Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Come in.”

Levi is at his desk, the inevitable stack of letters in front of him. Formal, antiseptic versions of blood-stained badges salvaged from dismembered corpses. His face tightens when he sees Mikasa standing in the doorway, fist pressed to her heart, her own expression blank.

She closes the door behind her, then stands in front of his desk and takes a deep breath.

“Permission requested for a day’s leave, sir.”

She’s come to be able to read him reasonably well. Under the usual mask of chilly indifference she can perceive nervous suspicion.

“We barely have enough people left to run the Corps now, and moreover I’m reliant on you now in combat. What’s the reason for your request, Lieutenant?” Levi asks sharply.

“It’s for… a medical procedure.”

Afterward, she thinks it’s less the hesitation in her speech than how she at first opened her mouth, closed it again, and reopened it that gave her away.

Levi says nothing at first, just stares at her. Most people would take it for confusion or lack of comprehension. A few months ago she might have, too. It’s a mistake people make of her all the time. Then he very quietly says, “Shit,” and rests his face against his palm.

Mikasa continues to stand silently in front of him, watching him, waiting him out. Finally he raises his head again. His eyes are like ice chips. “So. Were you wrong, or did you lie?”

Anger churns in her gut along with the low, nearly background level of nausea that’s been keeping her company for days. “The former. I told you, I…” Why she’s hesitating now, she has no idea. “… I hardly ever bleed.”

“That’s not what you said. What you said was, ‘I don’t bleed.’ An entirely different statement.”

“But—”

His voice runs right over hers. “You lived in a doctor’s house for a year. You got sex education in training. And you’re not stupid. You should have known better.” The last sentence comes out as corrosively as if he in fact is calling her stupid. He expels his breath harshly and turns his face from her to stare out the tiny window. “I should have known better.”

After a stretch of silence that makes Mikasa want to sink into the floor, she asks, her voice creaking, “Do I have permission—”

“No,” Levi snaps. “Permission denied.”

Her mouth falls open as her stomach hardens into a ball of ice and her knees wobble. “What the— Sir! I can’t go ahead with this!”

“Trust me, I don’t want a drooling idiot brat on my hands any more than you do.” She must look like he’s just slapped her, because guilt flickers in his eyes and his lower lip pulls tight.

“Then let me see the medics,” she demands, pitch dropping in anger because anger is safer than fear. She’s done bothering with the sir for now.

“No.” His own voice is rough, like something inside him is fraying.

“Why not?” She’s being flagrantly insubordinate now and she doesn’t care. She hasn’t been this terrified in more than six years. “I can’t—”

“Mikasa.” There’s a mix of fear and revulsion in Levi’s eyes that makes her take a step back the way anger or scorn in them would not. “They are not going to give you that procedure. They are going to lock you into a room until you give birth, and they are going to take... it away, and they won’t care if it has twelve fingers or three eyes or the intelligence of a sponge, and they will raise it to be a weapon against humanity. Is that what you want?”

What she wants, at the moment, is to vomit. She thinks he’d deserve it if she splashed her dinner all over his floor, honestly.

“So… what do I do?” she croaks.

He sighs and rubs at his eyes again. The first time she saw him up close, in the courtroom, she wouldn’t have believed he was anywhere near as old as thirty-four. Now, when he pulls his hands away from his eyes, she isn’t sure she believes he’s anywhere near as young.

“Get rid of it on your own.”

The hairs on her nape and arms prickle. Several times during her year in Shiganshina, Dr. Jaeger had to tend to a woman who had tried to “get rid of it on her own.” He was unable to save them all.

“I…” She swallows. “I don’t know how. It’s … it can be dangerous. I might not ever have children afterward. If I survive.”

“Yeah, I know,” Levi says, quietly and not without sympathy. She remembers what she’s heard of his life before the Survey Corps, wonders if he saw the same wreckage Dr. Jaeger did. He adds, “You can ask Armin for help. But don’t trust anyone else.”

He doesn’t have to add including Eren. She’s not going to tell Eren. Ever.

Mikasa nods, her mouth twisting. She doesn’t salute as she leaves. Levi doesn’t call her on it.

***

The first time he was anything more to her than that piece of shit who beat Eren bloody was when he helped her get Eren back. The second time was the evening of that same day, after they’d returned to the castle.

She had assumed that between pre-expedition insomnia and all the riding and fighting she’d done during, she’d be able to sleep. Instead she lay on her bunk, staring off into the dark. The handful of other women and girls who’d returned were either doing the same or sobbing into their pillows.

They were the lucky ones, all of them.

Krista and Ymir were huddled tightly together in Ymir’s bunk, and Mikasa wasn’t about to impose on them for conversation. Nor on Sasha, who’d been crying hard all evening and probably hadn’t much of a voice left by now if she were still awake. Mikasa wished she’d gotten to know at least a few of the other survivors in the days between joining the Survey Corps and embarking on the 57th Expedition. She’d never been good at making casual conversation with near-strangers.

She wished she’d gotten to know Eren’s new and now-dead mentor, the pretty soldier with the dark-red hair, at least a little. Even if she couldn’t have thanked her in any way that would not have been awkward.

At length, she rose and pulled on her uniform and boots, leaving off the straps. The exhaustion ran down into the marrow of her bones, but she’d pulled weeds, scythed wheat, flown in 3DMG, and cut down titans at this level of fatigue before. She could manage a stroll to the mess hall to make a cup of tea.

Given that she wasn’t the only survivor who lay awake, she’d expected to see various others in the dining room. Maybe six or ten or fifteen Corpsmen, whispering, nursing a cup of tea or something stronger, one or two crying on another’s shoulder.

What she saw was one small figure seated at a table in the middle of the room. To his left was one stack of papers, to his right another. Between them was an inkwell, a pocket knife, a small pile of quills, and a half-full teacup. The pen in his hand flowed over the sheet of paper before him, its scratch barely audible above the crackle of the low-burning fire.

“Captain,” she said, pressing her fist lightly over her heart.

Levi raised his head from the paperwork. The circles under his eyes were darker, deeper, as if the flesh had been eaten away. His thin lips were pulled into a thinner line than usual. The corners of his eyes sagged. His gaze was, as she had come to learn, characteristically expressionless.

Mikasa held it for a moment. Then she said, “Sorry to disturb you, sir. I can’t sleep.”

“Join the club,” Levi said tersely, returning to his work. It wasn’t a dismissal.

Mikasa turned toward the hearth, with the shelf full of mugs beside it. The Survey Corps had a large matched set of them, as it were: dozens of off-white stoneware cups, each stained heavily and chipped in at least one spot. Most of them, she thought, would not be lifted off the shelf again for a long while. A teapot sat in the embers. In the morning, there’d be a bottle of cream, watered down a bit to last and set in a small basin of cool water on the floor. The sugar bowl would be out, too, but between meals it was stowed away, safe from vermin. Mikasa was used to taking tea without either sugar or cream.

“Help yourself,” Levi said absently from behind her.

“Thank you, sir.”

The teapot was still mostly full. She poured herself a cup, then took a sip. She’d gotten used to the strong, acidic brew of the military; in the land reclamation camp there’d been no tea at all. This tea was remarkably good, almost as good as the stash her mother had kept in a little silk bag and broken out on special occasions.

When Levi spoke again, she realized he’d been watching her. He said, “I’m used to making that tea for five. It was already brewing when I realized I have to make it for only one now.”

She turned around and caught his still-emotionless face. She felt as though she’d just caught a blow from a massive hailstone in the gut.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Levi shrugged and returned again to the paperwork before him.

“Sir,” she began again. When he looked up, she swallowed. “I owe you an apology. I could have gotten you killed in the Forest, as well as myself. Your injury is my fault.”

His face gave nothing away as he regarded her. Shadows flickered across it from the cheap rushes in the wall sconces. She held his gaze; she owed him that much, she thought.

Finally he nodded. His eyes dropped again, not to the paperwork again but to the top of the table, or maybe his lap. He said without intonation, “The desire for vengeance was understandable. Unprofessional, reckless, insubordinate, stupid… but entirely understandable. The last time I had to fight against it, I was considerably older than you are now.” He looked up again. “Loyalty, too, is entirely comprehensible. And admirable, if you can keep it in check with caution.”

Mikasa said nothing. His response was, she realized, far more generous than she probably deserved.

“What is he to you, anyway?” Levi asked abruptly.

She blinked, then said automatically, “Family.”

“You don’t look anything alike.”

“His parents took me in after… well, you know the story.”

One corner of Levi’s mouth jerked a little. Even on an expressive face, it would have been far from any indication of a smile.

“They didn’t formally adopt you, though. Your surname’s still Ackerman.”

“No,” Mikasa said. “But… still, he’s family.”

“‘Big Brother,’” Levi said. She and and Eren were the same age and, in fact, the same height, but something subtle had shifted in Levi’s eyes, so again she said nothing. A second later he seemed to come back to himself. “Sit down,” he said. “As far as I can tell, there’s room.”

Mikasa stepped forward, mug cupped in both hands, welcoming the heat against her palms. She pulled out a chair across from and slightly more than one seat down from Levi, then put her mug on the table and sat.

“Don’t spill that on my work,” he said over the scratch of the quill.

“I won’t.” Nonetheless she slid the mug several more centimeters away from him, to her other side.

For several minutes she watched him write. He would scratch five or six lines across the breadth of the cheap paper with its cheap imprint of the Wings of Freedom at the top, then add a signature below. His handwriting was angular, the stroke of the letters heavy, but he left no blots of ink, nor did he cross out a single word in error. Each finished letter was moved to the pile to his right, whereupon he’d take a fresh sheet from the pile to his left and begin anew. Every third letter, he would set down the quill to flex the fingers of his right hand. Every fifth letter, he would take a modest sip of tea.

“May I please ask what you’re writing, sir?” Mikasa finally said.

Levi looked up at her and, after a silent second, said, “Letters to the families of the fallen.”

Something in her chest ached heavily. “Oh.”

His eyes dropped back to his work, but his pen didn’t resume its strokes at first. “I relieved Erwin of the task. He’s overwhelmed with funding and strategy meetings. And I’m more likely to have known them well enough that I can write something a little more personal than, ‘He was all one could ask for in a soldier,’ or ‘Her death was for the sake of humanity.’“

As it wasn’t a statement that seemed to require a response, Mikasa said nothing. She watched his pen rise and fall over page after page after page, an elegant dance. Beautiful in its own way, no less for being cruel. And hypnotic.

“Am I keeping you awake, cadet?”

She started awake and blinked heavily; her eyes felt full of sand. “Um. I guess the lack of sleep is catching up with me, sir.”

He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “You’re not alone. I imagine I should try to catch at least a few hours.” He pushed back the chair and rose. Without warning, his face went ashen and his mouth tight, and he caught the edge of the table as he stumbled.

“Sir,” Mikasa said sharply, rising too. “Let me help you up the stairs.”

“I’m not a cripple,” he said, the words hard and sharp. “Not being cleared for combat doesn’t mean I can’t get up to my rooms by myself.”

She took a deep breath. “May I at least please carry your paperwork for you?” She didn’t add, so that you have two hands in case you need to catch yourself again. Let him think she was fawning over him.

He was silent for a second. Then he muttered, almost to himself, “Why not.”

Resting his weight on his good leg, he lay one stack crosswise over the other, piled the other writing accoutrements on top of them, and handed them across the table. One of the lightest burdens she had ever carried, yet not without its distinct gravity against her arms.

She followed Levi out of the mess hall and down the corridor to the stairs. Perhaps a complete stranger would never have guessed he was injured. To Mikasa, he was clearly, even gingerly, favoring the leg that had incurred her damage. The perception grew more pronounced as he climbed the stairs. Once, just once, his hand shot out to grasp the bannister, and he hissed — with pain? With disgust and humiliation? She said nothing, as nothing she could have said would have been welcomed.

On the top floor of the castle, he stopped before an unadorned wooden door and produced a key from his jacket pocket. The tumblers in the lock clicked softly, and the door swung open. “Give me a moment,” he said, entering the dark beyond. Mikasa heard the sound of a drawer being pulled open, a scraping noise, and the hiss of a match flaring to life.

Levi touched the flame to the wick of a candle cupped protectively in a glass jar, then blew out the match and set the jar down. The room around him was small, austere, and well scrubbed. Other than the desk and the chair behind it, it boasted a plain settee for visitors, a small table that bore cleaning implements and 3DMG accoutrements, and several maps pinned to the walls. A second door opened off its rear wall. That room was dark, and Mikasa guarded herself from staring at it, but from a quick glimpse she could make out one corner of a low bed.

“Just put the papers on my desk, away from the candle,” Levi said. She’d no sooner obeyed than she heard his boot scrape against the wooden floor in the same way it had in the mess hall. She looked up to catch the same look of pinched pallor on his face as before.

“Sir!”

She moved without thought. Just as Levi’s bad leg went out from under him and his hand scrabbled for the edge of the desk, her arm shot out and her hand clamped around his other wrist.

Through the jacket and shirt, he was warm.

Between the fabric and her palm, something seemed to crackle, like the air before a thunderstorm. Halfway between her heart and her gut, a second jolt of energy answered the first. As Levi leaned into the desk she abruptly let him go, composing her expression and refusing the sudden urge to swallow.

He stared at her. The same stranger who didn’t know him might have said he looked unperturbed. To Mikasa, his eyes seemed wider than normal, and — though it was hard to tell in this light — darker, too. Color had returned to his face, and more of it than usual.

Then he cut his gaze away from her to stare at the door. Pointedly, one might have said. “Your assistance is appreciated, cadet,” he said curtly. “You’re dismissed.”

“Sir,” she said hoarsely, thumping out a quick salute, and turned on her heel.

She closed the door behind her, and a moment later she heard his key turn in the lock. An odd urge to sag, as if with relief, was upon her. Forcing it down, she gained the staircase and descended a floor. For the next few minutes she allowed herself to stand in the landing, back against the chilly wall, breathing with slow deliberation until her pulse quieted and the jolts in her belly eased to a muted ache.

She reflected, not without irony, on the handful of times she’d wished she were drawn to someone, anyone, other than Eren. Someone more like her herself, someone who understood why she did what she did and didn’t lambaste her for it.

Someone drawn to her, in turn.

Be careful what you wish for, the saying went.

The women’s dormitory was near-silent now, only a few sobs and sniffles breaking the placid symphony of deep, even breaths. Mikasa’s fatigue was almost tangible now, like weights hanging off her. In a fog she eased off her boots and shed her clothes, long training forcing her to drape them neatly over her chair. With a sense of relief, she slid under the covers of her bunk and waited for sleep to claim her.

It would not. Not with the slow and steady current of heat running downward from her belly, like oil afire, burning straight through the haze of exhaustion.

She’d never had much shame about getting herself off. It was a bodily need, the same as the need to eat or shit. From time to time she’d thought maybe she was lucky in that she’d never expected anyone else to meet it for her. Someone who could one day refuse her, or instead merely die. All she needed was five minutes of hard, steady rubbing after lights out, with her teeth dug into her lower lip or a pillow. Then a moment of letting her breath even out, followed by a quick mopping up. Fast. Easy. Uncomplicated.

Now shame weighed her down as heavily as her fatigue as she drew up her knees and slid her fingertips down, then past, her abdomen. Lying amid the bereft and the scarred, she worked her cunt wet and open, the back of her other hand pressed over her mouth, as she pictured the man she had wanted to kill for weeks. The same man she had, entirely without intention, almost gotten killed. She imagined hard muscles beneath a fine linen shirt contracting and then yielding to her touch, and the smell of herbal-green soap mixed with clean sweat and a trace of musk. She came gasping and clenching to the image of narrow eyes gone more black than grey as they hovered over her face.

Disgust seeped into her post-orgasmic inertia. As soon as her lungs and heart slowed down, she wiped her damp hand against the wall side of the mattress, grimacing at the stickiness that remained. Sleep was quick to close in as she lay back; her last coherent thought was the resentful question of whether she’d ever again be able to attain quick, mindless, almost mechanical release.

***

Mikasa would never say that Armin is not a good person. But that is what he believes of himself. It is partly why, she thinks, he offers her no judgment at all, from the start of her story to the end. Every so often he widens his eyes or lifts his brows or both, but then he quickly recomposes his face and merely says, “Go on.”

She falls silent at the end with her eyes fixed on the grimy floor. They’re in a little-used room in the depths of the castle, at the opposite end of the hallway from Eren’s old dungeon. With no more worries about the monarchy or the MPs, the Survey Corps has returned to the castle, which looms around them larger and emptier than ever. Nobody comes down here anymore, not even to clean.

Armin’s high, grave voice echoes softly off the damp stone walls. “There are a variety of herbs that are used as abortifacients. But they can make you deathly ill, sterilize or even kill you, if you don’t know what you’re doing with them. Dr. Jaeger’s textbooks were emphatic that women not try to use them on their own. And… I don’t have any experience with them.” In the dim daylight that filters in from the slivers of window near the ceiling, he looks terrified. “I don’t want to poison you, Mikasa.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she says grimly. She doesn’t tell him that if he can’t bring himself to help her, she could instead ask Levi to punch her in the belly until she feels something rupture inside it and blood runs down her inner thighs. Levi, she’s sure, would do it. Or she could have an “accident” with the 3DMG. Between Armin’s fearsome intelligence and his equally fearsome imagination, she’s pretty sure both those options have occurred to him, too.

They’re silent for a long moment, listening to the condensation drip off the stone and a mouse scuttle somewhere along the opposite wall. The latter noise gives Mikasa a perverse sense of pleasure: Levi can’t scour every inch of this place, no matter how hard he tries.

Finally, Armin says, “We can’t do this alone. No matter what Levi said, we’re going to have to trust one other person.”

***

Hop, punch, rise, punch, crouch, punch, tilt, punch. The cylindrical sack of leather suspended from the ceiling, filled near to bursting with tough grains, jolted and danced in place but withstood her blows. It was hard enough that she could imagine it as crystal. Yet, despite the give to it, she could imagine the feel of that crystal shattering under her knuckles as they drove the shards into the pale sleeping face beneath.

Even before Eren awoke her will to fight, Mikasa had always had a keen ear for the softest of warning sounds. Living out in the middle of nowhere whetted your hearing; Sasha was the same way, Marco had been too. Most townsfolk wouldn’t have been able to hear the faint scrape of boot leather over the sound of a gloved fist slamming into a punching bag or bare soles slapping against a mat.

Mikasa rocked back on her feet and pivoted. Levi, she’d long ago noticed, was in the habit of moving silently unless he wished to make his presence known. Unsurprising, given what she’d heard third-hand of his exploits before he joined the Survey Corps. Beneath his usual expression, or lack thereof, she thought he seemed vaguely unsettled. She guessed he hadn’t expected to run into her alone in the training room, with her clad only in athletic bra, exercise trousers, and boxing gloves. Well, he should have, she thought; this was the logical place for her to be on a rainy day with no orders to carry out.

“Captain,” she said, peering at him from behind sweaty bangs, deciding it would look silly if she were to press her gloved fist over her bare breastbone. “I thought you and the other officers were still at the Capitol?”

“We were,” Levi said, voice and face suddenly sour. “Now we’re back.” He strode to the coatrack in the corner and hung his jacket neatly on a hook, then pulled off his cravat and tucked it neatly around the jacket’s collar. “I was intending to commandeer the punching bag, but frankly I think I’d prefer to spar.” He turned his head back toward her. “Are you game?”

The post-Stohess proceedings, she gathered, had gone so well that Levi’s need to work off some steam overrode any reservations he had about grappling with her. Not a good sign for the Survey Corps, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Nor was she going to ask him any questions.

“Is your leg doing better, sir?” she asked politely, pulling off the gloves and laying them aside. It wasn’t entirely an excuse to beg off the match; she didn’t want to be responsible for prolonging the medical leave she’d caused in the first place.

“Noticeably better.” Levi pulled off his boots and socks and set them against the wall near the door. “I don’t heal as fast as I did when I was your age, but it’s coming along.” Barefoot now, he moved back to the coatrack and began to unbutton his shirt, holding her gaze with his usual lack of expression. “Feel free to try to take it out from under me. If you can.”

She kept her own face pointedly expressionless as his torso emerged rippling from the shirt, hard and gypsum-white. Scars stippled it, red and new, pale and old; bruises, too, from livid to faint yellow; and the old, silvered ruts that Gear straps inevitably wear into human flesh. She refused to acknowledge the warmth that had risen to her face. While Levi’s face remained pale, his air of boredom seemed slightly more forced.

He turned again to hang the shirt from another hook. Then he faced her again and strode forward onto the mat, which filled most of the room. Feet apart, arms raised in front of him, knees slightly bent, one corner of his lips faintly quirking, he said, “Come at me, cadet.”

Less-experienced recruits might have rushed him, thinking their height and weight would be their best advantage over his well-known strength. Even if her own advantage in that wise had been much greater than ten centimeters and three kilograms, Mikasa wouldn’t have. Instead she began to tread slowly toward him, then — once she was just close enough that she could have landed a kick — began to circle him in a not-quite crouch. Levi mirrored her trajectory, trying to close the gap between them as he moved around her. She answered his first few steps toward her with corresponding steps away from him. The fourth time, she struck out at his breastbone with her foot.

Levi blocked the kick immediately and with no apparent effort, and Mikasa pulled back just in time before he could grab her ankle and haul her off-center. As she got both feet under her again, he closed in and began to strike out with both fists and feet. She was fast enough in regaining distance that only two of the flurry of blows — a kick to her left quadriceps, a punch to the right side of her ribcage — landed. But, though he’d definitely pulled them somewhat, the pain buzzed straight down to the bone and for a few seconds she was left wheezing.

As soon as she caught her breath she lunged again, this time with her right fist forward. It connected only with air as Levi easily sidestepped the blow and, in the same movement, knocked her feet out from under her with one kick. She rolled as soon as she hit the mat, lashed out with her uppermost leg, and — taking him at his earlier word — hooked the foot around the ankle of his bad leg. Though he remained on his feet, his eyes widened, and he caught his breath sharply and staggered like a drunk as he tried to regain his balance. Mikasa was up again instantly, and before he could right himself she drove her forearm solidly into his breastbone.

The impact sent him a few steps backward, but he’d already dug his fingernails into the skin of her forearm. His momentum pulled Mikasa along, and he didn’t let go even when she again hooked her foot behind his and knocked him off his axis afresh. As he fell, he pulled her down with him. She landed on top of him, her bruised ribcage jarring against and digging into her own forearm trapped between them.

She grunted, wheezing again, as little stars burst behind her eyelids. When the pain cleared, she hazily registered that he’d let her arm go, rather than shoving against it to push her off him. A split-second later she registered the hard shape pressing into her abdomen and the fact that Levi’s face was only a few centimeters away from her chest. She sprang to her feet as if scalded, schooling her face into stone even as her pulse sped up again.

Still flat on his back, flushed pink, the front of his trousers distended, Levi stared at her for a long moment. He didn’t look very different from how he had looked in his rooms just after she’d steadied his fall. Then, abruptly, the cold mask slipped back into place. Cutting his gaze once more, he rose to his own feet in one motion and turned his back on her to walk to the coatrack.

Mikasa stood in place on the mat and watched him pull the shirt off the hook, shake it once and hard, and shrug himself into it. The silence boomed as he buttoned it up from the hem, then retrieved his boots, leaning against the wall to put them back on. By the time he was back into his jacket and retying his cravat, she found herself blurting, “I’m sorry, sir.”

His head turned. The strenuously maintained look of boredom had returned. “Why? You did nothing wrong.” The tone of his voice implied very much otherwise. She set her upper teeth into her tongue and watched him move back up the stairs as silently as he had come down.

She didn’t bother to pull the boxing gloves on again. She had no drive to lash out with her fists anymore. The energy that curled within her now was different, hotter and brighter, and shot through with a thread of something that was faintly sick-making.

Not long afterward she crouched under the hot, hard needles of a showerhead. They’d cleaned the women’s shower room just yesterday, another day of rain pissing down, and nobody showered this early in the afternoon. Nobody to walk in on her as, knees bent and parted, Mikasa thrust rhythmically against the fast-moving pads of two fingertips. She pictured Levi under her, neither their trousers nor her bra between them any longer, and his teeth pitiless against her nipples. She dug a fingernail deeply into one of them, the way he’d dug his own into her arm, and that was when she came, gasping and shuddering. She let herself sink until the pebbly texture of the cold, wet tiles pressed into her shins. Water swirled down the drain between her knees, thin fluid carrying viscous fluid away.

She rose on still-wobbling legs, washed but feeling far from clean. Seeping rapidly into the sweet emptiness that the tension had left behind was a hard, sour anxiety. Mikasa shut off the spigot and ground the coarse-woven towel into her skin until she could imagine her skin coming away in flakes.

***

Sasha chews her lower lip for a moment, then says, “What you want’s pennyroyal. And golden buttons, and mugwort. But mostly pennyroyal.”

The three of them are in the same room at the bottom of the castle. Mikasa’s told her the entire story, other than who the father is. Given Mikasa’s bloodline, the threat Levi relayed is convincing enough for Sasha; there’s no need to invent an excuse not to go to the medics.

“You are not going to tell anyone this, by the way,” Mikasa said when she’d finished the story, a hint of menace to her voice.

Sasha’s brows shot up. “Of course not!” she exclaimed, looking offended. “Girls in Dauper got in trouble, they’d go see the herbwife, she didn’t tell tales. Shame on the medics for even thinking of doing that to you. And on the man, if you can call him that, for not standing by you,” she added, voice darkening with indignation. Behind her, Armin flushed a little in the patchy candlelight.

“Forget him,” Mikasa muttered. “He doesn’t know, and it’s all for the better.” The lie came easily enough. The last five words are certainly true.

“‘Golden buttons’… those are tansy, right?” Armin asks now, his brows pinched, as if he’s remembering something from one of Dr. Jaeger’s books.

“I think so,” Sasha says. “We just called ’em golden buttons.”

“Can you find all of them in the woods around here?”

Sasha purses her lips. “The golden buttons, I think I’d have to go into Trost to buy, but they’ve got lots of other uses so nobody’d think anything of it. So do pennyroyal and mugwort, actually. People use pennyroyal to get rid of fleas, mugwort for moths. And back when they used to bury people instead of burn ’em, sometimes they’d stick golden buttons into the winding sheets, to keep the worms away until they were under the ground.” Mikasa feels her stomach lurch.

“But if I bought the three of ‘em together,” Sasha goes on, “someone might wonder. And I ain’t gonna spend money on what I can root up myself. Anyway, yeah, the other two are common as dirt. Mugwort’s a leafy green that smells kinda nasty-sweet, if you know what I mean. Pennyroyal’s a purple flower that looks kinda like a ball of spikes and smells like a strong mint. And golden buttons smell something like mothballs, maybe a little nicer. You’ve seen ’em all in the woods, I’m sure, you just never noticed.”

Mikasa thinks back to the cabin in the woods. Her parents, refugees from the city, had learned to hunt and garden well enough, but they knew no herblore and had never done their own healing. She can’t remember the first time she met Eren’s father; he was just always there when the Ackermans needed him, from her first bout with colic to the day he and Eren brought her back to Shiganshina to the night he mysteriously disappeared. As for plants, she doesn’t recall the name or look of anything her mother didn’t grow herself in their garden.

“Also,” Sasha says, face turning from thoughtful to solemn. “This is gonna be rough on you, Mikasa. You’re gonna sweat buckets. You’re gonna be nauseous and dizzy and really, really weak. And you’re gonna have awful belly cramps, and you’re gonna bleed like a stuck pig.” Behind her, Armin goes pale. “I mean, you wanna bleed like that, because you wanna flush it out. But it’s pretty rough. And you gotta keep drinking the tea no matter what: a cup every four hours, round the clock, for at least five days.” Mikasa, her gut clenching again, nods.

Sasha continues, “And you gotta get at least a week off, because you ain’t gonna be able to fly or fight or chop wood. Maybe not even be able to stay awake much. I know you heal fast, maybe it won’t take you that long, but just to be on the safe side. And you’re gonna need extra rations to build your strength back up. I can brew some other herbs to help with that, but you gotta have meat, eggs, and leafy greens too. Will the captain let you have all that, especially the time off?”

“Yes,” Mikasa says without hesitation.

Sasha blinks, then says, “All right. Give me three days.” Then her eyes narrow. “You owe me, by the way. Big time.”

“We’ll take you to the butcher shop in Trost next payday,” Armin says without missing a beat. “Whatever our paychecks cover, you can have.”

Whatever their paychecks cover isn’t all that much. But Sasha turns her head over her shoulder, and Mikasa catches half of the grin that lights up her face. “I want that special sausage,” she says. “From Frühlinger’s, up in Stohess. They ship it out to butchers in the other towns. Papa could never get the recipe for the spices they put in it, otherwise we’d’ve tried to make it on our own from wild boar. Some for me, some to send to Papa.”

Mikasa, sagging against the wall, says, “No problem.”

***

She awoke to the realization that, for the first time since Wall Maria fell, she’d been sleeping in a room alone.

Mikasa stared up through the darkness at the ceiling of the tiny room. She’d known that they’d be relocating to a remote cabin to let Hanji experiment with Eren’s titan powers in greater secrecy, but she had no memory of seeing it from the outside. She must have been carried in and settled in unconscious.

The previous day and more was a muddle to her. She recalled someone holding a cup to her lips and telling her to drink; after she’d gotten the bitter brew down the pain had begun to ebb. Then came a long sleep shot through with surreal nightmares. At another point, she seemed to remember, a few women had gently bathed her while she lolled semi-conscious and muttering in a tub. She wasn’t sure. The memory felt about as trustworthy as the dream she’d had that the Smiling Titan was transparent and she was watching Carla Jaeger dissolve in its stomach. Or the one in which the rest of the 104th bit their hands in unison, shifted into titans, and encircled a 3DMG-less Mikasa.

The memory of Eren, though, was solid and sure. The spark of understanding in his eyes before he pulled away and shifted; his look of guilt and words of apology as he held her hand in the wagon. None of that had been a dream.

Mikasa smiled.

The knock on the door made her frown again immediately. She was fairly certain she had her underpants on, but not her bra. Vaguely she recalled someone dressing her in the former, but giving up on trying to put the latter on her after pain shot up her side and she batted their hands away with groans of protest. She sat up carefully in bed, pulling the topsheet along with her and tucking it around her upper body, then called out, “Come in.”

She realized as the door opened that she’d been expecting Hanji, come to check on her injuries again. She wasn’t sure whether she was more surprised by the identity of her visitor or by his appearance. Levi’s jacket and shirt were neatly pressed, as usual, but he wore no cravat. It occurred to her that not once — not in combat, not the few times she’d encountered him during his injury leave — had she ever seen him without it.

He slung a small canvas bag onto the foot of her bed, then struck a match to light the bedside candle. “Hanji’s got her hands full with other shit right now, and we can’t afford to call attention to ourselves by looking for a doctor. So you’re stuck with me this evening as impromptu medic.”

“Er,” Mikasa said. “Sir.”

“What?” He blew out the match and laid it neatly in the shallow bowl of the candlestick base.

She felt her cheeks flush. “I’m, uh, not … decent, sir.” She wondered why he couldn’t have sent Sasha or Kris— Historia, rather, to do the job. Or even Armin, which would have been slightly more awkward, but nowhere near this awkward.

Levi stared at her, bringing her up short. The changes in his face were subtle; yet more things a stranger would never have caught. A deepening of the shadows under his eyes, a few new lines in his forehead, a tightness around his mouth. She remembered how he looked after the 57th Expedition, from the battlefield all the way back to the castle. And in the mess hall, death notice after death notice beneath his pen.

He brought her back to the present with a roll of his eyes. “Two of your ribs were poking right out of your skin. Those wounds need to be checked, cleaned, and re-dressed. Do you want to be modest, or do you want to not die of infection?”

She cut her gaze away from him to stare at the right-hand wall. Levi, taking it as the acquiescence it was, picked up the bag again and walked behind her, settling himself on the edge of the bed. The canvas rustled softly as he pulled several items from it. His voice unnaturally flat, he said, “You can drop the sheet now.”

Her heart stuck in her throat and gooseflesh rose on her upper arms as she let it fall.

Levi’s quiet “What the…?” confused her at first. Then she twitched as his left palm came to lie flat against the left side of her ribcage. Small, warm, rough with calluses, solid as a sheet of iron. He brushed his fingertips the skin there, and she shivered.

“Sorry,” he muttered. She realized he’d taken her reaction for ticklishness when he pressed his right hand flat, and more firmly, against the other side of her ribcage, fingertips pushing against the bone, almost rubbing.

“You… it’s healed.” His voice was hoarse with incredulousness, and — was she imagining it? — a faint, faint hint of fear. “What the fuck. Just over twenty-four hours ago you had a rib coming out of your skin on each side. Then all the jostling on the horse aggravated the injuries, the medics told us. And now, not only is the skin completely intact, but as far as I can tell your ribs aren’t even broken anymore.”

She said nothing. Her bruises and scrapes had always healed quickly: after her abduction, after she’d fought in defense of Eren or Armin, after bad falls during training. I’m amazed you have no broken bones, she’d heard from a Trainee Legion medic more than once.

Had she?

Levi, behind her, was silent. She could feel the pulse in his wrists accelerate against her torso. Finally, quietly, he asked, “Would there have been steam?”

Somewhere between his hands, a hard, cold pang struck her. She sat up straighter, head rising.

“No.”

She didn’t think she was at all imagining the relief — again, subtle — in his exhalation.

“You’re human,” he said. His voice was low and quiet still; there was a note in it she couldn’t place. His hands remained on her ribs. “Not…”

Not a monster?

Something in her brain protested. She should speak up, she thought, deny any such division between herself and Eren. He was no less human than she was — and she’d bathed her hands in blood alongside his when they were nine. A needful thing. But not a normal thing.

There was only one human on earth she knew for sure she’d never need to defend Eren from — with her words, if not with her fists — and that was Armin. She couldn’t wager that Levi would never, ever feel compelled to kill Eren.

But, for the here and now, she could safely say Levi was on Eren’s side.

Her reply was an equally quiet, “Yeah. Human.”

He said nothing in response. His fingertips had stilled, but his hands remained where they were. She hadn’t called him sir, she realized, but he hadn’t objected.

At the time, she didn’t make the connection. Later, however, she’d recognize these things as having given her the courage to take the left one by the wrist and move it upward — him not resisting at all, probably in surprise — to cover her left breast.

Her chill-stiffened nipple poked into the center of his palm, but his fingers didn’t curl to grasp her. He stayed utterly silent. She couldn’t even hear him breathing behind her.

Five seconds passed. Ten. Humiliation scorched her throat and rose up to stain her cheeks. Stupid. Stupid.

Then he said, voice deeper than normal and oddly strained, “Do you understand what you’re doing?”

Anything other than affirmation without the faintest note of uncertainty, she understood, would be taken as no. Nonchalantly, she replied, “Yeah, I do.”

Another few seconds of silence. Then Levi muttered, “That makes one of us,” before he leaned forward and just touched his lips to the nape of her neck. Mikasa jolted and sucked in her breath.

His hands dropped to her hips, maneuvering her. She found herself in his lap, straddling his waist, pushing into the hard shape under his trouser front as she crossed her ankles behind his back. There were too many things in his expression for her to have sorted out before he thrust his fingers into her hair and pulled her head downward.

Letting him lead, she figured, was probably the best plan. He brushed his lips against hers a few times; she opened hers submissively to admit his tongue and let it slide around inside her mouth. It felt weird, thick and heavy and wet, but she’d heard Hannah and other girls rhapsodize about kissing so maybe it got better as it went along?

Suddenly he pulled his head back and turned his face away. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said with an undertone of disgust.

“Yes, I do,” she insisted, with more indignation than she’d planned. He looked at her again, faintly taken back. She pulled his head in close again and mashed her lips against his. When his opened, she pushed her own tongue between them, imitating how he’d moved his own. His lay still for a moment, then rose again and slid against hers. It felt less strange this time, more—

She lost the word she was trying to think of when he pressed her left nipple between his fingertips, the ball of his thumb stroking over the tip. He swallowed up the small noise she made before he pulled his mouth away again and bent his head, cupping the same breast with his hand. She emitted a louder noise when his teeth scraped the crown of the nipple.

“Quiet.” Though the word floated just above the volume of a whisper it was heavy with authority. “The boys are sleeping on the other side of this wall, all four of them. You want to wake them up?” He reached for something he’d laid on the bed, then pressed it against her mouth: a plaster-sized piece of linen. “Shove it in your mouth if you have to.”

It absorbed nearly all the spit in her mouth, but at least it was clean. She whined faintly around it, cunt pulsing, and held onto his shoulders while he alternated sucking and licking her nipples with chewing at them. She grunted a little louder when he nipped a little too hard, and his nails dug into the back of her hip in warning. She yanked the cloth out of her mouth and let it drop to the floor. “That hurt,” she nearly snarled. Her tongue felt like crumpled paper. She reached for the glass of water next to the candle.

His exhalation was hot against the skin of her upper breast. He waited until she’d finished the glass and put it down again before he took the same nipple back in his mouth. He wasn’t using his teeth at all now, just sucking gently. She pressed her face against the top of his head, his hair filling her nostrils with green soap-scent and the smell of clean scalp, and hummed softly. She’d wound her arms around his upper back, and under her palms she could feel muscles bunch and shift under both layers of cloth. When she pushed the soaking-wet crotch of her underwear more forcefully against the bulge of his erection, he shifted his thighs wider apart, drawing her in.

A minute later he was pushing her backwards. “Get off me a sec.” Blinking, she obeyed, settling onto the edge of the bed next to him. He took off his boots and socks, as he had in the exercise room, and laid them aside. Then he stood, shrugged out of his jacket, and hung it on the bedpost. His shirt followed, the upper curves of his muscles gilded by the flickering flame; then trousers and underwear, which he gathered up, folded, and lay atop the dresser.

The low light washed his flesh a pale gold wherever it was unmarred. There was very little hair on him other than the trim black patch bracketed by his narrow hips. She knew cocks turned dark red when they were hard, because of bloodflow, but the color of his was downright startling against his overall pallor as it curved up toward the rockface of his belly and swayed with his movements. The tip of it bobbed against her knee as he moved in again, closing one hand around her shoulder and hooking the forefinger of the other into the waistband of her underwear.

“Off.”

Silly, she thought, the sudden stab of nerves when she was all but bare anyway. She made as if to stand, but Levi decided to grasp the waistband with both hands instead. Mikasa raised her legs obediently to let him ease them down and off. She had no time to contemplate her now-total nakedness as he bore down on her, pressing her to the bed. His eyes were hot, his mouth a hard line. His cockhead rubbed against her belly as he worked his right hand between her thighs, neither especially rough nor especially gentle. Instinctively she drew up her knees, and she heard him catch his breath when his fingers slipped between the lips of her cunt. He traced patterns through the heavy slickness, thumb pushing against her clit and making her shudder.

“You plugged?” he asked abruptly.

There were exceptions, like Ymir, but most girls in the military had pessaries inserted some time between their thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays. All three legions highly encouraged it, as none wanted to lose trained soldiers to something so eminently preventable. Had things gone differently with Eren, Mikasa might have sought out the medic shortly after she turned thirteen. Since then, she’d wondered every month if it would have even been necessary.

“I don’t bleed.” Levi raised his brows. “I’m sure of it,” Mikasa insisted, watching indecision play in his eyes until it seemed to just wink out. Or, maybe, he’d deliberately snuffed it out.

He rocked back from her a little. He was about to put it in, she figured, leaning back on her elbows. He wasn’t. He continued to slide his body downward, not upward, on the bed, and his head followed the path of his hand. She arched a few centimeters off the bed when his mouth brushed against her pubic mound. “Ah?”

He looked up at her, lips tightening. “What’s wrong now?”

“Uh…” She knew people did this, she’d heard other trainees talking about it, but… well, this was Captain Levi. “Is that, um, you know, clean? I mean… doesn’t it smell?”

His eyes were barely visible in their dark wells of shadow, but it was a prolonged, direct look, with all that implied when it was coming from him. “You were bathed maybe three hours ago. Of course it’s clean. Unless there’s something about your health you’re not telling me?”

“Uh, no?” Her voice came out strangely small.

“Good. Shut up, then.” He lowered his head and pushed her thighs apart.

She had no idea what to expect. The soft, wet slide of a warm tongue-tip against slickened membrane was startlingly… she couldn’t think of any word other than intimate. Stupidly obvious, but fitting. The feel of cool air touching her where Levi wasn’t; you didn’t have to spread your legs that far apart when it was just you and your fingers. The sense of exposure, of vulnerability, of trusting someone other than yourself to get you off.

Letting that someone set the pace, at that. Levi’s had been almost businesslike earlier, but now he didn’t seem to be in any kind of a hurry. She’d understood from barracks chatter that this was a good thing — wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, two-pump chump, phrases mockingly attached to the names of particular boys. But she wasn’t sure how much she wanted him to linger, even though her hips had begun to jerk minutely with the way he was licking around the inner folds. Especially when he looked up at her again and she still couldn’t see his eyes, but she knew he could see as much of her face as a single candle would permit.

Then his tongue slid upward, just barely touching the hard bead of her clit. Mikasa clamped her lips shut on a groan as nerves sparked under the saturated flesh. Her hips rose off the bed, and her thighs clamped hard around Levi’s head and neck. They unfolded again, and she clenched her jaw, at the sharp pinch to the left inner one. Even with his eyes shadowed she could tell he’d resumed glaring at her. “Next time, I bite,” he said, voice snapping even at that low volume and pitch. “And it won’t be your thigh.”

It was a terrifying thought; Humanity’s Strongest could probably bite an iron rod in half. Then again, as solid as his neck was, her thighs could probably snap it like a twig. “Sorry,” she muttered, slumping a little. Levi continued to hold her gaze for another moment before he lowered his head to her again.

With his hands on her hips he worked slowly and steadily at her, the pressure of his tongue neither teasingly light nor brutally expedient as he went back to tracing the inner lips. She found herself meeting it, hips pushing forward, spine coiling to drive them. As guttural sounds formed in her throat, she pulled the pillow out from behind her head and thrust it over her face — then groaned into it when Levi stopped.

“Move the pillow down. I want to see your eyes, at least.”

She flushed hot, as hot as Eren in her arms with his eyes shut and wildcat whiskers of gore across his face. But she obeyed. The trim at the edge of the pillow tickled her nostrils as Levi descended into her again. He swiped the flat of his tongue against the inner opening, then seemed to mouth at it, lips moving back and forth over the flare of flesh. Eyes closing, Mikasa surged up against his mouth, clenching in rhythm with the strokes of his tongue. Fighting the overwhelming urge to vise him again, she anchored her toes into the mattress and settled for grasping his shoulders instead. The muscles under the wax-white skin and ragged scars jumped and twitched as she kneaded them. He pulled off her cunt with an explosive intake of air to warn her, “Don’t pull my hair, either,” before dropping his head again.

They fell back into the same rhythm with barely a hitch. Ten swipes of his tongue, twelve, fourteen. He would lick firmly into the inner hole, lightening the pressure as he moved upward until it barely grazed her clit. She found herself arching off the bed to open herself wider to him, but he maintained the same distance, the same pressure. He’s fucking me with his mouth. She fucked him back, bearing down on him with her hips, hands pushing against the backs of his shoulders and head — he didn’t say anything about that — but he didn’t cede as much as a centimeter to her, instead grabbed her by the ass to hold her still, fingers digging into her glutes.

Her thighs began to shake with the tension he’d contained. When she thought she could have broken the bed in half just with her toes, Levi suddenly hauled her closer and — God, fuck, shit, God — started all but trying to suck her brains out through her clit. She howled into the underside of the pillow and let herself rut up into his face, feeling the wet run out of her and over his face and into his hair as her cunt contracted violently — and her orgasm was right there, hers for the taking like a massive nape, and she leapt into it —

Levi didn’t stop licking her through the afterjolts, not for a second, until she’d collapsed into bonelessness and her nerves began to scream no more, no more. She began to push instead of pull at his shoulders, until she realized the lack of strength in her hands and dropped them instead and closed her eyes.

They flew open again at the feel of Levi’s hands on her shoulders. His breathing was ragged; she could smell her own wet on him. One of his hands was against her cunt, fingers parting the slick, swollen folds, and the other was down beyond her line of sight.

It didn’t hurt like she’d expected, maybe because coming had loosened her up. It didn’t feel good, either, being opened up by a thick, solid cylinder of flesh. Hannah had said it wasn’t really good for her until the third time with Franz, so maybe this wasn’t bad, all in all. What was good was watching Levi’s face as he pushed into her: his eyes were closed, his lips parted. For the first time she noticed his lashes, long and plentiful like some girls in the barracks would have killed for, and she saw that his lips were red and swollen with having made her come.

Awkwardly she raised one hand and stroked his hair, the instinctual part of her mind expecting him to slap it away. Instead, he opened his eyes and stared down at her like he wasn’t sure what she was doing there underneath him. She could see his eyes a little better now; they were very dark, darker than the dim light would have accounted for. He withdrew from her and entered again, and a small sigh escaped his lips when they parted this time.

She continued to caress his hair and shoulders and, on his inward thrusts, his chest. Before long his eyes went glassy, like he wasn’t seeing her at all, but his right hand dropped from her shoulder to her breast and cupped it, fingertips flicking the nipple lightly. Fresh arousal flickered weakly in her belly, but she didn’t think she could come again before he finished, and she was starting to feel chafed even before he began to thrust faster and harder. She clenched her jaw; she could ride out the discomfort. As his body began to seize, she gave in to an impulse to stroke her finger across his lips. He gave a soft moan of surprise as well as pleasure, the sound twisting in her belly in spite of her soreness. She could feel his cock spasm inside her, and then a new warm wetness too.

Levi braced his palms against the mattress, panting and gasping, head hanging down. A few licks of his hair stood up with sweat, and his skin gleamed with it. When he finally raised his head, his eyes were clearing. They caught Mikasa’s.

Staring, her mouth slightly open, she raised and opened her arms.

Levi froze, his eyes going wide. Then he closed them, and the flush drained almost immediately from his face as he whispered, harshly and angrily, “Shit.”

“What…” Mikasa began, but before she could sit up he’d pulled out of her, grabbed the discarded linen up from the floor, and begun to swab at his groin. From the tightness of his jaw she could tell the sensation was nearly unbearable.

“This should never have happened,” he all but spat.

She went cold from toes to scalp. Mouth locked tight against any sound escaping, she watched him dress, pulling the starched shirt tight over his musculature, then the spotless jacket. She fumbled for the edging of the topsheet and, finding it again, pulled it up to her chin. She took a tiny, pitiful bit of relief from the fact that he had no cravat to put back on.

He didn’t say another word to her, just walked out of the room and pulled the door shut behind him quietly.

After an age frozen in place, Mikasa slowly slid back down. The fitted sheet was clammy and wet in the spot where she’d sat up. Her throat worked convulsively as her eyes filled. Later she wouldn’t remember how long she cried before sleep overtook her and she watched Reiner and Bertholdt eat Eren alive as he screamed.

***

“Here you go,” Sasha says, holding out the cup. The steam from it rises to wreathe her face. There are no hearths in the cellar, so they’ve set up a brazier over which to heat the brew.

Mikasa takes the battered piece of stoneware and stares down into the dark-golden contents. They smell, more than anything else, of mint, stronger than the eating kind and with a rancid undertone. There’s also a cloyingly musky-sweet odor and a piercing streak of something halfway between rosemary and pine sap. She’s smelled far worse things, but it is not an aroma that appetizes. At least the liquid is clear, strained of all dregs.

Armin, laying out ragged old towels on the cot they’ve set up, says, “Take your time drinking it, Mikasa. You don’t want to bring it up all up and waste it.”

She doesn’t reply. She had considered swilling it all in one gulp, like Hannes with a bottle of ale. Get it over with faster. Armin’s right, though. She settles on the edge of the cot and takes a long, slow sip. Purposefully, she doesn’t savor it, but its essence — it tastes like it smells — requires no savoring in order to drill into her nostrils, ring in her sinuses, and permeate her brain. When she lowers the cup, grimacing, her throat is stinging.

She wills herself into a cycle of long sips followed by facial contortions and deliberate deep breaths. Armin stands by, the picture of anxiety; Sasha looks concerned but not alarmed. After about ten minutes, the cup is empty.

“That’s one,” Sasha says, holding out her hand for it.

The three of them reconvene four hours later on the dot for cup two. Mikasa stares down into it again, feeling the weight of Armin’s and Sasha’s expectant gazes. The bouquet of menthol, pine resin, and overripe musk makes her nose wrinkle and her stomach curl protectively in on itself. She drinks it with the same careful deliberation and timing that she did the first.

By the time for the third cup — only Armin by her side now, having heated the part of the batch that Sasha made in advance, then serving it to her — her stomach is doing more than just curling. “I… don’t know if I can hold it all down,” she warns, staring into the brew as it if contained poison. It does, she reminds herself. The dose makes the poison or the cure, Dr. Jaeger said more than once within her hearing.

“You have to try,” Armin says, sternness edged with fear. “As much of it as possible.”

Mikasa exhales, resigned, and drinks. It stays down.

More than half of cup four does not, despite Mikasa’s heroic efforts to keep it down. Laced with gastric acid and the small bits of dinner she was able to consume, it splashes hot and stinking into an old, cracked chamberpot that was found in yet another unused room during the most recent all-hands cleaning spree. As she gasps and coughs, Armin refills the mug halfway. She ruthlessly stifles a groan of protest and sips even more slowly at the replacement liquid until it’s gone. Then she stretches out on the cot as her stomach continues to churn.

Armin has permission from Levi to sleep in a small ground-floor room near the cellar stairs this week, so he can tend to Mikasa without disturbing the sleep of other Corpsmen. When he wakes her for cup five, she is not merely sleep-groggy but leaden with a weird lethargy. She drags herself up into a sitting position. Her head is light, her sense of balance off. The lassitude with which she drinks this time is not deliberate. The empty cup nearly falls from her hands, except that Armin is there to catch it and replace it on the table.

They return to their separate sleeps. Mikasa’s nightmares blossom in slow motion, imagery and sounds and even tactile sensations moving at a crawl. At some point therein she vomits, copiously and repeatedly, as if her stomach could no more be emptied than the magical cauldron in the old fairy tale. She surfaces to the first morning light filtering in through the ceiling-high window slits, and she realizes from the mutinous feeling in her belly that she has not vomited at all.

Success, weakly cherished, until Armin shuffles to her bedside, his eyes bleary and cup six in his hands.

***

What “should never have happened” did not, unsurprisingly, happen again.

After the first week or two, Mikasa rationalized later, it wouldn’t have been likely to happen anyway, no matter what Levi had decided. Thinking back, she can’t imagine he’d have been in the mood after the all-night torture session. She certainly wasn’t after learning that Eren was in danger. All that aside, she can’t picture the two of them trying to slip away from that shithole barn for a quick fuck before the attack on CMP HQ, even if he hadn’t been shot. And after that… more combat, more killing, more breakneck travel, not enough time to sleep well, barely time to take a piss, no time at all to bathe. Her mouth twists: if nothing else, that last bit would have deterred Levi entirely.

The awkwardness of the initial few weeks was, again, a subtle one. He didn’t hesitate to look at her or address her. That didn’t mean she couldn’t catch how he tore his gaze away from her at the first opportune moment, his mouth tightening. She doubts the others caught it, no matter how long any of them had known him. They’d have ascribed it to other burdens weighing him down, the ones she saw hints of in her recovery room.

After they abandoned the second cabin, the awkwardness was replaced by a new intimacy, very different from that which went before. It wouldn’t have been entirely unfamiliar to anyone who’d fought alongside others. But to become another fighter’s right-hand man, or woman, is also partly akin to the intimacy of engaging an enemy. You mirror their moves until you can anticipate them from the lines of tension in their stance, if not their expressions. Until you and they act as one organism, one brain, one body.

It was, she thought fleetingly during those battles, strangely easy.

Strangely easy. She thought about that later, too, after she and Levi had taken Kenny Ackerman down. Before he died, he told them the truth. About the brother he hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years, and that brother’s family. His first family. His common-law wife and their infant son. He left them for their own protection, disappearing from the Interior entirely. She hid the baby in the cesspit of the Underground for his own safety, then left him with his uncle when she couldn’t protect him any longer.

One moment Mikasa had had no blood kin left in this world at all. Then she had two, about both of whom her father had lied by omission. And she was helping one kill the other.

This world, of course, is profoundly cruel.

More awkwardness, with a queasy edge of shame to it. She’d swear that, for a while, Levi turned green whenever he looked at her. But neither of them had time to agonize about it, not with so many loose ends to be squared away and many fewer Survey Corpsmen to square them.

And, no matter what else she was to him now, she was still an extension of his right hand, his certain successor. The knowledge of their bloodline put a rightness on it, even if it didn’t mitigate the wrongness of their first intimacy.

He continued to work with her in the training yard throughout. Captain and, now, Lieutenant, sharing a name — he’d taken it back for himself — and a purpose. Roles, she thought, were excellent hiding places, rocks to lean on, fonts of solace. Nearly three weeks after Kenny died, Mikasa mastered a difficult series of moves. Levi ended up on his back in the dirt. This time, he looked at her with something that wouldn’t have passed for a smile on anyone else. But, of course, she could read him by now. She smiled back and extended her hand to help him up.

She would have thought nothing of it a few weeks later when she didn’t bleed. Except that her breasts throbbed painfully, the smells of the mess hall made her retch, her bladder seemed to have shrunk to the size of a walnut, and everything — a nuzzle from her horse, Jean rolling his eyes at Eren, a misstep during sparring, a typically stupid joke from Connie — made her want to burst into tears.

It wouldn’t be all right after all.

***

The second day is a blur of sweaty sheets, a phlegmy cough, a racing pulse, and an insistent pressure in her gut that isn’t quite pain but is more than just nausea. And more lethargy, despite her rapid pulse. Mikasa lies inert, alternating between overheated and chilled from her own cooling sweat, wasting precious energy on pulling the sheet up or down. Armin, or maybe Sasha, has left a meal on a tray for her, eggs scrambled with kale. She’s glad when it begins to cool off and congeal because the smell of it makes her stomach buckle.

She hasn’t felt this weak since… she tries to think, a task made painfully slow by the herbs. Since she was barely eleven, that first terrible winter in the land reclamation camp, when none of them got enough to eat? Since she was six, a viral infection raging through her, Dr. Jaeger able to do no more than mitigate the symptoms?

Since I was nine.

She thinks, as she has always tried not to, what would have happened if Eren hadn’t come, or if she’d let Eren die and never realized her own will to fight. She wonders how many times by now she’d have lain in bed for days, trying to flush herself out with substances used to kill fleas. She wonders if she would have been permitted to in the first place. If they’d have sold the babies away from her, future toys for other rich men.

She lets the ruminations drift away on a tide of listlessness and passes back into the realm of distorted dreams.

Every four hours, a hand on her shoulder shakes her awake. Her faithful cupbearer, carrying the brew pot on the same tray as a fresh meal, eyeing her anxiously, asking her how she is, heating the brew, pouring her the dose, making sure she drinks it all. Armin stays with her for at least twenty minutes after she’s drained the cup, holding her up, encouraging her to eat at least a few bites of food. Sometimes he has to replenish the cup, sometimes not. The effort it costs her not to vomit usually leaves her in a collapsed heap on the bed. Armin, eyes sagging with fatigue and sadness, lays his hand briefly on her forehead, picks up the cold uneaten meal he brought on his previous visit, and leaves.

The cramps begin on the third day. From the light, Mikasa guesses it’s early afternoon. Her sense of time is gone, as is the clear-cut division between wakefulness and sleep. One moment a titan holds her by her head and feet, its teeth ripping into her belly as if she’s a choice cut of meat on the bone. The next she realizes she’s not on the battlefield but on the cot. The third moment, the room spins and she folds in two, knees pressed to her breasts. She groans, as much in surprise as in pain. Her voice is louder than it’s been in two days.

Not only are the cramps powerful, far more so than any she’s ever had before, they’re extremely localized. It’s just one narrow spot in her lower abdomen, like a barbed drill bit is spinning inside it. She forces herself to breathe deeply and steadily until she runs out of energy to do so; then she whimpers off and on until she slides into another series of nightmares. She’s suddenly naked on a bed in a locked room whose walls and floor are cold white tile. Pools of blood cool and thicken under her ass and thighs as she tries to push what feels like the Wall Maria boulder out of her body. Kenny Ackerman reaches down between her legs, grabs something, and pulls, tearing more flesh inside her. He hoists a silent, unbreathing infant into the air by the heels and roars, “Congratulations, it’s a boy! Let’s call him Levi!” Then his arm lashes out, slamming the baby’s head into the tiles of the wall. Mikasa awakens with a hoarse shout of rage that degenerates into a broken wail as the cramps continue to grind through her.

Her face is buried in her pillow, soaking it with tears and snot and drool, when she feels a hand on the top of her head. “No,” she groans. “I can’t.”

“Mikasa,” Armin says, and again a thread of fear is woven through his steely tone. “It’s working. Don’t stop now. Are you bleeding at all?”

“I — I don’t know,” she mumbles. Doesn’t feel like it, and she’s sure as hell not going to make Armin check.

“Well, from what Sasha said, you’d know.” She hears the strike of the match, and within five minutes she can smell the infernal aroma even with the pillow mashed into her face. She never wants to smell mint again, or mothballs for that matter. There’s the sound of Armin decanting it from the pot into the cup, and then it’s in her hands. They shake as she tries to get it down despite the lightning strikes in her gut.

When she finishes, she sways in place with pain and nausea. Armin takes the cup from her again, then sits beside her and puts his arm around her. She leans on him, though their differences in height mean his head is on her shoulder and not the reverse. He says nothing the whole twenty minutes, doesn’t even try to get her to eat, just props her up. She’s grateful.

“You, uh…” Armin trails off. “You might want to take off your underwear, so you don’t ruin it.” He pauses again. “I can leave first, if you want.”

She sighs. “No. Help me stand up.”

Armin doesn’t reply to that, just stands and pulls her up against him with his arm around her waist. Leaning on him, Mikasa tugs her underwear down over her hips to her knees, then manages to shimmy it down around her feet and kick it off and into a corner. She sinks back down onto the edge of the cot, arms wrapped around her abdomen. “See you in four more hours,” Armin mutters on his way out.

The bleeding starts not long after the next cup goes down and Armin’s left again. Sasha was right: Mikasa doesn’t need anybody to check for her. As with the cramps, it’s nothing like any menstrual period she’s ever had. It’s pumping out of her like… what was that thing in Armin’s book, about the ocean? A... tidal wave or something? The blood is hot against her inner thighs, and it feels much slicker, much slimier, than blood has ever felt to her before. She feels unclean, being unable to wipe or plug it up, but she has no energy for full-blown disgust, and at least the towels will protect the mattress.

She floats back into a landscape of nightmares tumbling into one another — titans, the locked room, Levi driving a drill bit into her belly until it emerges from her back — and surfaces from it when she hears Armin say, “Wow. Sasha wasn’t kidding.”

Mikasa raises her head. “Can… can you clean me up a little? Please?”

“Uh, sure. After you get the next cup down.”

Armin puts down the tray and walks to the brazier, the brew pot in hand. Five minutes later Mikasa is choking the concoction down. Most of it doesn’t stay down; the wave of vomit splashes over the side of the chamberpot. Armin’s expression is pained. He pours her another cup, and it’s a full forty-five minutes before she’s drunk all of it and he seems confident it won’t come up again.

“Let me go get some more towels and water, okay?” As soon as Mikasa gives a weak nod, he’s gone. Ten minutes later he’s back with a larger pot of water inside a small metal washbasin. He sets the pot over the brazier, then pulls several clean towels, one of Mikasa’s clean shirts, and a bar of kitchen soap out of the basin. Mikasa lolls back on the bed, staring blankly upward, until she feels the towel beneath her ass be pulled out from under her and a warm, wet cloth swipe over her inner thighs. “Thanks,” she mutters.

Armin doesn’t say anything. There’s the slosh of cloth being soaked and wrung out, then more swipes between her legs. The smell of the soap is basic, harsh. When she raises her head to look at Armin, his face is flushed. Nonetheless he asks solicitously, “Can you sit up? While I’m doing this I might as well wash the rest. You’re all sweaty and clammy.”

“You mean I stink,” she says drily, her voice creaking.

“Well…” Armin begins.

“That’s a yes.” Mikasa hoists herself up on her arms and pulls her shirt off, throws it onto the floor. Armin, letting her lean on him again, passes the soapy cloth over her face, neck, back, breasts, and armpits, then soaks up the suds with a second cloth that’s only slightly damp.

“Don’t bother toweling me off,” she says. “I’ll just get sweaty again before long.”

“You’ll get chilled, though,” Armin says uncertainly.

“Doesn’t matter, that’ll happen anyway.”

He nods. He leaves the unused clean towels and shirt on the table; he throws the ones soiled with blood, vomit, and sweat over his shoulder before he picks up the pot and basin again. “You’ll stain your jacket,” Mikasa warns him.

Armin snorts. “I think I’ve had worse on it.”

“Matter of opinion,” she mutters as he leaves, then falls back asleep. There are the nightmares, as always, but she thinks when she emerges from them that she’s slept a little better, maybe.

The blood continues to pump out of her for, she thinks, another day. She never bothers putting the fresh shirt on.

Armin’s remaining visits blur into one another, except for the last one. Sasha accompanies him, carrying the water pot, linens, and soap inside the washbasin, while Armin carries the inescapable meal tray. She puts the water on the brazier after the brew’s been heated. As Mikasa finishes the dose, swallowing repeatedly against the nausea, Armin steps out of the room and Sasha says with forced cheer, “Let’s clean you up.”

Mikasa nods, limp against the sheets. She lifts her ass weakly as Sasha tugs the soiled towel out from under it.

“Oh. Wow.”

“Hm?”

Sasha’s holding the bloody towel stretched out between both hands, staring down at it with a perfectly blank expression. “Uh… I ain’t ever actually seen this before. But I think this means the herbs worked.”

Mikasa sits up with a sudden, frantic burst of energy. She and Sasha peer at the small, pale, curled thing within the slough of blood. Mikasa remembers the diagrams on the walls of Dr. Jaeger’s study, antiquated ones that had been printed in bright colors. The Nervous System. The Digestive System. The Endocrine System. Stages of Fetal Development.

Ten centimeters, she estimates, and the words make her think of Eren as he crosses back over the line between monster and human: comparatively tiny, streaked with blood. She pokes at the thing with one finger, rolling it over. It feels rubbery under all the slime. A thick clot of blood slides off its… head to reveal a tiny black button. An eye.

“Huh,” she says, then blinks when she realizes Armin has come to stand next to her and Sasha. He doesn’t seem to care right now that she’s naked. His eyes, wide with fascination, are fixed on the thing lying on the towel.

They all stand there silently for a few minutes. Then Mikasa says, “Um, so… what do we do with it?”

Sasha frowns. “The herbwife would burn it. Seems right to me. I mean, you don’t want animals digging it up, right?”

Mikasa feels more than she sees Armin wince. The mental image leaves her, by comparison, oddly unbothered. “You mean, on a pyre?” she asks.

“Not really a pyre, just a little campfire. Never on the hearth, I guess the smell of it would get into the room.”

“We can do that for you, Mikasa,” Armin says.

“Unless you wanna be there?” Sasha asks, brows arching.

Mikasa thinks for a second, then shakes her head. “No, it’s all right.”

Sasha resumes sponge-bathing Mikasa, rinsing the towel in the basin until the water is pink. Armin’s eyes are trained on the bloody towel as he folds it up, then wraps a cleaner one around it. He looks faintly perturbed, as if there’s some ritual to this he has to get right but nobody’s told him the details. He settles on just being neat about it. As coarse soapy linen rubs against Mikasa’s thighs, she watches his hands work, watches pink disappear into red, and then red into white.

“…Mikasa?”

Armin and Sasha left the door open. They all look up to see Eren standing there, his eyes wide and his face sallow. He takes in the pink water in the basin, the pile of red towels on the floor, the folded white bundle in Armin’s hands.

Armin breaks the silence. “Eren,” he says warningly, though he’s losing his color.

Eren turns on him, eyes full of fire. “You lied! ‘Stomach bug,’ my ass!”

Armin doesn’t reply; Mikasa can see him swallow. She’s never figured she might have to defend him from Eren, let alone when she’s feeling about as strong as a damp leaf of lettuce. She’s relieved when Eren turns away from him, alarmed again when he glares contemptuously at Sasha and Sasha glares back, relieved once more when he finally turns to Mikasa and yells, “What the fuck is this?”

“Eren, please,” she says. “I can’t right now. I’ll explain la—”

“Eren!”

Armin’s indignant shout echoes off the stone as Eren tears the bundle out of his grasp. He unfolds the outer towel and tosses it to the floor. Then he grabs the inner one, unfazed by its slickness, and pulls it open as well. He stands there, staring at the small red-smeared pink object for a long while. Undoubtedly thinking of the very same charts on his father’s study wall.

Finally, his voice deadly soft and quiet, he demands, “Who?”

Mikasa blows out her breath. “It’s none of your business, Eren.”

That felt really good to say, she realizes. Especially when it shocks Eren out of his rage. His eyes widen further and his lips part a little, the lower one quivering slightly. “Not even sure why you want to know,” she goes on. “Since when do you care who I get off with?” He looks even more shocked at that, and that’s gratifying, too.

“But… you could have at least told me that… this happened!” he protests, his voice cracking a little.

“Why, so you could freak out like you are now, make me have to calm you down?” She closes her eyes, suddenly too tired to appreciate it if Eren looks even more crestfallen.

“Did she tell either of you who it was?” Eren snaps, retreating into anger. His head swings back and forth between Sasha and Armin.

“No,” Sasha says. She sounds about as pissed as Mikasa’s ever heard her.

“No,” Armin lies. His voice is growing cool. There’s no way Eren can’t have picked up on that; he must be choosing to ignore it.

“Why didn’t you go to the medics?” Eren demands of Mikasa, changing tack.

“Because,” Armin answers him even more coolly, “she was told that they’d force her to give birth, take the baby away, and make it into a weapon against humanity.”

Mikasa opens her eyes into the sudden silence. Eren is staring hard at Armin again, but she’s pretty sure Armin isn’t the target of the fresh rage in his eyes. Armin is looking back at him with no expression at all. Mikasa wonders how much it’s costing him to close himself up like that to Eren, and how much recognizing it and thinking about it will hurt Eren once he’s calmed down.

Eren blinks first, as it were. He looks only at the towel as he places it carefully onto the table. Then he slumps against the wall with his face in his hands. “Useless,” Mikasa thinks is the word he mutters.

Neither Sasha nor Armin speaks nor moves. Mikasa turns her head and stares at the ceiling for several minutes. It eventually occurs to her that she’s the only one who’s not frozen in place, and she sighs and musters a little energy. Her voice is still weak, but she’s pleased to hear a note of steel in it.

“Eren… just go back upstairs, all right? I’m exhausted, I’m naked, Sasha still has to clean me up, and she and Armin have to get rid of…. you know. We’ll talk in a day or two, when I’m feeling better.”

She doesn’t turn her head back to him, so she doesn’t see Eren’s face, but later Armin will tell her that he had tears in his eyes. She hears the scrape of his boots on the floor, then on the stairs beyond the doorway.

A moment later, Sasha and Armin sigh, just about in unison. It’s almost funny, Mikasa thinks. Almost.

Sasha wets and soaps up a clean towel and resumes scrubbing at the remaining traces of blood on Mikasa’s thighs. Armin retrieves the bloody towel and folds it once more, brows pinched, teeth clenched. He retrieves the outer towel, which is no longer pristine white, from the floor and wraps the other one in it. “I’ll go take care of this,” he says, and though it’s ostensibly to Mikasa and Sasha it might be to nobody in particular at all.

After he’s left, Sasha tosses the towel she was using onto the laundry pile. Tight-faced, she picks up the basin and carries it upstairs. Through the window pane Mikasa can hear the slosh of water against dirt and grass. Then she hears boot leather scrape on stone as Sasha returns to the cellar.

“Will you be okay?”

Mikasa is staring at the ceiling again. “That was my last cup, right?” she says. Maybe it’s a stupid question, maybe she has to drink more to get the afterbirth out, she has no idea.

“Well… yeah,” Sasha says.

So, stupid question, Mikasa thinks. She turns her head; Sasha’s expression remains strained. “Yeah. I should be fine. And… thanks, Sasha.”

Sasha tries to smile but it falters. “It’s all right,” she says, lowering her eyes. She doesn’t mention Frühlinger’s. She tucks the cup into the empty pot, along with the bar of soap, and piles all the soiled linens atop of it. She carries everything but the cot and the bedcovers back out of the cellar as Mikasa eases off into one more sleep and, this time, dreams only about the ocean.

***

“Come in.”

When Levi raises his head from this desk this time, his eyes widen a bit at the sight of Mikasa standing in the doorway, fist pressed to her heart, her own expression calm. That he is taking note of the color, weight, and muscle mass she’s lost would be obvious to any stranger aware of her situation. But she can also pick up sympathy, curiosity, and, she thinks, a glimmer of respect in his eyes.

“You appear to have come through… things well enough,” he says.

“I did, sir,” she replies, closing the door behind her. She doesn’t think he needs any more details, nor that he’s going to ask for them.

“And… it worked?”

“It did, sir.”

His shoulders sag minutely, and his eyes close for a few seconds. He reopens them, sits up as straight as an iron rod, and continues to regard her. As she comes to stand in front of his desk she returns the gaze resolutely.

“I take it you’re not here just to brief me on your health,” he says.

“No, sir. Permission requested for a fifty percent advance on my paycheck.”

He frowns. “Why the fuck don’t you ask me for something easier, like blood out of a turnip?”

“I, uh, owe someone, Captain.”

“You and every other rank-and-file Corpsman still alive, Lieutenant. And you’re more capable than most of fending off any enforcers your debtors send after you.”

She stares hard at him in incredulity, and not a little anger. “I owe someone for medication. Sir.”

If nothing else, she’ll credit him for looking ashamed at not having made the connection, yet still meeting her eyes. He leans to one side, and she hears a drawer slide on its runners. Levi straightens up with a small iron box in his hands. Tumblers click in the silence between them; she assumes he’s turning the dials on a combination lock. He opens the lid and reaches in, then pulls out his fist and opens it over his desk. Metal clacks against wood, and she stares at the three gold coins. Enough to keep Sasha and her papa in sausages for a month, with a healthy amount left over for, among other things, a meal for three with drinks at a tavern. Strong drinks. Lots of them.

“This is extremely generous of you, sir, but I don’t need quite this much,” she feels compelled to say.

“Just take it,” Levi says as he returns the lockbox to the drawer. He sounds, all of a sudden, tired. “Don’t worry about paying it back. And, for fuck’s sake, drop the ‘sir’ when it’s just you and me.”

“All right. And thank you,” Mikasa says quietly as she drops the coins into her jacket pocket.

They’re silent for another long moment as they look at one another. The moment is not devoid of tension, but neither is it marked by the grotesque awkwardness of before. She can look him in the face now and recognize the curve of her father’s cheekbones, the jut of her own nose in the mirror. (He probably sees hints of Kenny in her face, but, again, this world is cruel.) It lets her pass the time and wait him out until he feels like saying something else.

Finally, he does. “Quite a few Corpsmen send, or rather sent, most of their paychecks to their families. I … never needed all that much, so I spend some of it on my men. Rounds of drinks, extra rations, doctor’s bill for someone’s mother. Shit like that. Sometimes I’ve chipped in for expedition funding. Pisses Erwin off when I do that. Once I bought Hanji this old chemistry book some guy was selling in Trost from a blanket on the sidewalk. The rest of it, I just put aside.” His tone goes dry. “Saving for the oh-so-certain future.”

“There’s a future now,” Mikasa says.

“Or so we hope. You should have been able to trust the medics.” Amid a trace of cold disgust, the flicker of guilt is there, then gone.

She shrugs. “It’s a future. Not a fairy tale.”

One corner of his mouth pulls upward slightly, a movement so faint that a stranger could have missed it, before his mouth collapses back into its usual straight line. “You’ll join me for breakfast tomorrow,” he says.

Mikasa stares. His concept of “breakfast” is much earlier than that of anyone else in the Corps, even Erwin’s. But she’s under no illusion that he hasn’t just issued an order, rather than made a request. “Um, sure?”

“There’s no way I’m going to finish all the good tea before it goes stale, Lieutenant,” Levi says.

It’s her turn to feel the corner of her mouth twitch. It is good tea. The kind that shouldn’t be sipped alone over a stack of death letters, but broken out and shared with kin.

“I’ll see you at zero four thirty, then, Captain,” she says, fist pressed to her heart. Then she swings around, expensive sausages and fine vine clinking in her pocket, and goes looking for Armin and Sasha.