." — Sasha looked at him with an expression of infinite patience. — "I've tried to steal Captain Levi's tea on three separate occasions. All three times, I almost didn't make it."
"That's because you stole it."
"You receive it in a cup. He makes it and serves it to you."
Connie made a sound that was unmistakably a laugh disguised as a cough.
"The posture," Jean said then, in the tone of someone presenting evidence before a court. "Tell us about the posture, Eren."
Eren put down his spoon.
"It's training."
"Yeah. Training in which Captain Levi — who normally corrects his soldiers' posture by yelling at them — takes the time to correct you by touching you."
"It's so I do it right."
"He yelled it at me from across the field," Connie said. "I can give you the exact details of what he said if you want to compare pedagogical methodologies."
Eren looked at Armin, who was always his last line of defense in situations like this.
Armin looked up from his soup.
"The officers' food is also a valid point," he said, with the gentleness of someone driving a knife in very carefully. "You've shared it with us several times. You told us the Captain sent it to you because you needed more calories from training."
"That's true."
"He also sends us more calories from training," Armin continued. "In the form of the same soup as always." — He paused. — "Yours had chicken."
The entire mess hall erupted.
Eren opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"That doesn't mean anything."
"Eren," Jean said, leaning back in his chair with the satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for this moment for weeks, "listen to me carefully because what I'm about to tell you is important. Captain Levi — the most intimidating man in Paradis, the same one who makes recruits cry with a single look — shares his tea with you, plays chess with you twice a week, corrects your posture with his own hands, and sends you food with chicken." — He paused dramatically. — "You know what that means?"
"No," Eren said, although his voice had lost approximately forty percent of its previous conviction.
"That you're his favorite."
"Or something more than his favorite," Sasha murmured.
"Sasha."
"It's what all of us are thinking!"
Eren looked at the table.
He didn't want to look at the table. Looking at the table meant he had nowhere else to look, that Jean's words were doing something they weren't allowed to do, that they were lining things up in his head with a logic that was irritatingly hard to ignore.
The tea. The Tuesdays and Thursdays. The posture. The food with chicken.
The fact that Levi didn't do any of those things with anyone else. Eren knew this because he lived in the same building and had eyes, and at no point in the last three years had he seen the Captain offer his tea to another person, invite another soldier to play chess, or send officers' food to any other member of the squad.
Only to him.
Shit.
"Besides," Jean said, who clearly wasn't finished and had no intention of finishing, "if you think about it, it makes perfect sense."
"Jean, I'm warning you—"
"Levi is basically the dad of all of us. Serious, intimidating, makes us run until we throw up, but deep down he loves us and protects us." — Jean paused for effect. — "And you, Eren, have been cleaning his room for days while he was injured, making his tea, cooking his meals, keeping everything in order." — Another pause. — "You're the mom, Eren."
Connie doubled over the table laughing.
"Captain Levi's perfect wife!" he managed to get out between laughs. "She meets all the cleanliness standards!"
"She exceeds them!" Sasha added. "The Captain should be proud!"
"I'm going to kill all of you," Eren said, with a dignity that would have been more convincing if his ears weren't completely red.
Armin, beside him, wasn't laughing. He was looking at Eren with that usual expression of his — calm and too perceptive for anyone's good.
"Eren?" he said, his voice low enough that only he could hear.
"Don't say anything, Armin."
"I was just going to ask if you'd considered the possibility that—"
"Don't say anything."
Armin closed his mouth. But his expression said everything he wasn't saying, with that kind and relentless clarity that Eren had learned to fear more than anything else.
That night, alone in his room, Eren stared at the ceiling.
He thought about the tea. About Tuesdays and Thursdays. About the Captain's hand on his shoulders correcting his posture with a patience he had with no other soldier. About the food with chicken. About the days changing bandages without anyone asking him to, and about the way Levi had let him do it — which in the particular language of Levi Ackerman was probably equivalent to letting someone into a place where no one normally entered.
He thought about the color that rose to his own ears every time he was too close.
He thought about the scar that ran across the Captain's face and about what he had said without thinking while bandaging it.
It suits you.
He covered his face with his pillow.
Shit.
*********************************************
He saw it coming from across the mess hall.
Not because he was looking at Eren specifically. Levi was not looking at Eren. He was drinking his tea and mentally reviewing the training rotations for the following week like he did every noon, and if his gaze had fallen on the table where Eren ate with his friends, it was simply because it was in his direct line of sight and not because he had any particular interest in monitoring who the brat was talking to.
The soldier was from the infantry branch. New, or relatively new — new enough not to know certain unwritten limits that anyone with more time in Paradis would have learned to read. He was walking toward Eren's table with an expression Levi identified in about half a second: nervous, determined, carrying something he had been mentally rehearsing for days.
Levi set his cup down on the table.
He stood up.
There was no hurry. There was no reason to hurry. He simply made his way to the serving line with his usual pace, asked for an extra portion of the stew that he knew perfectly well was Eren's favorite because the brat was completely predictable in his food preferences, and headed toward his table.
The soldier was already there.
Perfect.
Jean was the first to see him coming.
He had been in the squad long enough to develop an almost animal instinct for detecting when something was about to become extraordinarily interesting, and the image of Captain Levi crossing the mess hall with a tray in his hand and that absolute poker face of his while an unknown soldier leaned over Eren to speak to him in a low voice activated all his alert systems simultaneously.
He elbowed Connie without looking away.
Connie followed his gaze. His spoon froze halfway between his plate and his mouth.
Sasha, who had a supernatural radar for anything involving food or drama, looked up from her own plate and assessed the situation in under two seconds. Then she went back to eating, but with her posture slightly reoriented toward the center of events, like a sunflower following the sun.
Annie, at the far end of the table, said nothing. But she stopped eating.
"Hey, Yeager, do you have a moment? I'd like to talk to you alone if you don't mind."
Eren looked up from his plate. The soldier in front of him was from the infantry — he vaguely recognized him from the joint training exercises the previous week. He had an expression Eren couldn't quite decipher, nervous and determined at the same time, and was about to say yes, of course, when a tray landed in front of him with the precision and authority of something inevitable.
Stew. The good kind. With toast.
"Eat," said the Captain's voice, completely flat, from somewhere over his right shoulder.
Eren looked at the stew.
Looked at the soldier.
Looked at the stew again.
The stew won.
Levi remained standing by the table.
He didn't sit down. There was no reason to sit down, and standing gave him a direct line of sight over the soldier that was, under the current circumstances, considerably more intimidating.
The soldier had looked at him the moment the tray touched the table. And Levi returned his gaze with the same expression he had used to look at Titans, at enemy generals, and at anything else that had ever stood between him and a target in battle.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to say anything.
Levi Ackerman's silence had its own vocabulary, and what he was communicating in that moment was clear enough for anyone with basic survival instincts.
Jean had stopped eating.
Connie too. They both watched the exchange of looks between the Captain and the soldier with the expressions of men witnessing something outside their weight class — like watching a storm from a window and being grateful to be inside.
Eren, completely oblivious to all of it, made a sound of genuine satisfaction with his first bite of stew and murmured something about it being delicious without looking up from his plate.
No one responded.
The soldier held the Captain's gaze for exactly four seconds — which was about three seconds longer than most people managed. Then he cleared his throat, said something about talking to Yeager another time, and withdrew with a speed that was technically within normal walking parameters but came dangerously close to running.
Annie watched him until he disappeared through the door.
"That was very intense," she said, in the completely neutral tone she would have used to comment on the state of the training ground.
Erwin and Hange arrived minutes later — which was enough time for the mess hall to have returned to its normal temperature but not enough for Jean and Connie to have fully processed what they had just witnessed.
Hange assessed the scene in about two seconds, read Jean's expression, Connie's, Annie's, and then looked at Levi, who was sitting across from his tea with his usual expression.
"What did I miss?"
"The Captain almost made an infantry soldier piss his pants," Jean said, with the solemnity of a witness giving testimony. "With a look. Without saying a word."
Hange turned to Levi with a smile that promised nothing good.
"Levi. Were you marking territory?"
"I was eating."
"You were standing."
"I can eat standing up."
"You went specifically to get Eren's favorite stew," Erwin said, sitting down with the calm of someone who had all the time in the world.
"I was hungry."
"You're never hungry at this hour," Hange said. "You've been eating at one o'clock for three years. It's twelve-oh-eight."
Levi took a sip of his tea.
"What an interesting watch you have, four eyes."
"Levi, you almost made that kid piss himself," Hange repeated, with a delight she made no effort to hide. "That's too much even by your usual intimidation standards. Something motivated you specifically."
Levi didn't respond.
Erwin smiled over his cup.
Eren finished the stew — which was, objectively, in the top three best things he had ever eaten in his life — and looked up to find the Captain with the intention of thanking him because he had manners, even if Jean insisted otherwise.
Levi was across from him, on the other side of the table, with his tea and his usual expression.
Eren mentally processed the sequence of events from the last twenty minutes with the slowness of someone reassembling a puzzle missing pieces. The soldier who had wanted to talk to him alone. The tray appearing out of nowhere. The soldier leaving without saying anything more.
He looked at Jean.
Jean gave him back a look that said absolutely everything without saying anything.
He looked at Connie.
Connie was staring at his plate with suspicious dedication.
Ah.
Eren looked at Levi. Levi drank his tea. His eyes didn't move toward him — which in Levi Ackerman's language could mean anything or could mean precisely what it seemed to mean — and Eren thought about everything his friends had said and felt something move in his chest with an inevitable slowness, like a piece clicking into the place it had always had reserved.
He didn't say any of that.
Instead, he reached across the table and touched the back of the Captain's hand — briefly, with the same naturalness he would have used to do anything else.
"Thank you for the food, Captain. It was delicious."
The mess hall didn't stop. The soldiers kept eating, the conversations continued their course, the trays kept moving back and forth with the usual midday noise.
But at that specific table, time did something strange.
Everyone saw Levi's hand. Everyone saw the exact moment when Levi, instead of pulling away or ignoring the contact with the indifference he would have applied to any other similar situation, turned his wrist slightly and brushed his thumb over Eren's knuckles before separating.
It was less than a second. It was completely imperceptible to anyone who wasn't looking exactly there at exactly that moment.
Jean opened his mouth. Closed it.
Connie blinked.
Sasha stopped eating — which was clinically significant.
Annie looked at the table with the expression of someone filing away information without comment.
Armin, who had arrived in silence two minutes earlier and had assessed the entire situation without anyone noticing him, was looking at Eren with a small, calm smile that didn't need to say anything because he had already said everything weeks ago in the mess hall.
Erwin drank his coffee.
Hange buried her face in her hands with a muffled sound that was half scream, half gasp.
And Eren, who was staring at his empty tray with his ears completely red, decided that the time had come to retreat with what remained of his dignity.
"Good afternoon, everyone," he said, and stood up with a speed that was technically still normal walking.
Levi drank his tea.
On his face, there was absolutely nothing.
Except — if one knew exactly where to look — something that looked dangerously like satisfaction.
*************************************************
No one expected the negotiations to go well.
Erwin did. But he didn't say it out loud because he had learned long ago that declared confidence before the fact was simply arrogance with better presentation, and arrogance was a luxury Paradis couldn't afford at a table where every word carried the weight of years of accumulated war.
Historia had been the key piece. Erwin had calculated it that way from the beginning, but watching it work in real time was still something he appreciated with the quiet satisfaction of a plan executed with precision. A queen who had been a soldier, who had fought on the same fields as her men and who spoke of war without the distance of someone who had only seen it on maps — she was a figure the Alliance representatives hadn't expected to find. And what you don't expect in a negotiation often tips the scales before anyone notices.
The ceasefire with Marley came after the battle, as Erwin had anticipated. The loss of the War Hammer Titan was too great a blow to ignore, and Marley — which calculated in terms of power and resources with the same coldness with which Erwin calculated strategies — had done the math.
It wasn't advantageous to continue. Not yet.
Erwin had done the math too. And he knew exactly how much time they had before Marley recalculated.
But for now, there was peace. And with peace had come things Erwin hadn't fully calculated — which was unusual enough to hold his attention.
Among the wounded Marleyans that Paradis took in during the confrontation were Colt, Gabi, and Falco.
The decision to leave them with Sasha had been, in retrospect, either the most intelligent diplomatic move of the entire operation or a catastrophe of moderate proportions depending on the day of the week. Sasha Braus had an almost supernatural ability to make any person, regardless of their origin, ideology, or initial level of hostility, end up sitting at her table eating something she had prepared and feeling inexplicably good about it.
Nicolo, who had been cooking for Sasha long enough to have developed a resistance to the unpredictable, simply increased the portions without asking questions.
Gabi was the most complex case.
The girl had a relationship with Eren that oscillated between declared hostility and something that didn't have a name yet but that everyone in the building could see being built brick by brick every time they shared space. Every time she saw him, she would lunge at him with an energy that was half confrontation and half something closer to the need to be heard, and Eren — with that patience of his that still surprised those who didn't know him well — let her talk.
What Gabi hadn't calculated was the Captain.
The first time she tried her usual approach toward Eren with Captain Levi present, a single grey, completely flat look was enough to stop her dead in her tracks halfway there. Gabi blinked. Looked at the Captain. Looked at Eren. Looked at the Captain again.
She sat down.
Falco, beside her, exhaled discreetly.
******************************************************
The orphanages had been Levi's idea, which remained one of those things Erwin processed with the same sensation of reading a map he hadn't expected to find.
Not because it was incongruent. Erwin knew Levi well enough to know that there were layers to that man that most people never had the chance to see, and that the underground had left marks that weren't only the ones you could count. But because watching it in action — watching him move among the orphanage children with that simplicity of gesture of his that somehow the children read as safety rather than distance — was still something Erwin never tired of observing.
The Marleyans had accompanied them on the third week. Colt with the expression of someone recalibrating everything he thought he knew. Gabi silent — which was notable enough. Falco watching everything with that attention of his, like someone building something internally.
Eren had gone too, because Eren went wherever there was something he could do, and the image of him sitting on the floor with three children climbing all over him while he tried to explain something that had clearly gotten away from him was domestic enough to be almost comical.
It was a girl no older than six who said it first.
"Is that man your dad?" she asked Eren, pointing at Levi, who was standing two meters away with a four-year-old hanging off his arm with admirable determination.
Eren opened his mouth.
"No," said the boy who was perched on Levi's shoulder, with the authority of someone who had solved a complex question. "That one's the mom."
He pointed at Eren.
The silence that followed lasted just long enough for Eren to process what he had just heard and for the color to start rising from his neck with a speed that didn't do him any favors.
"I'm not—"
"He has a mom face," confirmed the six-year-old girl, with total seriousness.
"She's right," Levi said, without inflection, without looking at Eren, ruffling the boy on his arm with a gesture that was technically the closest Levi Ackerman ever came to tenderness in public.
Eren turned to look at him with an expression that was half indignation and half something he didn't know how to name.
Erwin had to look away.
That night in the mess hall, Jean took approximately forty-five seconds to find out what had happened at the orphanage.
Forty-five seconds later, Connie already knew. Thirty seconds after that, Sasha. Twenty seconds later, the joke had acquired a propagation speed that would have been admirable under other circumstances.
"Mom face," Jean repeated, with the solemnity of someone engraving this in his memory for the next twenty years. "A four-year-old saw him and knew."
"Kids have instincts," Sasha agreed.
"I don't have a mom face," Eren said.
"You're the most organized person in the squad," Connie said. "You always know where everything is. You're always the best at cleaning and you know how to make tea."
"That doesn't—"
"You make tea specifically for the Captain."
"That's different!"
"Why?" Armin asked, with genuine curiosity.
Eren opened his mouth. Closed it.
Mikasa, who had been silent for several minutes at the far end of the table, looked up from her plate.
"The Captain also agreed," she said, neutrally. "Technically, he confirmed it."
The entire mess hall turned toward Eren.
Eren stared at his soup.
The soup had no answers.
*************************************
The first day of joint training, no one knew exactly what to expect.
The foreign soldiers arrived at the field with that particular mix of tension and curiosity that people have when they've heard stories big enough not to know whether to fully believe them. They had seen Paradis's soldiers in battle, yes, but one thing was seeing them in the chaos of a war field, and something else entirely was standing in front of them in a controlled space — no Titans falling from the sky, no noise covering everything, with enough silence to process what they had in front of them.
Levi arrived at the field exactly at the time he had said he would arrive.
That detail alone reorganized the posture of several soldiers.
Those who had seen him in battle recognized him immediately and moved instinctively backward, which created a chain reaction among those who hadn't seen him and who now had enough contextual information to know that stepping back was probably the correct response. The women were the notable exception. Several pairs of eyes followed the Captain from the moment he crossed the field's gate with an attention that was completely different from fear, exchanging whispers that Levi ignored with indifference.
The new scars helped, in the most twisted sense of the term. The line that ran across his face, far from softening his presence, sharpened it. It was the kind of scar that told a story without needing words, and the story it told was clear enough for anyone with basic survival instincts.
This man had survived things that would have killed anyone else.
And he was still here.
Levi didn't like wasting time.
He had spent enough years of his life explaining things he could demonstrate more efficiently in thirty seconds of practice than in thirty minutes of theory, and the foreign soldiers, for all their diplomatic goodwill, were still soldiers who needed to see to believe.
So when he finished the basic introduction — which he kept to the bare minimum because he had no patience for ceremonies — he looked at Annie.
Annie looked back at him.
There was something in the dynamic between them that wasn't exactly rancor but wasn't complete neutrality either, and they both knew it, and neither of them had any particular interest in discussing it out loud. Annie had killed his squad. Levi had processed that and coexisted with her, but that didn't mean he had forgotten it — it meant he had found the right drawer to put it in so it wouldn't interfere with daily functioning.
Today, that drawer was slightly open.
"Ready?" he said.
Annie adopted her combat stance without responding, which was response enough.
Erwin timed it from the side of the field with his usual expression, though internally he was recording every reaction from the foreign soldiers with the attention of someone who knows that what is happening in front of them is going to have considerable diplomatic consequences.
The first thirty seconds were enough for the field to fall into absolute silence.
Levi moved with that speed that was still difficult for the human eye to process, changing direction with a grace of movement that made every gesture exactly what was necessary and nothing more. Annie was formidable — no one on the field doubted that — and during the first two minutes, the exchange was balanced enough that several foreign soldiers began to relax their jaws.
Then Levi changed speed.
Not gradually. Suddenly. As if the first two minutes had simply been the evaluation phase and now he had decided he had enough information.
Annie fell in forty seconds.
What followed after was, technically speaking, more than what was strictly necessary for a training demonstration. Levi immobilized her with a precision that had too much muscle memory — cutting, blocking, turning until he subdued her with an efficiency that was almost surgical and that left very little room to interpret as anything other than absolutely deliberate.
Annie, once immobilized, looked at the sky with the expression of someone who had expected something like this and who still hadn't been able to avoid it anyway.
"You're still holding a grudge against me," she said.
Levi didn't respond.
The field took several seconds to start breathing normally again.
Erwin observed the faces. The soldiers who had arrived with reasonable doubts about whether the stories were exaggerated now had a uniform expression that was the combination of awe and fear that Erwin had been hoping to produce. Those who no longer had doubts had simply made sure to be one step farther back than before.
Even he had to admit — even if only internally — that Levi's new scars combined with that demonstration produced an image that generated something akin to apprehension even in someone who had known him for years.
After that, every time Levi spoke, every time he stopped in front of a soldier to correct a posture or explain how to disable a Titan with the minimum number of movements, there wasn't a single pair of eyes on the field that wasn't completely attentive. Not out of diplomatic respect. For something considerably more immediate.
The training, in practical terms, was the most productive Erwin had witnessed in years.
*************************
The problems started, as most problems in Paradis had started lately, with Eren's popularity.
The foreign soldiers had arrived with stories about the Attack Titan, about the Colossal Titan, about the battle where the sky had darkened and the ground had trembled. But the stories hadn't prepared anyone for the fact that the Attack Titan turned out to be a young man with green eyes and a serious expression that softened when he wasn't paying attention, and that the Colossal Titan turned out to be someone who frowned over maps with the concentration of a studious student.
Armin was the first to notice the looks. Eren took considerably longer — which was completely consistent with his track record.
The whispers in the hallways started the first week. Hange collected them with the enthusiasm of a field researcher and shared them at breakfast with a level of detail no one had asked for but that no one interrupted because it was objectively fascinating.
"They say the Colossal looks like a girl," Hange reported, her cup in hand. "But a very pretty girl. There's a consensus on that."
"Fantastic," Armin said, staring at his breakfast.
"About the Attack Titan, they say more elaborate things. Do you want me to read them?"
"No," Eren said.
"Yes," said Jean, Connie, and Sasha simultaneously.
Erwin saw the exact moment when Levi made the decision.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no announcement, no meeting, none of the formal mechanisms that Levi systematically ignored when he considered them unnecessary. Simply, on a Tuesday afternoon — after Levi had cut off, for the third time that same week, a conversation between a foreign soldier and Eren with nothing but his presence and a look — he stopped in the main hallway where there were enough people for it to function as a public statement and said, in a perfectly flat voice:
"Yeager is not allowed to have physical contact with anyone without my express authorization. It's a security measure."
The hallway processed this in silence.
"Of course, Captain," someone said.
Levi kept walking.
The news reached the mess hall in approximately eight minutes.
Jean was the first to speak — which was completely predictable.
"Security measure?" he repeated, with a tone that suggested he was enjoying this in a way that wasn't discreet at all. "Really? That's what he said?"
"Verbatim," Connie confirmed.
"Security. Measure."
"Jean," Eren said.
"No, wait. I want to understand the tactical threat. What exactly is the security risk of someone shaking Eren's hand?"
"There could be infiltrators with royal blood," Eren said, with a conviction that would have been more convincing if his ears weren't slightly red.
"Uh-huh," Jean said.
"It's a legitimate possibility."
"Completely," Connie agreed. "That's why the Captain specified that only he could authorize it."
Eren stared at his plate.
Armin, beside him, was studying the ceiling with an attention that wasn't completely genuine.
Sasha ate with the serenity of someone who had already accepted every aspect of this situation weeks ago.
It was Hange who appeared in the mess hall doorway with Erwin right at that moment, with an expression that suggested she was already aware and had been enjoying it for a while.
"Do you know what I find fascinating?" Hange said, sitting down without anyone having invited her. "That Levi — who has gone twenty years without explaining his decisions to absolutely anyone — felt the need to add a justification."
"Security measure," Jean repeated, with reverence.
"It's almost poetic."
"It's not poetic," Levi said from the doorway.
The entire mess hall turned. Levi was in the threshold with his cup of tea and his usual expression, and it was completely impossible to determine how long he had been standing there.
No one said anything for a moment.
"It's a security measure," Levi repeated, and headed to his usual table with his usual pace.
Hange buried her face in her hands with a muffled sound.
Erwin drank his coffee.
Eren looked at the Captain — who was sitting at the far end of the mess hall drinking his tea with the indifference of someone who hadn't just declared ownership over another person in front of half the building — and felt something in his chest move.
Security measure.
Yeah. Sure it was.
Eren stared at his soup and decided he was going to need to talk to Armin tonight.
***************************+
Erwin never thought he would understand Levi in this particular way.
He had seen him mark territory. He had seen him cut off conversations with a look. He had seen him appear with trays of stew on days that weren't Tuesday, and on each occasion Erwin had filed it all away with the quiet satisfaction of someone watching a process unfold exactly as it should.
What he hadn't calculated was that the process was apparently contagious.
He started noticing it the second week of joint training. A foreign soldier — young, with the expression of someone who had decided that Armin Arlert was exactly the kind of person he wanted to have an extended conversation with — had approached him after a strategy session with a map in his hand and a question that was clearly an excuse for something more.
Erwin crossed the field in a straight line.
There was no hurry. There was no reason to intervene in a completely innocent conversation between two adult soldiers about approach routes through Titan-infested territories. He simply positioned himself next to Armin with the naturalness of someone who had something important to discuss, placed a hand on his protégé's shoulder with the authority of a commander reviewing the work of his best strategist, and held the foreign soldier's gaze with the same expression he had used to negotiate peace treaties and convince men to march to their deaths.
The soldier suddenly remembered that he had something urgent to attend to at the other end of the field.
Armin had looked at him with an expression that was half confusion and half something that looked suspiciously like contained amusement.
"Commander?"
"Tell me about the northern sector routes," Erwin had said, completely flat.
Armin opened the map without saying anything more.
That was what Erwin appreciated about him. He knew when not to ask questions.
Hange saw it all from the other side of the field.
Then she looked for Levi with her eyes, found his expression, and the two of them held a look for exactly two seconds that contained a rather extensive volume of information.
That night, Hange appeared in Erwin's office with two cups of tea and a smile that promised nothing good.
"So," she said, sitting down without anyone having invited her — as always — "security measure for you too?"
Erwin took his cup.
"Armin is my right hand and future commander," he said, with the same calmness he would have used to present a report. "His well-being is a tactical priority."
Hange looked at him.
"That's the most Levi thing I've heard you say in twenty years of friendship."
Erwin didn't respond.
He drank his tea.
Hange laughed for approximately three minutes straight.
***************************************
It started the way important conversations between Eren and Armin always started: unplanned.
It was late. The building was in that particular silence of the hours when most people had already decided the day was over, and the two of them were sitting on the roof with a blanket between them and the Paradis sky completely clear above.
It was Armin who said it first — which was unusual because Armin generally waited for Eren to open the door before crossing it.
"I like Erwin," he said, his voice low enough that it sounded almost like he was thinking out loud rather than telling someone.
Eren looked at him.
Armin was still looking at the sky with that expression of his of someone who had just solved a complex math problem and wasn't entirely sure they liked the answer.
"I have for a while," he added.
Eren processed this. Then he processed the irony of the situation with the slowness of someone arriving at a conclusion he should have reached weeks ago.
"Armin."
"What?"
"I like Captain Levi."
The silence that followed was quite enlightening.
Then Armin turned to look at him.
"I already knew that. But... since when?"
"Three years." — Eren frowned. — "Since when are you?"
"Not long ago."
They both looked at the sky.
"This is a problem," Eren said.
"Yeah," Armin agreed.
What followed was, in practical terms, the most honest conversation Armin had had in months — which included all the strategic meetings, all the diplomatic negotiations, and all the reports he had written with a precision that left no room for ambiguity.
Ambiguity, it turned out, was considerably harder to handle when it was personal.
"He corrects my posture," Eren said, in the tone of someone building an argument. "He shares his tea with me. He plays chess with me. He sent me food with chicken."
"Erwin puts his hand on my shoulder when he talks to me," Armin said. "He looks for me when meetings end. Yesterday he brought me coffee without me asking."
"Coffee?"
"Yeah."
Eren looked at him and smiled a little.
Mikasa found them there twenty minutes later — because Mikasa always found Eren eventually no matter where he was — and sat down beside them with the naturalness of someone who had been doing exactly that her whole life.
She looked at both of them. Assessed the situation in approximately ten seconds.
"Levi and Erwin," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"Is it that obvious?" Eren said.
"Yes," Mikasa said.
"How long have you known?" Armin said.
"For a while," Mikasa said, brushing it off. "The way you both look at them isn't the way you look at anyone else. And the way they look at you isn't either."
Eren opened his mouth.
"Then why doesn't anyone say anything?" he said, with a frustration that had clearly been building up longer than he had admitted until now.
Mikasa considered this with the seriousness she gave to everything.
"Because they're Captain Levi and Commander Erwin," she said finally. "And you're you. And I think that weighs on them more than they show."
Eren was processing Mikasa's response when he heard footsteps on the stairs and the unmistakable noise of people who hadn't been invited but were coming anyway.
Jean appeared first, followed by Connie, Sasha, and Annie, with the collective expression of people who had detected that something was happening and had made a democratic decision to get involved.
"Secret meeting without us?" Jean said, sitting down as if the roof belonged to him.
"It's not a meeting," Eren said.
"You're sitting in a circle looking at the sky with existential crisis faces," Connie said. "That's a meeting."
Sasha was already sitting down and pulling out food from somewhere Eren decided not to investigate.
Annie sat at the far end with resignation.
Eren and Armin exchanged a look.
Then, because it was late and they were tired and because this specific group of people was impossible to contain once they had settled somewhere, they told them everything.
The silence that followed when they finished was of the reflective variety — which was unusual for this particular table.
It was Annie who spoke first, which surprised several people.
"The age difference," she said, with her usual neutrality. "That's probably it."
"Twenty years?" Connie said.
"Approximately." — Annie was looking at the horizon. — "To you, it's just a number. To them, it's twenty years of war, of losses, of building walls around things they couldn't afford to feel. That's not easy to dismantle, even if you want to."
"Annie's right," Armin said, slowly. "To Levi and Erwin, we're their soldiers before anything else. That's not rewritten easily."
"Even if the feelings are there," Mikasa added.
Eren looked at the sky.
He thought about Levi correcting his posture with his own hands. About the tea at the exact temperature. About the back of his hand brushed by Levi's thumb in the mess hall.
About twenty years of war that he hadn't lived and that Levi carried in his body in ways Eren was only beginning to understand.
"So what do we do?" he said.
"Wait," Armin said.
"Or not," Jean said.
Everyone looked at him.
Jean had that expression of his he got when he was about to say something that would make at least three people want to throw him off the roof.
"Look, I get it," he said, with completely fake solemnity. "The situation is complicated. There's history, there's hierarchy, there's a twenty-year gap that carries weight. It's a delicate topic that deserves respect and consideration."
Pause.
"But there's also a pretty direct solution that neither of you is considering."
"Jean," Eren said.
"Eren. Armin. Listen to me carefully." — Jean leaned forward with the energy of a man who had been waiting for this moment. — "Levi is almost forty and has spent twenty years fighting Titans. Erwin too. They've both survived things that would have killed anyone else. They're perfectly capable of making decisions on a battlefield in fractions of a second."
"Where are you going with this?" Armin said.
"To the fact that if you're waiting for those two to make the first move, you're going to be waiting until the Titans come back." — Jean paused dramatically. — "Sometimes humanity's strongest needs someone to do the easy work for them. If you know what I mean."
Connie choked on something.
Sasha stopped eating.
"Jean," Eren said, in a warning tone.
"I'm just saying there are ways to communicate interest that don't require a formal declaration. A touch here, a sustained look there, staying a little closer than strictly necessary during posture training—"
"JEAN."
"It's combat tactics applied to social situations!" — Jean raised his hands. — "You two learn military strategy, don't you? Well, this is strategy. With better results than a battle and considerably less blood. In theory."
Annie looked at the horizon with the expression of someone actively choosing not to comment on anything.
Mikasa covered her face with one hand.
Armin looked at Jean for a long moment.
Then he looked at Eren.
Eren was looking back at him with red ears and an expression that was half indignation and half the look of someone processing that Jean, despite everything, wasn't completely wrong.
It was Connie who opened the door without meaning to.
"Hey," he said, with the expression of someone who had just connected two ideas that had been separate for a while. "Isn't it a little weird that they're both your direct superiors?"
"Connie," Eren said.
"No, seriously. Levi is your captain. Erwin is the Commander-in-Chief. There's kind of a dynamic there that's—"
"Connie," Eren repeated, with more emphasis.
"Interesting," Connie finished, completely oblivious to the tone.
Jean processed this for approximately two seconds.
Eren saw it on his face before he opened his mouth and couldn't do anything about it.
"Wait," Jean said, with the specific energy of someone who had just received ammunition they hadn't expected to have. "So basically what you're telling me is that Eren likes being given orders."
"THAT'S NOT WHAT—"
"And Armin likes reporting to the Commander."
"Jean, I swear to you—"
"It all makes sense now." — Jean placed a hand on his chest with completely theatrical solemnity. — "The posture training. The tea served on time. Eren cleaning the Captain's room without anyone asking him to. It wasn't devotion, it was—"
"ONE MORE WORD," Eren said.
"Discipline," Jean finished, completely unperturbed. "I was going to say discipline, Eren. I don't know what you were thinking."
Connie doubled over laughing.
Sasha pointed at Jean with an expression of genuine admiration while continuing to eat.
Armin had his face completely covered with both hands.
"I didn't ask for this either," he murmured from behind his hands.
"Armin," Jean said, turning toward him with the energy of someone who wasn't finished. "You've been the Commander-in-Chief's favorite protégé for months. Private meetings, talking strategy late at night, sharing coffee in his office—"
"Jean," Armin said, with a calmness that was clearly his last resort before something irreversible.
"I'm just saying there are people who pay for that kind of personalized attention—"
What followed was the sound of Jean dodging a hit from Eren with years of practice, Connie rolling to the side out of instinct, and Sasha lifting her food with the reflex of someone who had learned to protect her resources in chaotic situations.
Annie shifted three centimeters to the right without changing her expression.
Mikasa didn't move because she knew perfectly well that Eren wasn't going to reach her.
"It's a joke!" Jean shouted from the other side of the roof. "It was a joke! The power dynamic is completely valid from a psychological standpoint!"
"I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!"
"That also sounds like something the Captain would say!"
The roof erupted.
Eren chased Jean around the available space with a determination that would have been admirable in a different context. Connie was shouting things that didn't help. Sasha kept eating. And Armin remained sitting with his face in his hands, processing that Jean Kirstein was, objectively, the worst friend anyone could have.
"To be fair," Annie said, her voice low enough that only Mikasa could hear her, "he wasn't completely wrong."
Mikasa looked at her.
Annie was still looking at the horizon.
"About the dynamic," she clarified.
Mikasa considered this for a moment.
"No," she said finally.
Annie didn't respond.
But the corner of her mouth moved approximately two millimeters upward — which in Annie Leonhart's language was the equivalent of a laugh.
**********************************************++
Tuesdays and Thursdays were for chess.
It hadn't been a conscious decision at any particular moment. It had started like anything else involving Eren — gradually — until one day Levi realized it was simply part of the structure of his week, and that the idea of it not being there irritated him.
Eren was better than he should be for someone who had learned relatively recently. He had a way of playing that was half instinct and half stubbornness — not exactly strategy, but it worked by causing Levi inconvenience. By keeping him alert. By the faces Eren made.
He didn't realize he bit his lips or licked them like a nervous tic, and it was killing Levi slowly.
Which meant chess nights required his complete concentration.
Which meant tonight, something was interfering with that concentration in a way Levi had been ignoring for forty minutes.
Eren had sat down across the board with his usual expression, but there was something slightly different tonight — something Levi had catalogued in the first thirty seconds and hadn't fully identified yet. An attention that was slightly more sustained than usual. A proximity that was slightly more deliberate. The way that every time he reached for a piece on the board, he did it with a slowness that wasn't completely necessary for moving a knight from one square to another.
Levi moved his bishop.
Eren watched him move the piece and then looked up at him with an expression Levi couldn't read in the time it normally took him to read Eren's expressions — which was unusual.
"Your turn," Levi said.
Eren considered his next move longer than necessary.
Not because the play was complicated. Levi could see perfectly well that he had three reasonable options, and none of them required the level of deliberation Eren was applying — elbow on the table, cheek resting on his hand, that way he had of slightly furrowing his brow when he thought, which made the angle of his jaw another problem for Levi's concentration.
That was another thought going straight into the drawer.
"You're taking too long," Levi said.
"I'm thinking."
"You've been thinking about three moves for eight minutes."
Eren looked up. And there it was again — that slightly different attention, held two seconds longer than a conversation about chess required.
"Does it bother you that I'm taking my time, Captain?" Eren said, with a tone Levi didn't exactly know where to classify.
"Inefficiency bothers me."
"Uh-huh."
Eren moved his rook.
It was the worst of the three available options — which meant he hadn't been thinking about the board.
Levi filed that information without comment and moved his queen.
It was twenty minutes later, when the game was at a point that required genuine attention from both sides, that Eren stretched toward the far end of the board to examine a piece's position from another angle — and something, the edge of the chair, his own foot, some combination of the two — conspired against him with the characteristic efficiency of the universe when Eren Yeager was involved.
Levi saw the exact moment his balance went.
He didn't have time to move back.
Eren fell forward with the inevitable gravity of something no one had planned, and the result was something completely unreasonable in which Eren ended up half-sitting, half-collapsed, his hands gripping Levi's shoulders and half-sitting in his lap to keep from ending up on the floor — his weight distributed in a way that made the concept of personal space feel abstract.
The board and the side table ended up on the floor.
Levi didn't move.
Not because he couldn't. But because the most logical movement in any direction required coordination that his brain was processing with a slowness that wasn't usual for him — and that had everything to do with the current distance between Eren's face and his own, which was considerably smaller than it had been at any other moment in the last three years.
Eren's eyes were very close. Too close to ignore the specific detail of their color — that shade of green that changed tone depending on the light, and tonight, with the lamp above them, had something Levi was not going to start cataloguing right now under these circumstances.
Eren's cheeks were completely red.
His ears too.
Levi kept his expression completely neutral with the same effort he would have used to maintain a combat position under enemy fire.
What happened next was Jean Kirstein's fault.
Levi didn't know how or why Jean Kirstein bore responsibility for what was about to happen, but he was completely sure that he did — because that was the kind of thing that could only have its origin in something Jean had said at some point that had reached Eren's ears in the worst possible way.
Eren opened his mouth.
He was probably going to say something completely reasonable about balance and the chair and the position of the board, and everything would have returned to normal in a resolved situation.
Instead, he said:
"...sorry, Daddy."
The silence that followed was of a completely new tension.
Eren blinked.
Levi said nothing.
Eren blinked again, with the expression of someone whose brain had just processed in real time what his mouth had said without consulting him — and the red of his cheeks reached a level Levi hadn't seen in any human being until tonight.
"I— THAT— WASN'T—" — Eren peeled himself off the chair with a speed that made him stumble. — "THAT WASN'T WHAT I MEANT TO SAY— GOOD NIGHT, CAPTAIN—"
The door closed.
Levi looked at the door.
Looked at the board and the pieces on the floor.
Looked at his legs, where Eren's hips had been approximately eight seconds ago.
He processed the silence of the room. Processed the temperature. Processed the distance Eren's face had been and the exact tone of his voice when he had said those words.
His groin had responded to that with an immediacy he hadn't anticipated and that was proving considerably difficult to ignore now that Eren wasn't in the room to require his attention.
Levi looked at the ceiling.
He picked up the pieces from the floor with a calmness that was completely external.
He set the board back in order.
He finished his tea — which was cold because it had been sitting there since Eren had made it when he arrived, and neither of them had touched it in forty minutes.
And then he remained sitting in the silence of the room, processing that he had a new problem, and that the word "Daddy" in Eren Yeager's voice was information his brain clearly had no intention of filing in the correct drawer.
He was going to need a cold shower.
And possibly a conversation with himself that he had been putting off for too long.
*************************+
It had been a week.
A week in which Eren Yeager — who had faced fifteen-meter Titans, survived battles that would have killed anyone else, and had the destruction of half a battlefield in a fit of rage to his name — fled every time he saw Captain Levi within a twenty-meter radius.
He wasn't discreet.
He was, in fact, the opposite of discreet, and the entire building had noticed with the same speed with which the building noticed everything involving Eren and the Captain — which was a matter of great collective interest.
The problem was that Levi had also noticed.
The first day, Levi had arrived at the mess hall and Eren had suddenly remembered he had something urgent to attend to at the other end of the building.
The second day, Levi had appeared in the hallway and Eren had taken an alternative route that put him fifteen minutes farther from his destination.
The third day, Eren had seen the Captain cross the courtyard from a second-floor window and had turned around before anyone could ask where he was going.
By the fourth day, Levi had processed enough information.
And by the fifth day, the training had reached a level that no soldier in the building was going to forget for the next several years.
Jean Kirstein had spent three days seriously considering whether opening his mouth had been a good idea.
The answer, objectively, was no. But the alternative answer — which was not having said anything and missing the spectacle of Eren fleeing from Levi through the hallways like he owed him money — wasn't completely satisfying either, so he still hadn't resolved the moral dilemma.
What was resolved was that this morning's training had sent four soldiers to the infirmary, and that Jean's legs had a very formed opinion about the weighted squats the Captain had deemed appropriate for a Tuesday.
"This is your fault," he told Eren in a low voice, trying to stretch without any muscle protesting.
"My fault?" — Eren looked at him with an indignation that would have been more convincing if he also weren't clearly exhausted. — "You were the one who made the joke!"
"You were the one who said it out loud."
"It was an accident!"
"Daddy," Jean repeated, in the tone of someone who was going to keep using that word until the end of time.
Eren threw a towel in his face.
The plan came together that night in Armin's room — which was the place where most plans involving moving pieces on a board that wasn't chess came together.
"We can't go on like this," Connie said, having spent the day walking with the stiffness of someone whose thighs had had enough. "The Captain is going to kill all of us before Eren decides to stop running."
"Technically, the problem is solvable," Armin said.
"How?"
"Locking them in."
The silence that followed was evaluative.
"Where?" Sasha said.
"The small meeting room on the third floor has a lock on the outside," Armin said, with the calmness of someone who had thought about this more than once. "And the windows don't open from the inside."
"Armin," Eren said from the corner where he had been trying to become invisible. "No."
"Eren."
"I said no."
"Eren," Jean said, "this morning the Captain made us run in full gear for two hours because you decided to take the service stairs to avoid him. Sasha almost passed out."
"Almost!" Sasha confirmed, with no apparent resentment.
"Tomorrow at ten," Armin said.
Eren looked at all of them.
They all looked back at him with the unanimity of people who had made a democratic decision and had no intention of changing their minds.
"I hate all of you," Eren said.
At ten o'clock the next morning, someone knocked on Levi's office door and told him there was a problem with the inventory in the third-floor meeting room that required his attention.
Levi knew perfectly well there was no problem with the third-floor inventory.
He went anyway.
The room was silent when he entered — which was the first indicator. The second was Eren being pushed into the room and looking at him with the posture of someone who had been placed there against his will and was actively evaluating his escape options.
The door closed behind Eren.
The lock clicked from the other side.
Levi looked at the door. Looked at Eren. Looked at the door again.
"Kirstein," he said, in a perfectly flat voice.
"It was a democratic decision!" came Jean's voice from the hallway, with the prudent distance of someone who had calculated exactly how much wood thickness needed to be between him and the consequences of his actions.
Eren wasn't looking at him.
He was looking at the window with the concentration of someone calculating whether two stories up was a reasonable option, and Levi knew him well enough to know the answer Eren was arriving at was probably yes.
"Yeager."
Eren tensed. Didn't turn around.
"Eren."
That did work. Eren turned his head slightly — not all the way — his ears red and that posture of someone who had decided that shame was a permanent state he simply had to learn to live with.
Levi crossed the room and stopped at a distance close enough that ignoring him would require considerable effort.
"You've been running from me for a week," he said.
"I wasn't running."
"You took the service stairs."
"I was in a hurry."
"Eren."
Eren closed his eyes briefly, with the expression of someone accepting his fate.
The problem was that when Levi said his name like that — no last name, no rank, none of the usual markers of distance — something in Eren simply stopped working normally, and there was no training in the world that could have prepared him for that.
"I was embarrassed," he said, because apparently his mouth had decided it had been cowardly long enough. "About the other night. I was really embarrassed, and I didn't know how to look you in the face after that."
Levi said nothing.
Which was worse than if he had said something, because Levi's silence needed to be filled, and Eren filled silences in the worst possible way when he was nervous.
"And I know it was ridiculous and it was an accident and clearly Jean had put those ideas in my head with his horrible jokes that have no filter and—" — Eren paused — "even if some of them were kind of right and that's worse because—" — another pause — "the point is I didn't mean to say it but it's not like it was completely a lie because—" — his hands were doing something formless in the air — "you've been the most intimidating person I know for three years and also the most— I don't know— the most everything— and that doesn't make any sense as a sentence but it's that I don't—" — he breathed — "I like you. I've liked you for three years and I don't know what to do with that and Jean's jokes don't help because it turns out I like them a little and that says a lot about me that I'm not ready to process and—"
"Eren."
"What?"
"Stop."
Eren stopped.
Levi looked at him for a moment.
Looked at Eren's hands, which had stopped moving in the air. His completely red ears. His eyes, which were looking at him with that expression of someone who had just emptied everything they had and was now waiting for the verdict with the dignity of someone who knew there was nothing more they could do about it.
Three years.
Levi had spent three years cataloging things in drawers that weren't the right ones, building distance with the same efficiency he built everything else, convincing himself that waiting was the right thing to do because Eren was his subordinate and because there were twenty years between them that weighed in ways Eren still couldn't fully understand.
It had been hard enough.
"It wasn't easy for me to wait, either," he said.
Eren blinked.
Levi took the remaining step.
"Daddy," he said, his voice low and dark, "deserves a prize."
The kiss arrived before Eren's brain had finished registering what was happening.
It wasn't gentle. Levi wasn't gentle, and he wasn't tentative either. It was the kind of kiss someone gives when they know exactly what they're doing — when every movement had been rehearsed in their head for weeks, months, and now was simply being executed. It wasn't a surprise that his captain was impeccable at everything he did. Levi was the kind of strong, confident, devastating man. And his kiss was the same.
One of Levi's hands settled on his jaw.
That scarred, calloused hand — heavy and veined. The hand that made him feel weak just by resting on his skin. That hand that he knew could tear him apart, that had torn apart hundreds of Titans, now touched him gently. Holding back its strength. Just holding him. And Eren had never felt more lost in his senses.
Levi's thumb moved very slowly over his chin, tracing a path that seemed to say "mine," and Eren couldn't help it: he let out a gasp and closed his eyes.
Very slowly, that same hand kept climbing as if mapping a route. It passed over his ear, brushed the edge with an intimacy that made his skin prickle, and then anchored itself a little farther back to grip his hair in a fist. It tightened firmly. With authority.
And Eren — who had survived battles and Titans and the revelation of the end of the world — discovered that he had absolutely no resources available for this.
For the heat he felt in his body. His heart was galloping wildly in his chest, and he swore he could feel his eyes rolling back behind his lids. Every nerve in his body was on fire, and every cell was vibrating.
When Levi's other hand settled on the small of his back — right where the curve of his spine met flesh, that exact spot no one else had ever touched — and pulled him closer, chest to chest, feeling his firm musculature, his smell of tea and sandalwood soap, his warmth, his undeniable strength... Eren moaned.
It was a low sound, almost shameful, that escaped his throat without permission.
Levi wasn't in a hurry. That was the most devastating part. He didn't lunge, didn't devour. He took his time with a deliberation that suggested he had been thinking about this long enough to know exactly how he wanted to do it. Every pressure of his lips was a sentence. He kissed the way he fought: with deadly efficiency and a precision that left you breathless.
When Levi deepened the kiss — when his tongue finally claimed the entry Eren hadn't known he'd left open — Eren stopped having access to any coherent thought. His entire available cognitive capacity was being required elsewhere. He felt a terrible ache between his legs, a pull in his cock that was almost unbearable, a dampness he knew was his pre-cum soaking his underwear in an alarming amount.
He had never gotten wet like that. Never.
Another tug at his hair — harder this time, as if Levi were testing how hard he could pull — made him produce a sound he hadn't planned on producing. Something between a moan and a sob.
The bite on his lower lip — not gentle, nothing gentle, it was a deliberate pinch that knew exactly where it hurt to turn into pleasure — made him produce another.
His knees decided to stop holding him up.
He collapsed toward the floor, but Levi caught him with one of his legs, sliding his thigh between Eren's with a naturalness that bordered on obscene. He pushed him back toward the wall without interrupting the kiss for a second. With that grace in every movement of his — deadly and calculated. Levi was practically holding all of Eren's weight with his knee and his hands. That knee he moved a little — just a little — and brushed against his erection.
Eren almost screamed.
"Captain Levi!"
His voice came out broken, high-pitched, almost a strangled howl against Levi's mouth.
When Levi pulled back from the kiss — with a slowness that bordered on torture, separating millimeter by millimeter as if he wanted Eren to feel the emptiness — Eren's eyes were wet. He wasn't crying, but he was close. Very close. His breathing was a series of short, uncoordinated gasps. His hands were gripping Levi's jacket with a force that made his knuckles white — because they were the only thing he had available to keep himself oriented in space.
God, he must look terrible.
He felt drunk. Drunk with satisfaction, with desire.
Levi looked at him.
Looked at Eren's eyes — bright as gems, wet, beautiful like their holder. His cheeks flushed with a blush that spread to his ears — those ears that were now red as if they were burning. His thick lips, reddened, slightly swollen where he had left his mark. Open from ragged breathing, letting out that heat Levi felt hitting his own mouth. He could see the vapor exhaled in Eren's quick breaths, as if it were winter inside the room.
Eren's body was hot. Not warm — hot. As if he had just emerged from his Titan, as if his skin were radiating that nuclear heat Levi had felt on the battlefield. And he was trembling, too. A tremor that ran through his shoulders, down his arms, spreading to his shaking legs. His whole body vibrated on a frequency only Levi could feel.
He would be lying if he said that wasn't the most erotic image he had ever seen in his life.
He could feel Eren's erection against his knee. Fuck. It was the hottest part of his body — a damp heat that soaked through the fabric of both their pants. And in that moment, a thousand impure thoughts came to his mind. Images. Scenarios. Ways to make Eren make sounds again, and again, and again.
But then he noticed.
The way Eren had trembled. The innocence with which he had received the kiss, as if it were the first time someone had ever really kissed him. The surprise in his eyes when Levi pulled his hair. Eren didn't know. He didn't know what he was asking for. He didn't know what Levi could do to him.
Dirty old man, he thought to himself — a thought loaded with guilt and desire in equal measure.
He forced himself to breathe. To control the rhythm of his own heart, which was beating faster than it had in years. To ignore his own erection — hard and insistent inside his pants — demanding attention with an urgency he refused to grant. He didn't want to scare Eren. Not yet. Not with everything he wanted to do to him.
But he couldn't let him go either.
So he did what he did best: controlled the situation.
"I thought it was Daddy," he said, and his voice came out lower than he intended, rougher. "Not 'Captain Levi.'"
He watched Eren's cheeks flush even more — if that were possible. Watched his eyes open and close in a disoriented blink. Watched his hands grip his jacket tighter.
He leaned in slowly, without rushing, and placed his mouth on Eren's neck with the same deliberation he had done everything else. First he felt the pulse — racing, jumping beneath his lip like a trapped animal. Then the taste of his skin — slightly salty from sweat, hot like a sun-exposed surface. And finally — the right moment. The exact point where the curve of the neck meets the shoulder. Where he knew it would matter.
He bit down.
Hard. With precision. With the clear intention of leaving a mark that would last for days (if Eren didn't activate his regeneration).
Eren's reaction was immediate.
"Daddy!"
The sound got trapped between his throat and Levi's jacket, where Eren had buried his face to muffle the scream. But Levi heard it. He heard it perfectly. And he felt it too: the tremor in Eren's body worsened, became something resembling a convulsion. Eren's hands gripped his jacket as if it were a lifeline. The strength left his legs in a way that left no room for interpretation:
Eren had come.
Levi closed his arms around him. Tighter. Held him when his knees failed completely — when all his weight surrendered and gave in. Held him as if he weighed nothing, as if he were the most fragile and valuable thing he had ever had in his hands.
He felt the dampness on his knee.
And felt a sudden curiosity — almost obscene — to know how much fluid Eren had released. If he had completely soaked his own underwear.
But that was for another moment.
What he did decide in that instant — with Eren trembling against his chest, with his own heart racing, with the word "Daddy" still echoing in his ears — was that Eren's face in that moment was not going into any drawer.
His half-closed, wet eyes — as if he had just woken from a dream he didn't want to leave. His completely flushed, burning cheeks. His slightly parted lips against Levi's shoulder as they tried to remember how breathing worked. The blush traveling down his neck, disappearing under the edge of his shirt. That expression of complete annihilation — as if a single kiss had been enough to dismantle humanity's most dangerous Titan.
That was information he was not going to forget.
Fuck.
He was going to burn that image into his memory. Right now, his brat looked precious. And the most terrifying thing of all was that Levi knew it wasn't just desire talking.
It was something much more dangerous.
************************************************************
They had been like this for days. Kissing in every corner where no one could see them. In the pantry. In the storage room. In the goddamn hallway at three in the morning when everyone was asleep.
But Eren didn't just want kisses anymore.
And tonight, he decided to ask for what he really wanted.
Levi's room is dark, save for the pale moonlight filtering through the poorly drawn curtains. They've been like this for hours. Kissing. And it's always the same — always that restraint that drives Eren insane.
Every kiss is a small earthquake that clouds his vision, that makes him forget his own name, the world, the future. But there's something else, something vibrating beneath the surface of that perfect mouth, and Eren feels it with every fiber of his being.
Levi kisses him as if he's afraid of breaking him.
His hands — those hands Eren has seen tear Titans apart with surgical violence, that have wielded blades and ripped out steaming napes — now trace his back with a gentleness that's almost exasperating. But Eren feels them tremble. Feels Levi's fingers curl, feels his nails threatening to dig into his skin to leave it marked, possessed — and at the last second, they relax.
The same happens with his mouth: sometimes Levi bites his lower lip with an intensity that rips a gasp from him, and Eren perceives the exact moment when his captain wants to bite harder — sink his teeth until he draws blood, taste him from the inside — but holds back.
"Levi…" Eren whispers against his mouth, pulling back just enough to look him in the eyes.
Levi's eyelids are half-closed, his pupils dark like bottomless pits. His chest rises and falls with controlled breathing — too controlled. He's sweating. His white shirt is wrinkled from Eren's fists, and yet he maintains a safe distance, as if there were an invisible line he dares not cross.
"What?" Levi replies, with that deep voice that tickles Eren's stomach and lower down too.
Eren watches him. The tense jaw. The way he bites the inside of his cheek to keep from letting out what he really wants to say. And then he understands. It's not that Levi doesn't want to. It's that Levi is making a superhuman effort not to let go.
"You're holding back," Eren says, and it's not a question.
Levi stops breathing for a second. Too long.
"You don't know what you're talking about, brat."
"I do." — Eren pushes himself up on one elbow, showing his neck covered in red marks Levi doesn't even remember making. Or does he? When did he lose control? — "I can feel it. Every time you kiss me, you want to bite me harder. When you grab my hip, your fingers want to squeeze until they leave a permanent mark. But you stop. Why?"
Levi looks away. It's so strange to see humanity's strongest avoid his eyes.
"Because I know what I am," he answers, and his voice sounds hoarse, broken somewhere, as if he hadn't said those words out loud in years. "I'm not... good, Eren. The only times I've been with someone, I've been the one in control. The one who punishes. The one who... breaks. And you…" — He shakes his head, and there's something like self-loathing in the gesture. — "You don't have a fucking clue what you're asking for."
Eren feels a shiver run down his spine to the base of his tailbone. It's not fear. It's desire. It's hunger.
"Then show me."
Levi glares at him.
"No."
"Show me what you do to someone who begs you," Eren insists, and his voice trembles — not from fear, but from an excitement so overwhelming he feels his skin burn, feels every hair on his body stand on end. "I want you to stop treating me like I'm made of glass. Do you think I can't take it? Do you think I haven't dreamed about this every night since I first saw you?"
"Eren…"
"You say I'm not good at asking for what I want," Eren interrupts him, and now he sits up fully, facing him. The sheets fall, and he doesn't care. His chest rises and falls rapidly, and he can feel his own heart beating in his throat. "Well, I'm asking you now. I want everything. I want you to bite me until I bleed. I want you to grab me so hard my hips remember your fingers for a week. I want you to yell at me, to break me, to make me yours in every way you know how. Because you're the strongest, aren't you? Then give me that strength. Everything you want to give me. Because I can take it. I want to take it."
Levi stares at him. His jaw tenses so hard it looks like it might splinter. His chest now rises and falls fast too. Too fast. And in his eyes, there's a civil war: the man who wants to protect against the beast who wants to possess.
"You're a goddamn idiot," he hisses, but his voice cracks like old glass.
"Yeah," Eren smiles — a trembling, wet smile, full of desire and something deeper than desire. "But I'm your idiot. And I want humanity's strongest to show me everything he can do to a monster like me. Don't you want to destroy me, Captain? Aren't you dying to know what I sound like when I beg you?"
Levi lunges at him.
But not to kiss him. To slam him onto the bed, to pin his wrists above his head on the pillow with one hand, to wedge his hip between Eren's legs with a violence that makes the mattress and bed frame creak. His face is inches from Eren's, and his eyes are no longer human. They are the eyes of someone who has killed, who has destroyed, who has seen hell and decided to live there.
"Why do you have to be so stubborn?" he growls, his voice a contained roar, an earthquake about to explode. "Why can't you just... stay still and let me take care of you like you deserve?"
"Because I don't want you to take care of me," Eren replies, and his eyes shine with tears that don't fall — that burn at the edge of his lashes. "I want you to have me. I want you to use me. I want to feel everything you've kept inside. Everything no one else has seen."
Levi lets out a guttural sound — something between a moan and the growl of a cornered animal — and squeezes Eren's wrists tighter. Just what Eren wanted. The pressure hurts, his bones creak, and it feels so good.
"I'm not good," Levi repeats, but now his forehead touches Eren's, their noses brush, and his breath is pure fire. "I'm not the man you think I am. When I let go... there's no going back. I've seen the way they look at me after. With fear. With disgust."
"I don't fear you," Eren whispers, and he says it with such absolute certainty that it breaks something inside Levi — something he didn't even know was still intact. "I want you. And I want you to give me everything. Every hit you've held back. Every bite you've swallowed. Every scream you've silenced. Give me everything, Levi. Because I can take it. I want to take it. I've always wanted you. Not a soft version. Not a controlled version. You."
Levi squeezes his eyes shut. His whole body trembles. It's the first time in years someone has looked at him like that — not with fear, not with naivety, but with total acceptance of his monstrosity, with devotion, with hunger returned. And it's terrifying. And it's freeing. And it's the most addictive drug he's ever tasted.
"Stubborn fucking brat," he mutters, and when he opens his eyes, the barriers have fallen.
Then he kisses him.
But it's not like before. Before was a man holding back. This is a man letting go.
There are teeth. There's tongue and desperation and a metallic taste of blood when Levi bites his lower lip with a ferocity that breaks the skin. He doesn't let go. He keeps him trapped, sucking the wound, drinking Eren's taste like it's the first sip of water after a century in the desert. Eren moans, and that moan — high-pitched, broken, surrendered — is all Levi needs to lose the last thread of control.
Levi's hands move down, grab his hips with a force that makes Eren gasp against his mouth, that makes him arch his back seeking more. His fingers dig into the skin with an intensity that will undoubtedly leave bruises. Ten round marks that will say Levi was here. And Eren knows tomorrow he'll look at himself in the mirror, trace them, and not activate his regeneration. Never. He wants them to last. He's wanted them for so long he can hardly believe this is happening.
"Like that," Eren gasps, arching his back, offering himself. "That's how I wanted you to touch me."
"Shut up," Levi growls, but it's not an insult. It's a plea. It's a man on the edge of an abyss.
But Eren pushes him.
"Daddy," he whispers, so low it's almost inaudible over the beating of their own hearts. "Punish me."
Levi freezes. His eyes widen, and in them there's something primal — something Eren has never seen. Something that ignites him. Levi's pupils dilate until they almost swallow the blue.
"What did you say?" Levi asks, and his voice is dangerously calm. The calm before the storm. The silence before the earthquake.
"I want you to punish me," Eren replies, holding his gaze without blinking, his green eyes shining like emeralds. "Sir."
That word. Sir. Made of surrender and voluntary submission. Levi feels something break in his chest — something he's been holding together with wires for months. Years. His whole life.
"You're going to regret this," Levi warns, but his head is already lowering to Eren's neck, already biting where his pulse beats with a ferocity that makes Eren squirm with pleasure, that makes his hips lift seeking friction. "I swear to you, Eren. You're going to regret asking me for this."
"No," Eren moans, and his hands tangle in Levi's hair, pulling, guiding, asking for more. "Never."
And Levi falls.
Because, after all, humanity's strongest has always been weak for one thing: a pair of green eyes that look at him as if he were the end of the world, and they want to run toward it.
After making Eren's eyes roll back and soaking his underwear with a kiss — God, the pre-cum soaks the dark fabric, and Levi desires with every fiber of his being to see how much fluid can come out of him, how much he can wring out of him — Levi rips Eren's shirt open with a single tug. Buttons fly across the room like tiny bullets, and the sound of tearing fabric is obscene in the silence of the night.
Because if Eren wants everything from him, he's going to show him. Without holding back. Without being the civilized man he pretends to be.
With the torn pieces of the shirt — that white shirt now in shreds in his hands — he ties Eren's wrists above his head. He knots them to the headboard with knots Eren couldn't undo even if he wanted to. And then he flips him face down, without even blinking, with an ease that flaunts his strength. He knows Eren likes it. Knows that every display of power soaks him more.
"Daddy is going to punish you for being a very bad boy," Levi says, his voice deep, hoarse, barely a whisper loaded with promises.
He yanks Eren's pants down with a roughness that pops the button and tears the zipper. The fabric gives way like paper. And then he can see that back: tan, muscular but not bulky, free of marks and scars — because Eren erases them all. Soft to the touch, but not weak. That back he's seen rise among steaming napes. That back he's seen carry the weight of the world.
Eren doesn't have muscles as thick as his. He's not as solid, not as broad-shouldered. He's thinner, more graceful, with an almost feminine body in its curves — the narrow waist flaring out to perfect hips. And Levi can't help it: he kisses his back. Gently at first, as if apologizing for what he's about to do. But then the bites turn hard, desperate, breaking the skin, making Eren bleed in small red dots that Levi licks up with devotion.
He hears moans. Beautiful, ripped moans, coming from deep inside Eren.
And he touches with veneration too, because it's beautiful. Everything about Eren is beautiful. His shoulder blades moving like wings beneath his skin. The curve of his spine. Those dimples in his lower back that Levi wants to lick for hours. And he feels so lucky, so unworthy, that this boy — so handsome, so vibrant, so strong, so young — noticed him. Him, with his scars all over his body, with his gruff personality, with his shitty past.
Levi makes a silent promise: he's going to give him so much pleasure he'll drive him mad. He's going to carve his name into every inch of Eren's skin. He's going to make sure he never forgets this night.
When he finally pulls the pants all the way down and can see Eren's ass — God, what a perfect ass — Levi stops breathing for a second.
Uniform caramel color, as if he sunbathes naked because there's no different shading. Round, firm, large. With those dimples in his lower back that form a perfect triangle pointing down, toward the place Levi is already imagining.
And Eren, noticing Levi staring so intently, decides to arch his back. Opens his legs. Offers his ass as if he were a bitch in heat, as if there were no pride left in his body — only desire and surrender.
Levi squeezes it hard with both hands, his fingers sinking into the flesh, and then he strikes. Hard. His hand leaves a mark on the right cheek: red, swollen, with the exact shape of his fingers. The ass bounces, a ripple traveling up Eren's back.
Eren screams.
Not a moan. Not a whimper. It's an obscene scream, full of desperation and pleading — a sound that comes from his gut and fills the room. It was a beautiful scream, and Levi would never admit it out loud, but that Eren was so loud made him hotter than anything else.
And then he can see it. How much Eren liked the slap. Because in that position — legs open, ass up — Levi can finally see how wet his cock is. There's a thread of pre-cum dripping from the tip, falling onto the sheets and forming a small shiny puddle.
For the first time in his life, Levi thinks he could live with that kind of filth. If it's Eren's. Only if it's Eren's.
"Since you've been such a bad boy," Levi says, his voice trembling with desire, "I think you'll have to receive fifteen spanks. Understood?"
God. He couldn't wait to see how much semen he could get out of Eren. How many times he could make him come just from pain and authority.
Eren just nods. His face buried in the pillow, his hands still tied to the headboard, his body vibrating with anticipation.
Levi strikes again. Harder.
"Out loud," he orders.
"Yes, Daddy!" Eren screams, and the title echoes in the room like a gunshot.
Levi shivers. He should get his head checked. It's not normal for that title to excite him this much. It's not normal for him to get this hard just from hearing it.
"Count them," Levi says, his voice hoarse, barely controlled. "And if you make a mistake, we start over."
He strikes hard. His hand impacts Eren's ass with a wet, obscene sound that blends with Eren's moan.
"Ooone!" — Eren screams it in a drawn-out moan, almost singing, dragging the vowel until it turns into a sob.
Levi can see his face from the side: flushed cheeks, eyes rolled back, tears of excitement sliding down his temples. Eren's body trembles again, as if convulsing, as if each strike sent electricity through his entire nervous system.
With each strike, Levi increases the force. Measuring. Always measuring Eren's reactions. Watching his body tremble, hearing his screams and pleas: "Harder," "Please more, sir," "I deserve the punishment, Daddy." Every word is a caress to Levi's dark ego.
To say he's amazed by the amount of pre-cum that keeps leaking from Eren's cock is an understatement. With each strike, the fluid spreads more. It looks like little streams running down his legs, down his inner thighs. The sheets are soaked. From where he's kneeling, Levi feels the dampness on his own knees. Fuck. His sheets are ruined.
"FIFTEEN!" — Eren screams the last number with a broken voice.
And then it happens.
With the last strike, Levi can finally see Eren ejaculate.
He thought it wouldn't be much, given the amount of pre-cum he'd seen coming out of him. But when Eren screams — a sound that isn't human — a hot vapor rises from his trembling body. And Levi feels it. That electricity he knows well. Those small lightning bolts that race across Eren's skin before his Titan transformation. The same static. The same promise of destruction. The same raw energy that makes Levi's hairs stand on end.
And then the white fluid appears.
It starts gushing out of Eren in spurts. One. Two. Three. Each contraction of his body expels more semen — thick, hot — falling onto the already soaked sheets and forming a thick puddle beneath his cock.
Eren collapses. Falls onto that filth he himself created — his body sunk into the puddle of his own semen, and he doesn't even seem to care.
He gasps as if he's transformed into his Titan twenty times in a row. His body is bathed in sweat, every pore open, his skin shiny and sticky. He trembles like a goddamn earthquake — making the bed vibrate not only from his muscular trembling but from that electricity still racing through his body. Vapor rises from him in waves, as if he were a goddamn sauna. It burns. The heat Eren radiates is so intense Levi feels his own skin flush.
And to top it off: his ass is red, swollen, marked with the exact imprints of Levi's hand. Bleeding a little from the hardest strikes.
Levi can't help but think he's seeing the most obscene and hottest image of his life. Something he will burn into his memory forever.
"Hey, brat," he says, and his voice comes out softer than he intended. "Are you okay?"
God. He didn't know how he was going to survive this. The intrusive thoughts kept attacking him: how hot Eren would be inside, how that heat would feel around his cock, how many times he could make him come. How many times.
Eren practically burns Levi's hand when Levi touches him gently on the back, on his ass, on his trembling thighs. He gives him soft kisses — almost apologizing for having subjected him to that state, for having driven him to the edge of fainting with just his hands and his voice.
"I've never been better," Eren replies.
And when he turns his head to look at him — with that smile, with those eyes dulled by exhaustion but happy, shining, full of a devotion that breaks Levi's soul — Levi knows he will never be able to look at anyone the same way again. Never. Eren has marked something in him that no other human being will ever reach.
He kisses Eren again. Softly. Touching and venerating every part of his beautiful body. His shoulder blades, his spine, his dimples, the edge of his hip. Every inch of skin is an altar.
And then Eren starts moaning again.
Levi feels his erection — hard again, already hard, how is that possible? — pressing against his own. And he has a slightly worrying thought: how many erections could Eren have before exhausting himself? How many times could he come? How long would it take for his cock to not be able to get hard anymore?
"I want more," Eren whispers. And he already looks like new. Recovered. But he still has that look in his eyes. That happiness of a satisfied animal asking for another serving.
The night fills with moans, with bites, with hoarse whispers asking for "again, sir" and "more, Daddy, harder, Captain, more." The sheets are completely soaked. The mattress is ruined.
And when Eren finally can't take any more — when his body is a map of marks, of bites, of dried blood and semen; when his voice is broken from so much screaming, so much begging, so much saying please — Levi holds him against his chest. His hands are soft now. Almost gentle. They stroke his tangled hair, his sweaty nape.
"Idiot," Levi murmurs against his hair, his voice a broken whisper. "You're going to be the death of me."
"I know," Eren smiles — exhausted, happy, still trembling. "But what a way to go, right?"
And in the dim light, Levi laughs for the first time in a long time. A hoarse, dark, human laugh. And Eren thinks there's no more beautiful sound in the whole world.
********************