# Chapter 1: Echoes of the Past and Awkw...

# Chapter 1: Echoes of the Past and Awkw...

Audio by Paper2Audio

# Chapter 1: Echoes of the Past and Awkward Presents

The auditorium smelled like chalk dust and the particular mildew of old velvet seats, and sixteen-year-old Allison Craver had situated herself exactly four rows back from where the graduating class sat, because four rows back gave her a clean, unobstructed sightline to the third seat from the left in the second row, which belonged to a boy named Erwin Smith.

She hadn't meant to memorize his seat number. It had simply happened, the way certain facts imprint themselves on a person without permission — the capital of a country she'd never visit, the lyrics to a song she hated, the exact seat where the smartest, kindest, most maddeningly composed boy in the entire upper school sat during mandatory assemblies.

He was eighteen. She was sixteen. In the vast, unbridgeable arithmetic of adolescence, that gap might as well have been a canyon, and Allison — despite being, by near-universal agreement among the underclassmen, the single most charming girl in her year, a girl who had once talked a substitute teacher into letting the whole class skip a pop quiz by complimenting his tie in four different, deeply specific ways — could not, for the life of her, get Erwin Smith to look at her twice.

It wasn't that he was unkind. That was the unbearable part. If he'd been cold, or arrogant, or even just oblivious in the generic way tall handsome boys were often permitted to be, she could have written him off as a type and moved on to someone who deserved her attention.

But he wasn't a type. He was the boy who stayed after class to help the physics teacher carry equipment back to the supply closet. He was the boy who noticed when the new transfer student sat alone at lunch and, without a shred of performance in it, simply sat down across from her and asked about her old school. He was, infuriatingly, principled in a way that made every other boy in the building look like a poorly assembled imitation of a person.

Allison had watched him for the better part of two years the way one watches weather — with a kind of helpless, ongoing attention that never resulted in anything, because the storm never noticed you watching it.

She'd tried, exactly once, to talk to him directly. It had been in the library, of all places, over a returned book, and she had spent four minutes constructing what she believed to be a perfectly disarming opening line about the novel he was holding — something clever, something that would make him laugh and then look at her, really look at her, the way boys looked at girls in the books she read under her blankets with a flashlight.

What came out of her mouth instead was: "Is that book good? I mean — is it. Sad? I heard it's sad. Are you sad."

Erwin Smith had blinked at her, entirely unbothered, and said, "It's a little sad, yeah," and then he had smiled — a genuine, warm, completely un-self-conscious smile — and gone back to reading, and Allison had walked directly into a shelf of encyclopedias on her way out of the library because she'd forgotten, momentarily, how legs worked.

She never told anyone about that. It sat in her chest like a smooth stone for two more years, polished by repeated handling, until she graduated, aged out of a school she'd never see him in again, and packed the memory away along with her yearbooks and her retainer and the general architecture of who she'd been before everything changed.

---

The training yard at the 104th's temporary garrison did not smell like chalk dust. It smelled like sweat, and leather oil, and the ozone tang that lingered in the air after a full day of gas-propelled gear, and Allison Craver, two years and one entire apocalypse-adjacent worldview shift later, stood at attention in a line of exhausted, filthy recruits and tried very hard not to think about libraries.

She had made it. That was the thing she kept circling back to, in the small hours when her body ached too much to sleep — she had actually made it through training. Eighteen years old, top handling scores in her cohort despite a build better suited to a dance recital than a battlefield, decent with a blade, exceptional at reading the exact tone a superior officer wanted to hear before they'd finished the sentence. She'd learned, over the course of those brutal two years, that the same skill that had failed her so spectacularly with one specific boy in one specific library worked flawlessly on almost everyone else alive. Instructors. Quartermasters. The boy who ran the mess hall rotation and could, if properly flattered about the seasoning on a particular stew, be persuaded to slide her an extra roll.

She could read people. Not in some mystical sense — she wasn't a fortune teller — but in the ordinary, exhausting, endlessly useful sense of paying close attention to what people wanted to be told about themselves and then telling them that, precisely, convincingly, with just enough warmth behind it that it never curdled into obvious manipulation. It had gotten her out of two written reprimands, into the good graces of nearly every instructor who mattered, and once, memorably, an entire extra hour of sleep when a night-watch commander had been persuaded that Allison covering for a friend's shift was actually his own brilliant scheduling idea.

She was, by the unanimous and slightly bitter consensus of her squadmates, a menace. A lovable one, but a menace.

So when the graduation ceremony assignments were posted — when the new recruits of the 104th were finally told which branch would absorb them, which uniform they'd be buried in if it came to that — Allison had scanned the roster for the Scout Regiment with the mild, resigned dread of someone who'd chosen the branch with the worst life expectancy in the entire military, and then her eyes had landed on a name at the top of the regiment's current command structure, and every functioning thought in her head had simply stopped.

*Commander Erwin Smith.*

She stood very still in the assignment hall for a full ten seconds, holding her own paperwork, waiting for the universe to clarify whether this was a joke.

It was not a joke. Erwin Smith — the boy from the library, the boy from seat three, row two, the boy whose smile she had catalogued and re-catalogued in the privacy of her own skull for two solid years and then very deliberately tried to forget — was not merely alive and well and serving in the Scout Regiment. He was *running* it. He had somehow, in the span of a few years, gone from a tall, kind eighteen-year-old with excellent posture to the youngest commander the Scouts had fielded in a generation, a man whose name recruits spoke with the specific hush usually reserved for weather systems and religious figures.

"You're staring at the wall," said Petra Ral, who had somehow ended up beside her in the assignment line and had apparently been watching Allison's face do something alarming for several seconds. "Are you having a stroke?"

"I might be," Allison said honestly.

She did not tell Petra why. She barely let herself examine it. It was, she reasoned, simply a coincidence — a strange, cosmic joke, nothing more — and she was eighteen now, not sixteen, and she did not walk into shelves of encyclopedias anymore, and she had two years of hard-won social competence under her belt that the library version of herself could not have dreamed of. She could handle seeing Erwin Smith again. She could, in fact, probably handle *talking* to him, like a normal adult, without a single humiliating incident.

She was wrong about this almost immediately.

---

The first official briefing for new Scout transfers took place in a low stone room that had clearly been designed for function rather than comfort — long table, hard benches, a single window that let in a shaft of grey afternoon light that did nothing to soften the room's utilitarian bones. Allison arrived seven minutes early, which she told herself was professionalism and which was, in fact, an elaborate exercise in trying to control exactly how she would be standing, sitting, and breathing when Commander Smith walked in.

She had it all planned. She would be composed. She would make brief, confident eye contact when introductions were made, offer a warm but not overeager smile, and afterward — later, at some appropriately casual moment — she would find a way to speak to him that showcased her competence, her wit, her general delightfulness, without any of the flailing, over-corrected desperation of her sixteen-year-old self.

Erwin Smith walked in eleven minutes later than scheduled, apologized briefly and sincerely for the delay, and Allison discovered that two years, an apocalypse, and considerable personal growth had done absolutely nothing to protect her nervous system from the specific effect this man had on it.

He was taller than she remembered. His voice was lower, steadier, carrying the quiet authority of someone who had learned, the hard way, exactly how much volume a room actually required. He moved through the introductions with the same unhurried warmth she remembered from the library — asking each new transfer a real question about themselves, listening to the answer like it mattered, which, unfairly, made every recruit in the room fall a little bit in love with him on the spot, Allison included, though she suspected she had a two-year head start on everyone else in that particular race.

When he reached her — "Craver, was it? Allison Craver?" — she opened her mouth with the full intention of saying something charming.

What came out was: "Yes. That's — yes. I'm her. I mean, I'm me. I'm Allison."

Erwin blinked, the exact same unbothered blink from the library, four years and a lifetime later, and said, mildly, "Good to have you with us, Allison," before moving to the next name on his list.

Allison sat back down very slowly and stared at the tabletop like it had personally betrayed her.

*I'm her. I mean, I'm me.* She had gone eighteen years without a single instance of forgetting her own identity mid-sentence, and this man had managed to do it to her twice, four years apart, with no memory whatsoever of the first occasion.

"You okay?" murmured the recruit beside her — a broad-shouldered boy named Oluo who she'd exchanged maybe six words with total. "You look like you saw a ghost."

"I saw something," Allison muttered. "Not sure what yet."

---

It did not get better over the following days. If anything, it got worse, because proximity to Erwin Smith turned out to be a far more sustained and undermining force than the occasional glimpse across a school hallway had ever been. He was *everywhere* — striding through the courtyard with a stack of reports, standing at the head of every strategy briefing, appearing without warning in the mess hall to check on morale among the new transfers with the specific, unshowy attentiveness of a man who genuinely believed his soldiers' wellbeing was his responsibility and not merely his job.

Allison, who had successfully flirted a spare uniform jacket out of a supply sergeant twice her age within her first week of basic training, who had once talked her way past an entire checkpoint of increasingly suspicious military police by complimenting a guard's ability to spot forged paperwork, found herself utterly unable to execute a single one of her usual maneuvers around this specific man.

She tried anyway. That was, perhaps, the most humiliating part — she did not have the sense to simply stop trying, because some sixteen-year-old part of her still believed that if she could just land one good moment, one clean interaction where she said the right thing in the right tone, something might shift.

The first attempt happened three days into her assignment, in the corridor outside the strategy room, where she had positioned herself with what she believed was casual, unplanned timing to intercept him on his way out of a briefing.

"Commander Smith," she said, falling into step beside him with a smile she'd practiced in a water trough that morning. "I heard the eastern patrol route got restructured. Really smart call, if I'm being honest — the old route left the flank exposed for way too long near the ravine."

This was, in fact, a genuinely intelligent observation, one she'd overheard two veteran Scouts discussing and had quietly filed away for exactly this purpose. Erwin glanced at her with something that might have been mild surprise.

"That's a fair read of it," he said. "Have you studied the regional maps?"

"A little," Allison said, and then, because the silence stretched half a second too long and her nerve endings began screaming at her to fill it with *something*, she added, "You have really good instincts. For maps. And also generally. I've heard that. About you. Generally."

Erwin's expression did something complicated — not quite amused, not quite concerned, somewhere in the specific territory reserved for a superior officer trying to determine whether a new recruit was having some kind of medical episode.

"...Thank you," he said, slowly, and excused himself to a meeting that Allison was fairly sure did not exist.

She stood in the corridor afterward, replacing the words *generally, about you, generally* in her head on an agonizing loop, and briefly considered whether it might be more dignified to request a transfer to the Garrison Regiment and simply never speak to this man again.

She did not request a transfer. She tried again four days later — an attempt involving a comment about weather patterns that somehow, through a series of verbal missteps she could not later fully reconstruct, ended with her informing Commander Smith that she personally found overcast days "very trustworthy," a sentence that meant nothing, that she was fairly sure had never meant anything in the history of language, and that caused Erwin to simply nod once, say "I'll take your word for it," and walk away at a pace only slightly faster than strictly necessary.

It was, by any objective measure, baffling. Allison Craver did not fumble conversations. Allison Craver had once gotten a grieving widow to donate to a fundraiser by finding, within ninety seconds of meeting her, the exact story about her late husband that would make the woman feel truly *seen* rather than merely solicited. Allison Craver read rooms the way other people read the weather — instinctively, constantly, without conscious effort — and used what she found there like a key cut for every lock she ever met.

Except this one. This lock simply would not turn, and the not-turning made her reckless in a way she wasn't proud of, made her overcorrect and overthink and occasionally, in the privacy of her own bunk, quietly despair.

---

Her bunk, incidentally, was a disaster, and had been since day one of her transfer.

It was a fact Allison felt zero shame about and would have vigorously denied if confronted, which were, she recognized, two entirely contradictory positions to hold simultaneously, and yet she held them anyway with total conviction. Half-finished crochet projects draped over every available surface — she'd been three days into a soft cream-colored shawl when the schedule got restructured and she simply never returned to it, so it sat, permanently paused, over the back of her single chair like a small abandoned cloud. Loose sheet music, hand-copied flute arrangements she'd been slowly building since basic training, fanned out across her desk in a configuration that made sense only to her. A tin of spare buttons.

Two mismatched socks that had achieved a kind of permanent, unresolved orbit around her cot. And Willy — her enormous, perpetually unbothered white cat, who had somehow survived the transfer process by being smuggled in supply crates with the good-natured collusion of at least four separate soldiers who found him charming enough to risk minor disciplinary action — currently asleep in the exact center of a pile of her low-rise trousers, purring with the smug satisfaction of an animal who knew he was, structurally, off-limits to punishment.

"You are the worst roommate I could have possibly been assigned," Allison informed him, not for the first time, dropping onto her cot beside the pile he'd claimed. "You know that, right? You're aware."

Willy opened one eye, assessed her, and closed it again.

She'd clean it up eventually — she always did, in dramatic, focused bursts, usually the night before an inspection or the rare occasion someone she actually wanted to impress might see the space. Her room at home had operated on the exact same principle her entire life: chaos as a resting state, immaculate order as a costume she put on for company. Her mother had found this maddening. Her father had found it charming, in the years before he stopped being around to find anything about her at all.

She didn't think about her parents much these days. There wasn't room for it, not with the world the way it was, not with training schedules and expedition briefings eating every hour that grief might otherwise have colonized. It was easier, mostly, to let the ache live somewhere quiet and unattended, the way she let her room stay messy — not gone, just deferred.

Tonight, though, deferred grief and deferred cleaning both took a back seat to the specific, circular misery of replaying her own conversational failures.

She picked up her flute instead. It was the one thing she did that required no audience, no performance, no careful calibration of what someone else wanted to hear — just her, and the instrument, and whatever came out of it. She played something slow and unstructured, more feeling than melody, the kind of thing she'd never perform for anyone because it wasn't *for* anyone, and let the sound fill the small stone room until the humiliation of the day softened at its edges into something almost bearable.

Down the corridor, muffled by two closed doors and considerable distance, the faint, unplaceable sound of a flute drifted past a short, sharp-eyed man doing paperwork by lamplight, who noted it the way he noted most background noise in his life — briefly, dismissively, without any particular interest in its source — before returning to the stack of requisition forms that would, within the week, begin to pile up rather more than usual, for reasons he did not yet understand and would, before long, find extremely irritating.

He did not know her name yet. He had heard it — *Craver* — mentioned in passing, attached vaguely to some complaint about the interior offices, and had filed it away the same way he filed away most administrative noise: as a problem that would either resolve itself or eventually land on his desk.

It would, as it turned out, land on his desk. Just not yet.

For now, Levi Ackerman finished his stack of paperwork, banked his lamp, and went to sleep in a room three doors down from a girl he did not yet know was about to become the single largest disruption to his schedule in recent memory — and, though neither of them could have guessed it that first exhausted week, considerably more than that, eventually, though *eventually* was doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and would go on doing so for a long, long time yet.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,750)*

# Chapter 2: The Logistics of Disruption

By the end of her second week with the Scouts, Allison Craver had acquired a reputation, and it was, by any reasonable standard, a very good one.

It had started small — a joke traded with a quartermaster that resulted in her getting first pick of a fresh batch of gear straps instead of the picked-over leftovers new transfers usually got. Then it grew, the way reputations do in close quarters among bored, exhausted soldiers with nothing to gossip about except each other: someone mentioned that Craver could talk her way into anything, and someone else confirmed it with a story of their own, and within ten days Allison had become a kind of local legend, half-admired and half-resented in the specific way people always resent someone whose gift makes their own life easier by extension.

"Tell me how you did it," Sasha Blouse begged her over dinner, staring at the extra portion of stew Allison had somehow acquired without any of the usual line-standing or ration-card negotiation. "Tell me your secret. I'll do anything."

"There's no secret," Allison said, which was a lie, though not really — the secret wasn't a trick, exactly, it was just attention. She'd noticed the cook's assistant had a bandaged hand, had asked about it with what appeared to be casual concern, had listened — actually listened — to the story about the burn from a cracked kettle, had said something quietly sympathetic that made the boy feel, for one small moment in an otherwise thankless job, like someone had actually seen him do something hard. The extra stew had followed naturally, an afterthought, a small kindness returned for a smaller one given.

It worked on almost everyone. Sasha, easily, over food. Connie, over half-genuine flattery about his handling scores.

Jean, who pretended to be unmoved by charm and was in fact the single easiest mark in the entire regiment provided you complimented his blade maintenance. Even Mikasa, cold and self-contained as she was, had once given Allison a rare, small nod of approval after Allison correctly guessed, from nothing more than the tension in her shoulders and the specific way she kept glancing toward a certain green-eyed recruit, that something was bothering her about Aren.

It did not work, notably and infuriatingly, on two people: Commander Erwin Smith, for reasons of Allison's own deeply personal malfunction, and Captain Levi Ackerman, for reasons that had nothing to do with Allison at all and everything to do with the simple, immovable fact that Levi Ackerman did not appear to register charm as a category of human behavior worth reacting to.

She had not tried on Levi specifically. There had been no occasion to. He existed, as far as she understood him in those first weeks, primarily as a name attached to terrifying rumors — the strongest soldier alive, humanity's last hope, a man who had personally ended more lives, titan and otherwise, than entire squads combined — and as a short, precise, permanently unimpressed figure she occasionally passed in corridors, moving with the specific economy of motion of someone who had never once in his life taken an unnecessary step.

He did not know her at all, and this, as it turned out, was about to become a significant problem for both of them.

---

The trouble began, as most administrative disasters do, quietly and without anyone noticing until it had already compounded several times over.

Allison's continued campaign to charm Commander Smith required proximity, and proximity to Commander Smith meant proximity to Commander Smith's schedule, which was a dense, tightly-managed thing that left very few gaps for a new recruit to insert herself into casually. So Allison, resourceful as ever, had begun finding those gaps — lingering near the strategy room ten minutes before briefings under the pretense of reviewing notes, positioning herself in the corridor outside his office during the narrow window between his morning meetings, angling for brief, "accidental" run-ins that she hoped, each time, might finally land the way she wanted them to.

They never did. But they did, reliably, take up time — his time, and by extension, the time of everyone whose day was structured around his.

The first casualty was a supply requisition that sat unsigned for an extra forty minutes because Erwin had been cornered in a hallway by a recruit earnestly, if incoherently, praising his handling of a border dispute with the Garrison that she had, in fact, misunderstood the details of entirely. The second was a scheduling conflict between two squad leaders that should have been resolved in a five-minute exchange and instead took twenty, because Erwin had spent the preceding fifteen minutes politely extracting himself from a conversation about, of all things, the trustworthiness of overcast weather.

None of these delays were individually significant. Strung together, day after day, they began to form a pattern, and patterns were the sort of thing that eventually landed, with quiet, deteriorating inevitability, on the desk of the one person in the regiment responsible for making sure the machinery of command kept running on schedule regardless of whatever else was happening in the world.

That person was Levi.

He noticed it first as a vague irritation — a report delivered later than it should have been, an office door he needed access to still occupied by Erwin fielding some unnecessary conversation, a fifteen-minute gap in his own tightly managed day that had no business existing. He noticed it a second time as a pattern, the kind of low hum of dysfunction that his brain, trained by years of keeping an entire regiment functional under threat of extinction, could not simply let go unexamined. And he noticed it a third time, with real and specific annoyance, when an entire strategic briefing on eastern patrol routes ran nineteen minutes behind because Erwin had spent the preceding quarter hour being cornered by — Levi checked the duty roster, scanning for the name attached to the disruption everyone kept vaguely gesturing toward without actually identifying — a recruit named Craver.

"Who," Levi said flatly, to Hange, who happened to be in the room reorganizing a set of specimen jars with the kind of chaotic energy that made even Allison's crochet-strewn bunk look positively disciplined, "is Craver."

"Oh, Allison?" Hange did not look up from the jars. "New transfer. Very sweet. Terrifyingly good with people, actually — I watched her talk Oluo out of an entire disciplinary write-up last week just by asking about his sword grip. Why?"

"Because she keeps costing me time I don't have," Levi said, "and I don't know what she looks like."

This was, in fact, entirely true, and would remain true for another several days, which was itself a small, almost comic irony — the single most efficient man in the regiment had spent over a week being quietly inconvenienced by a girl whose face he could not have picked out of a lineup, whose name existed for him only as an abstract source of scheduling chaos, a rumor of a person rather than an actual one.

Hange, delighted by this, did not offer to fix the problem. "You'll figure it out," they said cheerfully, which was the kind of unhelpful answer Levi had come to expect from Hange on principle.

---

Erwin, for his part, remained entirely and genuinely baffled by the entire situation, in the specific way that only a deeply intelligent, perceptive man could be baffled by something directly in front of him, provided the thing directly in front of him happened to be his own blind spot.

He had noticed Allison Craver, certainly — it would have been difficult not to, given how often she seemed to appear in his immediate vicinity, offering comments that ranged from genuinely sharp tactical observations to statements so strange he found himself turning them over in his head hours later, trying to extract some meaning he might have missed. *Very trustworthy, overcast days.* He still didn't know what to do with that one.

What he had not concluded, not even once, not even as a passing hypothesis, was that any of this behavior constituted flirtation.

This was not because Erwin was unfamiliar with flirtation. He had, over the years, been on the receiving end of plenty of it — from other officers, from visiting dignitaries' daughters during the rare social functions his position required him to attend, from soldiers under his own command who occasionally forgot, briefly and harmlessly, that he was their superior officer before remembering it again. He recognized the shape of the thing.

Allison's behavior did not fit that shape. It fit, instead, the shape of someone who disliked him — someone circling him with a strange, tense energy, offering comments that felt less like charm and more like probing, searching, almost accusatory. It did not occur to him that this was because Allison, so effortlessly capable of reading and disarming everyone else in her orbit, became a stammering, overcorrecting disaster specifically and only around him. He simply registered the disaster and drew the only conclusion available to a man who had never once considered himself the kind of person girls got flustered over: that Craver, for reasons unknown, harbored some obscure grievance against him.

"I genuinely don't understand it," he admitted to Hange one evening, over the specimen jars that had, by now, migrated to his office in a small chaotic colony. "She seeks me out constantly. Says things that don't track. And then she just — leaves. Abruptly. Like she's angry."

"Erwin," Hange said, in the patient tone of someone speaking to a very smart child who had nonetheless failed a very obvious test, "has it occurred to you that maybe she's not angry?"

"Then what is she?"

Hange looked at him for a long moment, visibly debating whether the effort of explaining was worth it, and ultimately decided it was not. "You'll figure it out," they said, which was, Erwin noted with real frustration, exactly what they'd told Levi the week before about an entirely different piece of the same puzzle, though neither man yet knew the other had asked.

"Do you think she has some kind of vendetta?" Erwin pressed, entirely serious. "Against me, specifically? I've been trying to think what I might have done —"

Hange laughed so hard they nearly knocked over a jar. "A vendetta," they repeated, delighted. "Sure, Erwin. A vendetta."

He did not find this reassuring. If anything, Hange's continued refusal to simply answer the question made him more certain that something was going on that he was failing to grasp, and Erwin Smith did not, as a rule, enjoy failing to grasp things.

---

Levi's own investigation into the Craver problem, meanwhile, proceeded with rather more efficiency, though considerably less curiosity, because Levi did not actually care *why* the disruptions were happening — only that they stop.

He finally put a face to the name on the ninth day, in the mess hall, when Hange pointed across the room with a spoon and said, unhelpfully mid-bite, "That's her, by the way. Craver."

Levi followed the gesture and found a girl — tall, he registered first, taller than him by a couple of inches, which was not in itself remarkable, since most people were — sitting with a cluster of other recruits, laughing at something one of them had said with the kind of unguarded, full-bodied laugh that took up more space than Levi generally found tolerable in a mess hall. Long blonde hair pulled back in a hasty braid. Animated hands. A general air of someone who had never once, in her entire life, considered the possibility of sitting still.

She did not look, to Levi's clinical assessment, like a threat to anything. She looked like exactly what Hange had described — sweet, a little chaotic, entirely unthreatening — which made the ongoing scheduling disaster she was apparently responsible for all the more baffling and, if he was honest, all the more irritating. It was one thing to lose time to an actual problem. It was another to lose it to someone who looked like she'd never done a difficult calculation in her life.

He filed her face away with the same clipped efficiency he filed away most information he needed and did not particularly want, and made a private note to deal with the situation directly, at the earliest convenient opportunity, before it cost him any more of his exceedingly finite patience.

That opportunity arrived four days later, when a particularly important set of interior correspondence — paperwork that needed Erwin's signature and needed it that afternoon, no later, no exceptions — sat waiting an entire hour because Erwin had been cornered yet again, this time over some entirely fabricated concern about troop morale that Allison had constructed, on the spot, out of thin panic when she realized she'd run out of anything real to say to him.

Levi stood outside the strategy room with the folder of unsigned correspondence in his hand, listening through the door to Allison's voice growing increasingly strained as she tried, and failed, to extract herself gracefully from a conversation she had started and could no longer justify continuing, and felt something in his patience finally, quietly, snap.

*Enough,* he thought, with the specific, focused clarity of a man arriving at a decision. *This ends today.*

He had no particular plan for how, exactly, it would end. He simply knew, standing there with an hour of his day gone to a girl he'd exchanged a total of zero words with, that some kind of conversation was now unavoidable — a conversation he anticipated with all the enthusiasm of a man anticipating a root canal, and which would, though he could not have predicted this in the moment, end up reshaping the next several months of both their lives rather more thoroughly than either of them expected.

For now, though, it was simply an appointment he intended to keep, and keep soon, because Levi Ackerman did not let inefficiency fester, and Allison Craver — whoever she actually was, whatever was actually driving her strange, repeated failures around Erwin — had become, without either of them quite realizing it yet, the single largest source of inefficiency in his otherwise ruthlessly organized life.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,050)*

# Chapter 3: The Transactional Pact

The confrontation, when it finally came, did not happen the way Allison would have imagined it, if she had ever imagined it at all, which she had not, because it had genuinely not occurred to her that her ongoing disaster with Erwin might have a witness — let alone a witness who kept meticulous, furious mental records of exactly how much time she'd cost him.

She was summoned, not asked, to Captain Ackerman's office on a grey afternoon nine days into her transfer, via a curt note delivered by a nervous-looking cadet who seemed personally relieved not to be the one facing whatever was waiting behind that door. Allison read the note twice, found nothing in its four clipped words — *My office. Now. —L.A.* — that explained anything, and spent the walk over running through a list of possible offenses she might have committed, none of which, tellingly, included the actual reason.

The office itself was exactly what she'd have predicted if she'd ever bothered to predict it: small, spare, aggressively tidy, every surface either bare or occupied by something with an obvious and singular function. No personal effects. No decoration. A stack of paperwork squared off with a precision that looked less like organization and more like a small, silent threat.

Levi Ackerman sat behind the desk, and did not look up when she entered.

"Craver," he said, which was not a greeting so much as a confirmation of identity, delivered in a flat, unhurried tone that somehow managed to convey both total disinterest in her as a person and total, focused attention on whatever problem she represented.

"That's me," Allison said, and then, unable to help herself, "Sir. Captain. Sir."

"Sit down."

She sat. He still hadn't looked up. She used the pause to actually examine him properly for the first time — she'd seen him in passing, of course, everyone had, but she had never been close enough or still enough to catalog him the way she catalogued nearly everyone else she met within the first ninety seconds of meeting them. Dark hair, sharp undercut. Pale, unreadable eyes that gave away absolutely nothing, which was itself unusual — most people's eyes gave away *something*, some flicker of interest or boredom or calculation that Allison could use, a foothold to build a read from.

His face offered her nothing. It was, she noted with a strange, prickling discomfort, the single most closed-off expression she had ever encountered on a living person.

He was, she also noted, considerably shorter than her — she'd clocked that from the corridor sightings, but sitting across from him now, even seated, the compact, coiled economy of his frame was obvious in a way that had nothing to do with his height and everything to do with how he held himself, like a blade kept permanently, precisely sheathed.

"Do you know why you're here," Levi said. It wasn't really a question.

"I have several theories," Allison said honestly. "None of them good."

"You've cost me," Levi said, finally looking up, and the flat directness of his gaze made Allison's carefully assembled composure falter slightly, "one hour and forty-three minutes over the past nine days."

Allison blinked. "I'm sorry, *what?*"

"One hour and forty-three minutes," he repeated, with the exact same tone a shopkeeper might use to recite an unpaid bill, "of Commander Smith's time, which is my time, because his schedule is my problem, cornered in hallways being told things that don't make sense by a recruit whose name I didn't even know until four days ago. Requisitions delayed. Briefings starting late. A supply dispute that should've taken five minutes and took twenty because you'd decided, apparently, that the Commander needed to hear your feelings about the weather."

Allison felt her face go instantly, thoroughly red. There was something uniquely mortifying about hearing her most humiliating conversational disasters read back to her in a clipped, itemized list by a total stranger, as though her attempts at charm had been formally logged in some ledger of institutional inefficiency.

"That's — I can explain that," she said, though she had, in fact, no explanation that did not involve admitting to a four-year-old crush she had told absolutely no one about.

"I don't want an explanation," Levi said. "I want it to stop."

"Right. Of course. It'll stop." She said this with more conviction than she felt, because she knew, even as the words left her mouth, that stopping was not actually something she had any intention of doing — not really, not when she was this close to a version of Erwin Smith who existed in the same building as her, breethd the same recycled barracks air, occasionally looked directly at her even if he never seemed to understand why she was there.

Levi studied her for a long moment, and something in his expression — not quite softening, more like recalculating — shifted almost imperceptibly.

"No, it won't," he said, flatly. "You're going to keep trying. I can see it on your face."

Allison opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again, because he was, infuriatingly, correct, and there did not seem to be much point lying to a man who had apparently already read her more accurately in thirty seconds than most people managed in a month — which was, she registered with a small, uncomfortable jolt, a genuinely novel experience. She read people. People did not, generally, read her back. It was disorienting in a way she didn't have a category for yet.

"...Okay," she admitted. "You're not wrong."

"Then here's what's going to happen," Levi said, in the tone of a man laying out terms he had clearly already decided on before she'd even walked through the door, which meant this entire confrontation had never actually been about whether something would change, only about how. "You're bad at this. Whatever it is you're trying to do with Erwin, you're doing it badly, and it's making a mess of my schedule. I happen to know exactly what Erwin likes, what he responds to, what actually gets his attention instead of just making him think you've got some kind of grudge against him."

Allison's mouth fell open. "Wait — he thinks I have a *grudge?*"

"He thinks you might be plotting something," Levi said, with the flat, weary patience of a man reciting an absurdity he found tedious rather than funny. "I told him that was stupid. He didn't believe me."

"Oh my god," Allison said, and put her face in her hands.

"So," Levi continued, unmoved by her mortification, "I'll tell you what he actually likes. How to talk to him without making yourself sound unhinged. In exchange, you take half my paperwork load — every requisition form, every supply log, every report that crosses my desk, split evenly, starting today — until this is resolved, one way or another."

Allison lowered her hands slowly and stared at him. "You're offering to help me flirt with Erwin. In exchange for paperwork."

"I'm offering to make you stop costing me time," Levi corrected. "The flirting is your problem. I just want my schedule back."

It was, Allison would reflect later, one of the strangest and most efficient transactions she had ever been party to — an entire romantic campaign reduced, by this small, terrifyingly composed man, to a straightforward exchange of labor, as though feelings were simply another category of inefficient administrative burden to be optimized away.

"Deal," she said instantly, because whatever the terms, whatever the layer of secondhand humiliation involved in having her own incompetence formally diagnosed and then formally addressed by Erwin's own second-in-command, the offer itself was — genuinely, actually — exactly what she needed. "When do we start?"

"Now," Levi said, and pushed half the stack of paperwork on his desk directly across to her side of the table without further ceremony. "Chronological order. Oldest requisitions first. If you fall behind, the deal's off."

---

The first working session established, within its opening twenty minutes, the fundamental and apparently permanent incompatibility of their respective approaches to literally everything.

"This isn't in order," Levi said, not looking up from his own stack, several minutes into the silence.

"It is in order," Allison said. "It's in *my* order."

"There's only one order. Chronological. By date received."

"That's a boring order," Allison said. "I've got the urgent stuff on top — see, this one's flagged, this one's not, I did it with —" she held up a small loop of pale yellow yarn, tied neatly around the corner of one report, "— thread. Color-coded. Red's urgent, yellow's routine, blue's basically nothing."

Levi looked at the yarn like it had personally offended him. "You tied *thread* to Scout Regiment supply requisitions."

"It's very efficient."

"It's insane."

"It's a *system,* Captain—"

"It's chaos wearing a system's clothes," Levi said, and reached over, without asking, to remove the yarn from the top document and set it deliberately aside, restoring the stack to what he clearly considered its correct, God-given chronological order. Allison watched this happen with the particular offense of someone whose entire creative process had just been physically dismantled in front of her.

"You can't just — that took me *time,*" she said.

"Then you wasted time," Levi said, unbothered, already moving to the next form.

It went on like that, low-grade and constant, for the better part of two hours — not a fight, exactly, more a kind of running friction, the sound two entirely different operating systems made grinding against each other in close quarters. Allison filled the silences; Levi tolerated them, barely, in the specific clipped way of a man for whom silence was the natural and preferred state of any room he occupied. She asked him questions he answered in as few words as physically possible. He corrected her paperwork with a red pen and zero softening commentary. At one point she made herself a cup of coffee from the small kettle in the corner of his office — milk-heavy, so pale it was closer to beige than brown — and he looked at it with an expression of such profound, silent disgust that she nearly laughed out loud.

"What," she said.

"Nothing," Levi said, and went back to his forms, though his jaw remained tight in a way that suggested the coffee had, in fact, deeply offended some private principle of his.

It was well past midnight, the two of them still working through the backlog by lamplight, when the small, strange thing happened — the thing Allison would turn over later, privately, without ever quite admitting to herself why it stuck the way it did.

They both reached, at exactly the same moment, for the shared inkwell sitting at the center of the desk between them — her hand moving to refill her pen, his moving to do the same — and their fingers brushed, briefly, entirely by accident, knuckle against knuckle in the space above the ink.

Neither of them moved for a half-second too long.

It wasn't anything. It couldn't have been anything — a shared inkwell, two tired hands, the most mundane possible point of contact between two people forced into close quarters by an administrative arrangement neither of them had particularly wanted. And yet Allison found herself looking up, without meaning to, and found Levi already looking at her, his pale eyes catching hers with an intensity that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with simple, startled surprise — the visceral, animal awareness of unexpected contact, nothing more, she told herself immediately, firmly, the way she'd tell a cadet to stand down.

They both pulled their hands back at the same moment, too quickly, and Allison felt an odd, unfamiliar heat crawl up the back of her neck that she attributed, immediately and with great conviction, to the lateness of the hour and nothing whatsoever else.

"Get the ink yourself next time," Levi said, gruffly, and reached for his own pen again as though nothing at all had happened, his voice perfectly level, betraying nothing.

"Fine," Allison said, a beat too fast, and went back to her stack without looking up again.

They worked in silence after that — a different silence than before, though neither of them could have said exactly how, or would have admitted it if asked — until the paperwork was finally, mercifully done, and Allison gathered her things to leave sometime past one in the morning, bone-tired, ink-stained, and no closer to understanding Erwin Smith than she'd been that morning, though she'd acquired, without quite realizing it yet, something else entirely: the first thread of a strange, prickling, entirely unwanted awareness of the short, humorless, impossibly precise man across the desk from her, who had read her more accurately in one evening than most people managed in months, and who did not, infuriatingly, seem to be able to be read back.

"Same time tomorrow," Levi said, as she reached the door, not a question.

"Same time tomorrow," Allison agreed, and stepped out into the cold corridor, telling herself, with the same firm, unconvincing conviction she'd used on the inkwell moment ten minutes before, that this arrangement was purely, entirely, exclusively about Erwin, and would remain that way indefinitely.

She was eighteen years old, and she was, for possibly the first time in her life, wrong about something she felt completely certain of.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,150)*

# Chapter 4: The Art of Observation

The arrangement, once it had a week behind it, developed the particular rhythm of a routine that neither party had planned to enjoy and both, privately, had begun to structure their days around without admitting it.

It went like this: Allison finished her regular duties — drills, gear maintenance, the occasional supply run — by early evening, and by the time the dinner bell rang through the mess hall she was already peeling away from her squadmates, ignoring Sasha's increasingly theatrical questions about where she disappeared to every night, and making her way down the narrow stone corridor to the smallest, tidiest office in the entire garrison. Levi was always there before her. He was, as far as Allison could tell, always everywhere before everyone, as though he considered arriving anywhere at a normal human pace to be a personal failure.

The first hour was paperwork, always. Requisition forms, supply logs, expedition manifests, the endless bureaucratic undercurrent that kept an entire regiment fed, armed, and functional, none of which Allison had ever considered before joining the Scouts and all of which she now understood, with the weary clarity of someone drowning slowly in it, to be the actual, unglamorous bulk of military life. The second hour — sometimes longer, depending on how badly her most recent attempt with Erwin had gone — was devoted to what Levi refused, on principle, to call "flirting lessons," and what Allison had taken to calling exactly that specifically because she knew it irritated him.

"We are not having a *lesson,*" Levi said, for what felt like the hundredth time, on the evening this particular chapter of their arrangement properly began. "I'm giving you information. That's it."

"That's what a lesson is, Captain."

"A lesson implies I enjoy teaching it."

"Do you not?"

"No."

Allison grinned at him over the rim of her coffee mug — pale, sweet, steaming faintly in the cool office air — and did not push further, because she had learned, in her short time under his supervision, exactly how far she could push before he simply stopped answering her altogether, which was, infuriatingly, a fairly short distance. Levi Ackerman did not perform patience. What little he had, he spent efficiently and withdrew the moment he judged the return on it insufficient.

"Fine," she said instead. "Information. Lay it on me. What does the great Commander Erwin Smith actually like?"

Levi set down his pen — a small gesture, but one Allison had already learned to read as him committing actual attention to something, rather than the divided half-attention he gave most of their exchanges while simultaneously working through his own stack of forms. "He likes competence," he said. "Actual competence, not performed competence. If you tell him something and it turns out to be wrong, he doesn't forget it. He remembers who's reliable and who isn't, and he builds trust off that, slowly, over time. He doesn't respond to flattery — he responds to being useful *to*, and being *shown* something he didn't already know."

"Okay," Allison said, leaning forward, genuinely absorbing this. "What else."

"He likes quiet competence over loud confidence. He notices people who do their jobs well without making a show of it. He respects directness — if you have an opinion, say it plainly, don't dress it up in twelve layers of nonsense about the weather."

Allison winced. "You heard about the weather thing."

"Everyone heard about the weather thing," Levi said flatly. "It's become something of a legend."

"Oh my god."

"He also," Levi continued, entirely unbothered by her mortification, "has a genuine interest in old military history — strategy, specifically, from before the Walls. Reads about it in his off hours. Doesn't talk about it much because most people find it boring, but it's the fastest way to hold his attention past the first five minutes of a conversation, if you can actually discuss it instead of just nodding."

This, Allison recognized immediately, was gold — actual, usable information, the kind of specific personal detail that, in any other context, with any other target, she would have deployed flawlessly within the hour. She filed it away with the focus of someone memorizing a map before a mission.

"How do you know all this," she asked, curious despite herself. "Did he just — tell you? Over tea?"

Something flickered across Levi's face, brief and hard to name — not quite fondness, more like the specific, guarded acknowledgment of a bond he didn't discuss casually. "We've known each other a long time," he said, which was, Allison understood immediately, the full and complete extent of what she was going to get on that subject, and did not push.

"Okay," she said instead. "Strategy. History. Directness. Got it. Anything else?"

"Yeah," Levi said, standing and crossing around the desk toward her, and Allison's next question died somewhere in her throat, because this was new — he had never actually approached her before, had conducted every previous session from behind the safe, orderly boundary of his desk, and the sudden proximity recalibrated something in the room's atmosphere that she didn't have time to name before he was directly in front of her chair, studying her with the same flat, assessing focus he gave a battle map.

"Sit up straight," he said.

"I *am* sitting up straight."

"You're slouching like you're bored in a lecture." He reached out, without asking, and pressed two fingers lightly between her shoulder blades, correcting her posture with the brisk, impersonal efficiency of a drill instructor rather than anything that should have made her pulse do the small, traitorous stutter it did. "There. That's how you sit if you want to look like someone worth listening to instead of someone waiting for the conversation to end."

"Noted," Allison said, a little breathless, and hoped it read as irritation rather than whatever it actually was.

He didn't step back immediately. He studied her for another few seconds — her face, specifically, in a way that made the back of her neck go warm — and then reached out again, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear with the same brusque efficiency, as though this too were simply a correction, a technical adjustment to bring her presentation up to standard.

"You've got hair in your face constantly," he said. "It makes you look like you just rolled out of bed. Erwin notices things like that. Not because he's shallow. Because he reads it as carelessness, and carelessness reads, to him, as unreliability."

"Right," Allison said. "Carelessness. Got it."

He stepped back finally, and the room's atmosphere resettled into something closer to normal, though Allison noticed, with some private alarm, that her heart hadn't quite caught up to the recalibration.

---

The Organization Debate, as it would come to be known privately in Allison's head — capitalized, mentally, the way one capitalizes a recurring, formative argument in any long relationship — began in earnest on their fourth evening working together, and never, in any meaningful sense, ended.

It started over a stack of expedition supply logs that Allison had, with what she considered perfectly reasonable initiative, reorganized by urgency rather than the date-received order Levi insisted was the only acceptable system in existence.

"Where's the requisition for the western outpost," Levi said, flipping through the stack with visibly increasing irritation.

"It's near the bottom. It's not urgent — the outpost's fully stocked already, that one's basically just a formality."

"It's near the *bottom*," Levi repeated, in the tone of a man discovering a structural flaw in a building he'd trusted to be load-bearing, "because you reorganized my system."

"I improved your system."

"There's nothing to improve. Chronological order works. It's simple. It's consistent. Anyone can pick it up and understand it immediately."

"Chronological order doesn't tell you *anything* about what actually matters," Allison said, warming to the argument now, because if there was one thing Allison Craver genuinely enjoyed, it was defending a position she'd already half-convinced herself of through sheer conversational momentum. "You've got an urgent gear failure report sitting behind three routine supply requests just because it happened to come in a day later. That's not efficient, that's just — alphabetizing chaos and calling it a system."

"It's not alphabetized, it's chronological, those are different —"

"You know what I mean."

"I know that you tied *yarn* to military paperwork," Levi said, picking up, with visible distaste, a requisition form that still had a small loop of pale blue thread knotted around its corner. "This is a Scout Regiment supply request. Not a — a friendship bracelet."

"It's color-coded thread, and it's a perfectly legitimate organizational tool, and I'll have you know it's saved me actual time on multiple occasions."

"It's saved *you* time. It's cost me time, because now I have to translate your system back into a normal one every time I need to find something."

"Maybe you should just learn my system," Allison said, sweetly. "Might do you some good to think outside your little chronological box for once."

Levi looked at her with an expression that suggested he was seriously considering, for a brief moment, whether strangling a subordinate constituted a court-martial offense or merely a stern talking-to. "No," he said finally, with the flat, immovable conviction of a man who had never once in his adult life lost an argument by simply refusing to continue having it, and went back to reordering the stack himself, snapping the yarn off each form as he went and setting the little colored threads aside in a small, deliberately organized pile, as if to underscore, wordlessly, that he could organize things too — just correctly.

Allison watched him do this with equal parts irritation and, though she would not have admitted it under torture, a small, unwilling flicker of amusement at how seriously he was taking the destruction of her yarn system.

"You're going to run out of thread to confiscate eventually," she said.

"I sincerely hope so."

---

The Beverage War, unlike the Organization Debate, had a clear origin point, a single evening on which hostilities formally opened and from which there was no plausible path back to peace.

It began with Allison's coffee — the same pale, sugar-heavy, milk-drowned concoction she made herself most evenings from the small kettle in the corner of Levi's office, a habit he had tolerated with visible, silent disapproval for several days before finally, one evening, saying something about it.

"That's not coffee," he said, watching her stir a third spoonful of sugar into the mug. "That's dessert wearing a coffee's clothes."

"It's delicious," Allison said. "You should try it sometime. Might improve your personality."

"My personality doesn't need improving."

"Everyone's personality needs improving, Captain. Even yours. *Especially* yours."

He ignored this, which Allison had come to recognize as his version of losing an argument gracefully, and returned his attention to his own drink — a small, dark, unsweetened cup of black tea that he prepared with a precision bordering on ritual, measuring the leaves, timing the steep, discarding the first cup entirely if he judged the water even slightly too hot or too cool.

"What is *that,*" Allison said, wrinkling her nose at the smell drifting across the desk. "It smells like burnt leaves."

"It's tea."

"It smells like punishment."

"It's an acquired taste."

"It smells like something a very serious, very sad man would drink alone in a cold room while reflecting on his poor life choices," Allison said, delighted with herself, "which, incidentally, tracks."

Levi's expression did not change, but something in the set of his jaw suggested he was filing this comment away for later retaliation. "At least my drink doesn't require an entire cow's worth of milk to be tolerable," he said. "That's not coffee, Craver. That's a way of avoiding coffee while still getting the caffeine."

"It's *efficient,*" Allison shot back, delighted to have one of his own words turned against her used as ammunition. "I get the caffeine *and* dessert in one cup. That's optimization. You'd know all about optimization, wouldn't you, chronological-order man."

"Don't bring the filing system into this."

"You brought the filing system into this the second you confiscated my thread."

"That thread was compromising the integrity of Scout Regiment paperwork."

"That's the single most dramatic sentence I've ever heard about *yarn,*" Allison said, and this time she did laugh, a real laugh, loud enough that it startled even her, and Levi — for one brief, unguarded second, before he visibly caught himself and smoothed his expression back into its default flat composure — looked almost, *almost* amused, the corner of his mouth twitching in a direction that might, under significantly more forgiving lighting, have qualified as the beginning of a smile.

He covered it immediately by taking a long, deliberate sip of his tea, and Allison, watching him do it, felt an odd little warmth settle in her chest that she attributed, firmly, to the coffee, and absolutely nothing else.

---

It was nearly three in the morning, some nights later, when the evening that would come to matter more than either of them expected finally arrived — though neither of them recognized it as mattering, at the time, because it looked, from every conceivable outside angle, like nothing at all.

Allison had stayed too late. This had become something of a pattern by now — she was a night owl by nature, always had been, the kind of person whose brain woke up properly somewhere around ten and refused to wind back down until the small hours regardless of how early her duties started the next morning, and the combination of her natural rhythm and the sheer volume of paperwork the two of them had taken to splitting most evenings meant that "same time tomorrow" had quietly stretched, over the preceding week, from an early-evening arrangement into something that regularly bled past midnight.

Levi did not seem to mind, or if he did, he never said so directly — he simply kept working alongside her, matching her pace form for form, occasionally correcting her filing with a small, irritated noise that she'd started to find almost fond in its predictability.

That particular night, though, exhaustion finally caught up with her somewhere around the two-thirty mark. She'd been up since before dawn — drills, then an unscheduled equipment inspection that ran long, then dinner, then the usual paperwork session — and her body, having apparently decided it had tolerated her night-owl tendencies as far as it was willing to go, simply shut down without asking permission.

She didn't remember falling asleep. One moment she was halfway through cross-referencing a supply manifest against the previous month's totals, pen still loosely gripped in her fingers, and the next she was gone, head tipped forward, cheek resting against her folded arm on the desk, breathing slow and even in the particular boneless way of someone who has been fighting sleep for hours and finally, mercifully, lost.

Levi noticed almost immediately — the sudden absence of the small, restless sounds she made even while working, the shuffle of papers, the occasional hummed fragment of some tune she was thinking about — and looked up to find her slumped over her side of the desk, one hand still curled loosely near an unfinished form, her blonde hair falling across her face in a way that, had she been awake, she would have immediately complained obscured her from looking sufficiently competent.

He should have woken her. That was the obvious, correct, procedurally sound thing to do — she had her own bunk, her own responsibilities in the morning, and there was no legitimate reason for her to be asleep in his office at three in the morning instead of in her own bed like a reasonable person. He opened his mouth, in fact, fully intending to say her name, sharp and clipped, the way he woke recruits who'd fallen asleep on watch.

He didn't, in the end. He wasn't sure, later, why not — some combination, perhaps, of the fact that she looked genuinely, thoroughly exhausted in a way that made waking her feel less like a correction and more like a small, unnecessary cruelty, and the fact that the office, drafty as it was this time of year, had gone cold enough that he'd been considering, before she fell asleep, whether to add another log to the small stove in the corner.

He looked at her for a moment longer than strictly necessary — the slope of her shoulders, the slow, even rise and fall of her breathing, the small furrow between her brows that suggested even her sleep wasn't entirely peaceful — and then, with the same brisk, unceremonious efficiency he brought to everything else, he stood, crossed to the coat hook by the door, and took down his own Scout Regiment jacket.

He draped it over her shoulders without fanfare, tucking it loosely around her arms the way one might settle a blanket over a child, careful not to wake her, and then, satisfied that the immediate problem of her shivering — she had, he noted, been visibly shivering for the better part of twenty minutes without waking enough to register it — was resolved, he sat back down, picked up his pen, and returned to his paperwork as though nothing at all had happened.

He did not examine, closely, why he'd done it. Efficiency, he told himself. A shivering, half-asleep recruit was of no use to anyone, and if she caught a chill and ended up out sick for a week, that was simply more inefficiency added to a problem he'd already spent considerable effort resolving. It was practical. It was nothing more than that.

He worked for another hour in the quiet, glancing up periodically to confirm she was still breathing evenly, still asleep, still — and here he did not let himself finish the thought, redirecting instead to the supply manifest in front of him with rather more focus than the document strictly required.

---

Allison woke somewhere past four, disoriented, neck stiff from the angle she'd slept in, and it took her several seconds of blinking at the unfamiliar weight settled over her shoulders to register what it actually was.

It was his jacket. The Scout Regiment jacket, the one he wore every single day, currently draped over her like she was something worth the small effort of keeping warm, and it smelled — she noticed this before she noticed anything else, before she'd even fully processed what was happening — faintly of black tea and something clean and cold, like the air right after rain, and Allison sat very still for a long moment, not quite ready to move, not quite ready to examine the strange, warm, entirely unwelcome feeling unfurling low in her chest.

Levi was still at his desk, still working, though the hour and the faint shadows under his eyes suggested he hadn't slept at all. He didn't look up when she stirred.

"You fell asleep," he said, without inflection, as though narrating a minor and unremarkable fact.

"I — yeah. Sorry." She sat up properly, and the jacket slid slightly from her shoulders; she caught it before it could fall, holding it for a moment, unsure whether to hand it back immediately or whether that would somehow make the whole thing more awkward than simply not acknowledging it at all. "You didn't have to—" she gestured vaguely at the jacket, at herself, at the whole strange quiet tableau of the last several hours.

"You were shivering," Levi said, still not looking up. "Wasn't doing you any good passed out sick on top of everything else. It's not a big deal."

"Right," Allison said. "Not a big deal."

She handed it back to him a moment later, and he took it without comment, hanging it back on its hook with the same brisk efficiency he did everything, and neither of them mentioned it again — not that night, not the next day, not for a long while after — though Allison found, in the days that followed, that she kept catching, faintly, at odd unguarded moments, the memory of that particular smell: black tea, and cold clean air, and something she did not yet have a name for and was, for the time being, determined not to go looking for one.

She told herself, walking back to her own bunk in the grey pre-dawn light, that it meant nothing. He'd have done the same for anyone shivering in his office, she reasoned — it was practical, not personal, exactly the kind of clipped, efficient gesture that suited a man who measured his tea leaves to the gram and reorganized her yarn-tagged paperwork out of sheer principled irritation.

She almost believed it.

---

*(Word count: approximately 3,050)*

# Chapter 5: Cracks in the Facade

There is a particular kind of morning that exists only in military life — the kind where the body is asked to perform violence before it has fully agreed to be awake, where the cold air bites through a thin undershirt before the sun has cleared the eastern wall, and where the only thing separating a soldier from genuine misery is the promise that it will, eventually, be over.

Allison Craver had never been what anyone would call a natural fighter. She was quick, and flexible, and had decent instincts for reading an opponent's weight before they moved it — the same instincts, really, that let her read a room full of strangers and know which one wanted flattery and which one wanted to be left alone — but she lacked the raw physical density that made someone like Reiner or Bertholdt formidable in close combat, and she'd spent most of her training years compensating with speed and cleverness rather than strength.

Which was, perhaps, why the mandatory hand-to-hand sparring sessions Levi ran for the newer transfers left her more thoroughly wrecked than almost anything else in her weekly schedule.

"Again," Levi said, from the edge of the training circle, arms crossed, watching Oluo get thrown flat on his back by a recruit half his size with the specific, weary patience of a man who had explained the same footwork correction at least four times already that morning. "You're leading with your shoulder. Lead with your hip, or you'll keep ending up on your ass."

Oluo, predictably, bit his own tongue attempting to respond crisply to this and spent the next thirty seconds in visible pain, which nobody found nearly as sympathetic as he clearly hoped.

Allison's turn came somewhere near the middle of the rotation, paired against a broad-shouldered recruit named Braus — no relation to Sasha, as he'd clarified with visible exhaustion at least six times since training began — who outweighed her by what felt like a genuinely unfair margin. She lasted longer than she expected, dodging twice, landing one decent counter that earned her a small, surprised grunt of approval from her opponent, before he finally got a grip on her wrist and used his weight to put her flat on the packed dirt with a thud that knocked what remained of the air clean out of her lungs.

"Good instincts," Levi said, appearing above her with the unbothered air of a man reviewing a training exercise rather than a person who had just watched her get slammed into the ground. "Bad follow-through. You dodge well, then you freeze instead of using the opening."

"Noted," Allison wheezed, still flat on her back, staring up at the pale morning sky and reconsidering several of her life choices.

"Get up. Again."

She got up. Again.

By the time the session finally ended — nearly two hours of drilling, correction, repetition, the particular brutal monotony that Levi apparently considered the only acceptable path to competence — Allison was filthy, sweat-soaked, and thoroughly exhausted in the specific way that made every muscle feel simultaneously liquid and made of stone.

She was not, in that moment, thinking about anything except the very real possibility of collapsing directly onto the ground and staying there indefinitely. Which was, in retrospect, precisely why what happened next caught her so entirely off guard.

Levi began stripping off his own gear a few feet away, unclasping the straps of his O.D.M harness with the same brisk efficiency he brought to everything, shrugging out of the heavier outer layer of his uniform down to the thin, sweat-dampened undershirt beneath it, sleeves rolled to the elbow from the exertion of the last two hours of demonstrating, correcting, and occasionally physically flattening recruits who failed to internalize his corrections quickly enough.

Allison, catching her breath a few feet away, found her eyes drifting toward him without any conscious decision to look at all — the way the damp fabric clung to the lean, compact muscle of his back and shoulders, the specific, deceptive contradiction of a frame that looked almost slight in uniform and turned out, unclothed of its outer layers, to be corded with the kind of dense, functional strength that had, twenty minutes earlier, sent an eighteen-year-old recruit twice his size flat onto the ground in a single fluid motion. The rolled sleeves exposed forearms that were, she noted with a small, traitorous jolt of interest, considerably more defined than she'd registered before, veins standing out faintly along the strain of tendon and muscle as he worked a strap loose.

She caught herself staring — actually staring, mouth slightly open, gaze tracking a line of movement she had absolutely no business tracking — and felt her whole face go hot with something closer to alarm than attraction, because *attraction* was not a category she was willing, under any circumstances, to file this under.

*Stop that,* she told herself, sharp and immediate, the mental equivalent of physically shaking her own shoulders. *He is grumpy. He is terrifying. He confiscates yarn for a hobby. He is your tutor, your business partner, a means to an end that has literally nothing to do with whatever weird momentary lapse in judgment your eyes just had.*

She looked away, hard, focusing instead on retying her own bootlace with far more concentration than the task required, and did not look back in his direction again until she was entirely certain her expression had returned to something normal.

It did not occur to her, in that moment, to wonder why her body had reacted the way it had — why the sight of him, sweat-damp and stripped of his usual precise composure, had produced a reaction so entirely disproportionate to what should have been, by any reasonable measure, an unremarkable few seconds of a man taking off training gear. She simply filed it under exhaustion, under the strange, disorienting effect of two hours of adrenaline and physical exertion doing something odd to her judgment, and did not examine it further.

She would examine it, eventually. Not yet.

---

The paperwork session that evening proceeded with its usual rhythm — the low, running friction of the Organization Debate flaring briefly over a misfiled requisition, a fresh skirmish in the Beverage War when Levi discovered Allison had, in his absence, doctored his tea leaves with a spoonful of sugar as an act of what she called "culinary sabotage" and he called "an act of war" — until Levi, midway through reviewing a stack of her completed reports, leaned over her side of the desk to point out an error.

"This total's wrong," he said, tapping the offending line with one finger, close enough now that Allison could see the precise, economical way he moved even in something as small as this — no wasted motion, every gesture deliberate. "You added the western outpost figures twice."

"Did I?" She leaned in to look, and it was only then that she registered how close he'd gotten — his face inches from hers, close enough that she could smell, faintly, the black tea and cold, clean air she'd first noticed the night he'd draped his jacket over her shoulders, close enough to see the sharp, clean line of his jaw, the small, precise set of his mouth as he traced the error with his finger.

She found herself, for a disorienting three or four seconds, not looking at the numbers at all.

"Craver," Levi said, and snapped his fingers once, sharp, directly in front of her face, and Allison startled back to attention so abruptly she nearly knocked over her coffee.

"Sorry — what?"

"The total," he said, with the flat, faintly irritated patience of a man repeating himself for the third time in as many minutes. "You added the western figures twice. Fix it."

"Right. Yes. Fixing it," Allison said, and bent over the form with rather more focus than the correction actually required, silently, furiously scolding herself. *Focus on the mission. Focus on Erwin. You are not — whatever that just was, you are absolutely not doing that.*

She corrected the total. Levi, apparently satisfied, straightened and returned to his own side of the desk without further comment, and if he'd noticed anything unusual in her sudden lapse of attention, he gave no sign of it, already absorbed back into his own stack of forms with the single-minded focus he brought to everything.

Allison spent the rest of the evening very deliberately not looking at his hands.

---

It was around this time — though Allison would not have marked the exact date, had anyone asked her, because it did not announce itself as significant, arriving instead in the quiet, cumulative way most important shifts do — that the situation with Mikasa Ackerman began its slow, deliberate curdle from mild social friction into something considerably sharper.

The root of it, as with most things involving Mikasa, was Aren.

Allison had never set out to capture Aren Jaeger's attention, had in fact barely registered him as anything more than one of several new transfers she occasionally exchanged pleasantries with in the mess hall, but something about her — her easy warmth, perhaps, or the specific, unguarded way she laughed at things that struck her as genuinely funny, or simply the novelty of a girl who could talk her way through nearly any obstacle and yet remained, underneath the polish, visibly, humanly a little chaotic — had caught his attention in a way he made almost no effort to disguise.

"You're really good at that," Aren said one evening in the mess hall, watching with open admiration as Allison talked a reluctant supply clerk into handing over an extra ration of bread through nothing more than a well-placed compliment about the man's handwriting on the ledgers. "How do you even do that? I've watched you do it like four times now and I still can't figure out the trick."

"There's no trick," Allison said, breaking off a piece of the bread and offering it to him without thinking much of the gesture at all. "You just have to actually pay attention to people. Most people don't. It makes them feel like a novelty when someone finally does."

"That's kind of incredible, though," Aren said, and there was something in the way he said it — genuine, unguarded admiration, the kind Allison received constantly from people impressed by her social gifts and rarely thought twice about — that apparently registered, from three seats down, with considerably more weight to the girl watching them both in cold, careful silence.

Mikasa said nothing that evening. She rarely said much of anything, as a rule, preferring the quiet, watchful economy of someone who processed the world primarily through observation rather than speech, and Allison — who read almost everyone, who had built an entire skill set out of catching the small tells other people missed — had noticed, weeks earlier, the specific, careful way Mikasa's attention tracked Aren across any room they shared, and had filed it away without particular judgment, the way she filed away most things she noticed about people who weren't actively relevant to her own goals.

She had not, until recently, considered that this tracking might eventually extend to include her.

It began small. A comment, offhand, dropped into a barracks conversation about hobbies one evening while Allison was midway through a crochet project — a small, three-dimensional stuffed rabbit she'd been slowly working on for weeks, meant as a gift for one of the younger transfers who'd mentioned missing a childhood toy left behind when her village was evacuated.

"Must be nice," Mikasa said, not looking up from her own gear maintenance, "having that much free time to waste on toys."

The comment landed with the specific, deliberate weight of something meant to sting rather than inform, and Allison — who had spent years learning to read exactly this kind of tone, the difference between an offhand remark and a calculated one — felt the barb land precisely where it was aimed.

"It's not wasted time," she said, keeping her own voice level, refusing to give the comment more reaction than it had earned. "It's for Historia. She mentioned missing something like this from home. Figured it might help."

"Sure," Mikasa said, in a tone that made clear she did not, in fact, believe this was the actual point of the exercise, and returned her attention to her blades.

It was a small thing. Allison told herself it was a small thing, the kind of low-grade barracks friction that existed in every unit, born of exhaustion and close quarters and the general, grinding stress of training for a war none of them had chosen. She did not, in that moment, connect it to Aren, or to the small, careful way Mikasa's dark eyes had tracked the exchange in the mess hall days earlier.

She would connect it, eventually. The comments did not stop with the rabbit.

Two days later, it was the shawl she'd been working on before the schedule reshuffle interrupted it — Mikasa, passing her bunk, glanced at the pale cream-colored yarn draped over the chair and remarked, to no one in particular but pitched precisely to be heard, that some people apparently had the luxury of treating military service like a hobby camp.

Three days after that, it was more direct — a comment about how strange it was that Allison spent so much time in the Captain's office lately, delivered with a raised eyebrow and a tone that suggested Mikasa found the arrangement either suspicious or distasteful, though she did not clarify which, and Allison, catching the undertone immediately, felt her stomach tighten with the specific unease of realizing a conflict was building whose actual cause she had not yet identified.

"Is there something you want to say to me directly," Allison said, finally, catching Mikasa alone near the equipment shed one evening, her usual warmth cooled into something flatter, more careful. She had learned, over the preceding week, to stop offering her charm freely to someone who seemed determined to read it as an offense rather than a gift.

Mikasa looked at her for a long moment, expression unreadable in the particular way that made her nearly as difficult to read as Levi, though for entirely different reasons — Levi's blankness came from genuine, practiced discipline, Mikasa's from a kind of guarded self-containment that Allison suspected had been forged, much like her own defenses, out of loss she didn't discuss.

"No," Mikasa said finally, and walked away without further explanation, leaving Allison standing in the cooling evening air with the distinct, unsettled sense that whatever this was, it had not resolved — it had simply gone underground, and would surface again, sharper, when she least expected it.

She was, as it turned out, entirely correct about this.

---

She did not mention any of it to Levi, in part because it felt petty compared to the actual, mounting pressures of their arrangement, and in part because some private, still-developing instinct told her that involving him in barracks-level social friction would fall well outside whatever boundary their transactional partnership was supposed to maintain.

She mentioned it, eventually, to Petra, who had become something like a friend over the preceding weeks despite their initial brief, wary acquaintance in the assignment hall.

"Mikasa's been weird with me," Allison said, one evening, picking at her dinner with less enthusiasm than usual. "Little comments. About my hobbies. About — I don't even know, honestly. It's hard to pin down exactly what's bothering her."

Petra considered this for a moment, chewing thoughtfully. "Aren talks about you a lot," she said finally. "Have you noticed that?"

Allison blinked. "What? No, I mean — we talk sometimes. He's nice. I didn't think—" She stopped, turning this new information over, running it against the pattern of comments she'd been quietly cataloguing for the better part of two weeks, and felt something click into place with the specific, sinking clarity of a puzzle piece finally finding its correct position. "Oh," she said. "*Oh.*"

"Yeah," Petra said, not unkindly. "I think that might be your answer."

Allison put her spoon down slowly, staring at her half-finished dinner with the particular exhaustion of someone who had, without any intention of doing so, accidentally acquired a second complicated interpersonal entanglement on top of the one she'd already been failing spectacularly to manage for weeks.

"I don't want anything from Aren," she said, mostly to herself. "I wasn't — I didn't mean to—"

"I know," Petra said. "Doesn't always matter what you meant, though. Mikasa's protective. And she's not exactly great at talking about it directly."

"Clearly," Allison muttered, thinking of the rabbit, the shawl, the pointed comment about the Captain's office.

She went to bed that night with a new, low-grade unease settled somewhere beneath her ribs — not fear, exactly, Mikasa did not strike her as someone who would escalate into anything genuinely dangerous, but the particular tiredness of realizing that her already complicated life had just acquired one more thread to manage, one more person whose opinion of her she could not simply charm her way around, because charm, she suspected, would only make Mikasa's quiet resentment sharper rather than softer.

She thought, briefly, before sleep finally took her, of Levi's flat, unbothered assessment from their very first meeting — *you're going to keep trying, I can see it on your face* — and wondered, with a small, unfamiliar flicker of something she didn't examine closely, whether he'd be able to read this new tangle just as easily, if she ever worked up the nerve to mention it.

She did not, in the end, mention it. Not yet. But the thought that she might have wanted to — that some instinct in her had already started reaching, quietly, toward him as a place to set down burdens she wasn't ready to carry alone — was itself a small, significant crack in a facade she had not yet noticed was beginning to show its age.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,850)*

# Chapter 6: Proximity and Protocol

By the third week of their arrangement, the paperwork had stopped being the point.

Neither of them would have admitted this if asked directly — Allison would have insisted, with total conviction, that she was there strictly for tactical advantage in her ongoing campaign to win Erwin's attention, and Levi would have said, with equal conviction, that he was there strictly to recoup the productivity his schedule had lost to her earlier incompetence — but the truth, quietly accumulating beneath both of their stated justifications, was that the two hours they spent together most evenings had become something neither of them examined too closely, for fear of what examining it might reveal.

It was a Tuesday, unremarkable by every external measure, when Levi decided that verbal instruction alone had reached the limits of its usefulness.

"You're still doing it wrong," he said, watching Allison rehearse, for what felt like the fifteenth time, a hypothetical opening line she intended to use on Erwin the following morning at the officers' strategy briefing. "You're standing like you're bracing for an attack. Shoulders up around your ears. Chin tucked. It reads as nervous, not confident."

"I *am* nervous," Allison said. "That's the whole problem, remember? I turn into a complete disaster the second he's actually in front of me."

"Then don't look nervous. Looking confident and being confident aren't the same skill, and you're better at faking things than almost anyone I've ever met, so use that." He set down his pen, which Allison had come to recognize as the small, deliberate signal that he was about to commit his full, undivided attention to something — a rare enough occurrence that it still, every time, sent a small flutter of anticipation through her chest that she resolutely ignored. "Stand up."

She stood, a little uncertain, brushing invisible dust off her trousers to give her hands something to do. "Like this?"

"No." He rounded the desk and came to stand in front of her, studying her posture with the same flat, clinical focus he gave a battle formation. "Your shoulders are still up. Drop them." She tried. "More." She tried again, and this time he reached out — without asking, the way he'd started doing more often over the preceding week, as though some unspoken permission had quietly established itself between them — and pressed his hands lightly to both her shoulders, guiding them down and back with brisk, impersonal efficiency.

"There," he said. "That's what steady looks like. Feel the difference?"

"I feel like a marionette whose strings you're adjusting," Allison said, though her voice came out thinner than she intended, because his hands were still resting on her shoulders, and the weight of them — not heavy, not lingering in any way she could point to as inappropriate, and yet somehow entirely impossible to ignore — had scattered whatever composed response she'd been about to offer.

Levi either didn't notice or gave no indication that he had. He stepped back slightly, still studying her, and then reached up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, the same brusque gesture from days before, before his attention dropped, briefly and clinically, to the collar of her uniform undershirt.

"This is wrong too," he said, and before Allison had fully registered what he meant, his fingers were at the top button of her shirt, undoing it with quick, businesslike precision. "You've got it buttoned all the way up like you're heading to a funeral. It makes you look stiff. Rigid. Erwin doesn't want stiff — he wants someone who looks like they belong in the room, relaxed, sure of themselves." He undid a second button for good measure, adjusting the collar so it sat slightly open, and stepped back to assess the result with the same critical eye he gave a training formation. "Better."

Allison stood very still, acutely, uncomfortably aware of the small strip of skin now exposed at her collarbone, of how close he'd been to do this, of the fact that his hands — steady, sure, entirely unhurried — had been at her throat for the better part of ten seconds while she had, for reasons she refused to name, forgotten entirely how to breathe normally.

"You could've just told me to unbutton it," she managed, once she trusted her voice again.

"Would've taken longer to explain than to fix," Levi said, unbothered, already circling back to study her from a slightly different angle, the way an instructor might study a training dummy for structural flaws. "Fix your posture too. You're leaning forward like you're waiting for permission to speak. Erwin responds to people who don't need permission."

He reached out again, pressing two fingers between her shoulder blades to straighten her spine, and then, apparently still unsatisfied, took her chin lightly between his thumb and forefinger to adjust the angle of her head — tilting it up, slightly, correcting whatever small deficiency he'd identified in how she held herself.

The room, which had been perfectly ordinary a moment before, seemed to Allison to have gone very quiet and very small. She was abruptly, overwhelmingly aware of how close he was standing — close enough that she could see, in a level of detail she hadn't previously catalogued, the faint grey ring around the darker centers of his eyes, the small, near-invisible scar along one eyebrow, the particular, focused stillness of his expression as he made his final adjustments, entirely unaware — or entirely unbothered, she couldn't tell which — that his thumb was resting lightly against her jaw and that neither of them had moved in several long seconds.

"There," he said finally, releasing her chin and stepping back a full pace, his voice as flat and unaffected as it had been at the start of the exercise. "That's what you're aiming for. Memorize it."

"Memorize what, exactly," Allison said, a little unsteadily. "The posture, or the — the general experience of being manhandled into shape like a piece of gear."

"Both, if it helps," Levi said, entirely without irony, and returned to his side of the desk as though the preceding several minutes had been nothing more than a routine equipment check.

Allison sat back down slowly, unbuttoned collar and all, and spent the rest of the evening's paperwork session distinctly, uncomfortably aware of her own collarbone in a way she had never once, in eighteen years of getting dressed every morning, previously considered remarkable.

---

The following afternoon brought its own small, unplanned collision, though this one, unlike the posture lesson, belonged entirely to Levi's side of the ledger.

Allison had finished her half of the day's paperwork early — a rare enough occurrence that she'd allowed herself a full stretch before starting the next stack, arms raised overhead, spine arching to work out the stiffness of hours hunched over a desk, entirely unselfconscious about the fact that the motion pulled the hem of her undershirt up several inches, exposing a narrow strip of skin at her waist before the fabric settled back into place.

Levi's eyes moved there before he'd consciously decided to look — a small, involuntary flick of attention, gone in less than a second, the kind of reflexive glance any tired man might give any exposed skin in his immediate vicinity without it meaning anything at all.

He scowled immediately, forcing his gaze back to the requisition form in front of him with rather more focus than the document actually warranted, and felt a hot, unfamiliar flush of irritation at himself that he did not examine closely enough to understand.

"Fix your uniform," he said, sharper than the moment strictly required.

Allison, mid-stretch, blinked at him in genuine confusion. "What? It's fine, it's just—"

"It's riding up. Fix it." He did not look at her again while he said this, keeping his attention deliberately, pointedly fixed on the paperwork in front of him, jaw set in the particular tight line that Allison had learned, over the preceding weeks, generally meant he was annoyed about something and unwilling to explain exactly what.

"Okay, jeez," Allison muttered, tugging her shirt back into place, faintly bewildered by the sudden, disproportionate sharpness of his reaction to what had felt, to her, like the most unremarkable stretch in the world. "Didn't realize a stretch was a court-martial offense."

"It's not," Levi said, still not looking up. "Just fix your uniform and get back to work."

She did, though she caught him, once or twice over the following hour, glancing briefly in her direction with an expression she couldn't quite place — not quite irritation, not quite anything she had a name for yet — before he registered her noticing and dropped his gaze back to his forms with renewed, almost aggressive focus.

Neither of them mentioned it again. Levi, for his part, spent a good portion of that evening's walk back to his own quarters silently, furiously annoyed at himself for a reaction he refused to interrogate any further than *tired, and she startled me, that's all it was,* which was, even by his own private standards, an explanation that did not entirely hold up under scrutiny — scrutiny he was, for the time being, actively declining to apply.

---

The Paperwork Lean happened almost a week later, on an evening when Levi had simply had, by any measure, an exceptionally long day.

Two expedition planning meetings, back to back, followed by an unscheduled dispute between two squad leaders that had required his direct intervention to resolve, followed by the discovery that an entire crate of O.D.M gas canisters had been improperly stored and needed re-inventorying before the week's end — the kind of day that left even Levi's normally immaculate composure fraying slightly at the edges by the time he finally sat down across from Allison for their evening paperwork session.

He was reviewing her reports, jaw tight, movements sharper than usual, when he found an error in her third-quarter supply totals and leaned across the desk to point it out, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed hers, his finger tracing the line of the mistake directly under her nose.

"This number's off," he said. "You transposed the digits — it should be thirty-eight, not eighty-three."

Allison, midway through agreeing with him, found her attention snagging instead on the sharp, clean line of his jaw from this angle, the faint shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes, the small, unconscious furrow of concentration between his brows as he scanned the rest of the page for further mistakes. He smelled, this close, like black tea and the cold night air that always seemed to cling to him no matter the hour, and Allison found herself, for several long seconds, tracking the shape of his mouth rather than the numbers he was pointing at.

She caught herself, eventually, with a small, unwelcome jolt, and forced her eyes back down to the page.

*Focus,* she told herself, sharp and immediate. *This is exactly the kind of distraction you cannot afford. You have one job here, and it is Erwin, and it is not — whatever this momentary lapse in judgment currently is.*

"Craver." Levi's voice, flat and a little impatient, snapped her fully back to the present. He had straightened slightly and was watching her with the particular look he gave her when she'd drifted somewhere he couldn't follow. "Did you hear anything I just said?"

"Thirty-eight, not eighty-three," Allison said quickly, grateful the number, at least, had lodged somewhere in her memory even while the rest of her attention had wandered. "Got it. Fixing it now."

"You're distracted tonight," Levi observed, not unkindly, though there was a faint edge of genuine assessment in it, as though he were running through possible causes and had not yet landed on the correct one.

"Just tired," Allison said, which was not, strictly, a lie, even if it wasn't the whole truth either, and bent over her corrections with rather more focus than the task actually required, silently furious with herself for a lapse in concentration she could not, this time, entirely blame on exhaustion, and refused, with considerable effort, to examine any further than that.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,050)*

# Chapter 7: Rumors and Resets

Rumors in a military barracks move with a specific, ugly efficiency that Allison, for all her skill at reading people, had never quite learned to outmaneuver, because rumors did not require the target's participation to spread — they simply needed one person willing to say something interesting to a second person willing to repeat it, and from there the thing took on a life entirely independent of whatever truth it might once have loosely resembled.

She did not know, at first, that anything had shifted. She noticed only the small things — a few too many curious glances in the mess hall, a conversation among a cluster of recruits that died abruptly when she approached, Sasha going oddly quiet over dinner one evening instead of launching into her usual stream of chatter about food.

"What," Allison said finally, setting down her spoon. "What is it. You're doing the face."

"What face?"

"The face you do when you know something and you don't want to be the one who tells me."

Sasha winced, glanced around to confirm no one else was in earshot, and leaned in. "There's a — a thing going around," she said, in the careful, apologetic tone of someone delivering bad news they'd rather not be responsible for. "About you. And the Captain."

Allison blinked. "What kind of thing?"

"The kind of thing where people think you two are—" Sasha made a vague, uncomfortable gesture that somehow conveyed the entire scope of the rumor without a single further word being necessary.

Allison sat back slowly, the full weight of the implication landing several seconds after the gesture itself. "You're joking."

"I wish I was. It's all over the barracks. Someone said you two spend hours alone in his office every night with the door closed, and — I don't know, it just kind of snowballed from there."

"We're doing *paperwork,*" Allison said, with the particular indignant disbelief of someone whose entirely mundane reality had just been reinterpreted into something salacious by people who had clearly never once seen the inside of Levi's actual filing system. "We split it evenly. It was his idea. There is nothing — I mean, it's the least romantic possible activity two people could be doing. It's *requisition forms.*"

"I know that," Sasha said. "I believe you. Doesn't really matter what's true, though, once it's already going around."

Allison put her face in her hands, understanding, with a slow and specific sense of horror, exactly what this meant for the fragile, painstakingly rebuilt progress she'd been making with Erwin.

---

The rumor's origin, though Allison would not confirm it for several more days, traced back — as she'd already begun to privately suspect, given the timing, given the accumulating small hostilities of the preceding weeks — to Mikasa Ackerman, and it had been born less out of calculated malice than out of the specific, quiet desperation of watching someone she cared about grow more and more visibly enamored with a girl she couldn't compete with.

Aren had not stopped talking about Allison. If anything, his admiration had only grown more pronounced over the preceding weeks — the way Allison could talk anyone into anything, the way she seemed to genuinely, unguardedly enjoy things like her crochet projects and her flute practice without a shred of self-consciousness about hobbies most soldiers considered frivolous, the specific magnetic warmth she brought into every room she occupied. Mikasa had watched all of it accumulate, watched Aren's gaze track Allison across the mess hall with an attention he rarely gave anyone, and had said nothing, for weeks, because saying something meant admitting a fear she did not have language for and did not want to examine.

The rumor had not been a calculated attack, exactly. It had started smaller than that — an offhand, bitter comment to another recruit, something about how convenient it was that Allison spent so many late nights alone with the Captain, a comment meant to plant a seed of doubt rather than start a wildfire, and had, as these things do, escaped Mikasa's control almost immediately, growing and mutating as it passed from person to person until it bore only the faintest resemblance to whatever small, petty thing she'd actually said.

By the time it reached Levi's ears — via Hange, delivered with the barely suppressed delight of someone who found the entire situation far funnier than the moment warranted — the story had solidified into something approaching established fact among at least half the newer recruits.

"You're joking," Levi said, flatly, staring at Hange across his desk with an expression that suggested he was hoping, against considerable evidence, that this was some elaborate prank.

"I wish I were! It's everywhere. Half the mess hall thinks you and Craver have been—"

"We split paperwork," Levi said. "That's it. That's the entire extent of it."

"I know that, and you know that, but I don't think the rest of the garrison got that particular memo," Hange said, entirely too amused for Levi's taste. "Honestly, it's a little impressive how fast it spread. You should hear the version Braus is telling — very dramatic. Lots of candlelight, apparently."

"There is no candlelight," Levi said, with the flat, weary precision of a man cataloguing an absurdity he found personally insulting. "There's a desk. And an inkwell. And her disgusting coffee."

"Sure," Hange said, grinning. "Sounds very romantic when you put it that way."

"It's not—" Levi stopped, visibly recalibrating, and pressed two fingers to his temple in the specific gesture he made when a headache was imminent. "This is going to be a problem."

He was, as it turned out, entirely correct about that.

---

The problem arrived in its most immediate and damaging form the following morning, when Erwin — who had, over the preceding several weeks, begun to entertain the faint, cautious possibility that his earlier reading of Allison's behavior might have been slightly off the mark, that perhaps the strange, overcorrected comments and abrupt exits weren't hostility at all but something closer to nerves — heard the rumor secondhand from a squad leader delivering an unrelated report, and felt whatever fragile reconsideration he'd been quietly building collapse in an instant.

*Of course,* he thought, with the specific, deflating clarity of a puzzle piece clicking into place, though the wrong piece, into the wrong puzzle. *That explains it. The strange tension. The odd comments. She's involved with Levi — that's why she seemed so on edge around me, why she kept saying things that didn't make sense. Guilt, probably. Or distraction.*

It was, in fact, precisely the wrong conclusion, but it was also, given the information available to him, an almost inevitable one, and Erwin — who prided himself on reading situations correctly, who built his entire command style around careful, deliberate analysis — filed it away as settled fact and adjusted his own behavior accordingly, growing marginally more distant, more formally polite, treating Allison's continued attempts at conversation with the careful, slightly guarded courtesy of a man who believed he now understood a dynamic he had no actual insight into at all.

Allison noticed the shift immediately — noticed it the way she noticed everything, the small recalibration in his tone, the new, careful distance in how he answered her — and did not, at first, understand why.

She understood within the hour, when Petra caught her in the corridor with an expression that suggested she'd rather not be the one delivering this particular piece of news either.

"He's heard the rumor," Petra said. "About you and the Captain."

Allison closed her eyes briefly. "Of course he has."

"I think he believes it."

"Of course he does," Allison said, with the specific, weary bitterness of someone watching weeks of careful effort collapse over something that had never happened, would never happen, and existed only because someone had decided to be cruel with information that was never theirs to weaponize in the first place.

---

She found Mikasa that evening, in the equipment shed, and this time she did not bother softening her approach.

"You started it," Allison said, without preamble, closing the door behind her. "The rumor. It was you."

Mikasa did not deny it, which was, in its own way, confirmation enough. She continued polishing her blade with the same careful, deliberate focus she gave everything, not looking up. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't," Allison said, sharper than she'd intended, though she found, in the moment, that she didn't particularly want to soften it. "I know it was you. I've spent this entire conversation trying to figure out how to say this in a way that doesn't sound cruel, and I've decided I don't actually care anymore, because you cost me something that mattered to me, over a boy I have never once tried to take anything from."

That got Mikasa's attention. She looked up, finally, dark eyes sharp and guarded.

"I don't want Aren," Allison continued, her voice steady now, dropping into the same clear, precise register she used when she read someone accurately and had decided the moment called for honesty rather than charm. "I never have. He's kind, and he's easy to talk to, and that's the whole extent of it. But you've spent weeks watching him look at me like I'm interesting, and you've never once considered that maybe the reason it bothers you so much isn't about me at all — it's that you're terrified he'll look at you and not find the same thing, because you don't know how to be easy the way I am. You don't know how to let people in without it costing you something, and it's easier to punish me for having something you think you don't, than to sit with how much it scares you that he might actually see you the way you want him to and you wouldn't know what to do with it."

Mikasa's expression did not change, not visibly, not in any way another person might have caught — but Allison, who had built her entire life around reading exactly this kind of stillness, saw the small, precise flinch beneath it, the flicker of something raw and unguarded before the composure slammed back into place.

"That's not—" Mikasa started, and stopped, jaw tight.

"I'm not trying to hurt you," Allison said, quieter now, some of the sharper edge softening, because she recognized, even through her own anger, the particular ache of watching someone defend themselves against a truth they weren't ready to hear. "I actually don't want to be your enemy. But you cost me something real, over nothing, and I need you to understand that before we move past it."

Mikasa said nothing for a long moment, and then, finally, quietly: "It won't happen again."

It was not an apology, not exactly, but it was, Allison recognized, as close to one as Mikasa was likely to offer, and she took it, nodding once, and left the shed without further comment, feeling not triumphant, exactly, but at least steadier than she had walking in.

The rumor did not disappear — rumors rarely do, once they've taken root — but it stopped actively spreading, and that, for the moment, would have to be enough.

---

Levi, for his part, addressed the situation with rather less nuance and rather more direct, clipped irritation, cornering Mikasa during a routine equipment check the following day with the flat, unhurried menace of a man who had very little patience left for the whole affair.

"I hear you've been talking," he said, without preamble, in a tone that made several nearby recruits suddenly very interested in their own gear.

Mikasa did not pretend not to understand. "It's dealt with."

"It better be," Levi said. "I don't care what you think is or isn't happening in my office. I care that it's cost me and Craver both real problems that have nothing to do with either of us and everything to do with you deciding to say something you shouldn't have. If it happens again, I won't be nearly this polite about addressing it."

Mikasa held his gaze for a moment — she was not, by nature, someone easily cowed, even by a superior officer with Levi's reputation — and then gave a single, short nod. "Understood."

"Good," Levi said, and walked away without further comment, leaving the matter, as far as he was concerned, closed.

It was not entirely closed, of course — not for Allison, who would spend the following days carefully, painstakingly trying to rebuild whatever fragile ground she'd lost with Erwin, working twice as hard to counteract a rumor she'd had no part in creating; and not for Erwin himself, who continued, privately, to hold onto his mistaken conclusion with the quiet, stubborn conviction of a man who trusted his own read of a situation even when that read was, in this particular case, entirely and completely wrong.

But for Levi, at least, the matter had resolved itself into its proper, manageable shape: a problem, identified, addressed, closed. He did not examine, closely, why the accusation itself — the idea of himself and Allison, together, in whatever configuration the rumor had imagined — had produced in him a reaction rather more complicated than simple professional irritation. He filed the thought away, the way he filed away most things he did not wish to examine, and returned to his paperwork, and did not think about it again.

He would think about it again, eventually. Not yet.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,000)*

# Chapter 8: The Shadowed Hallway

The idea, like most of the ideas that ended up defining the strange, lopsided rhythm of their arrangement, was Levi's, delivered without preamble on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday evening, in the flat, clipped tone he used for anything he considered purely practical.

"We need a new approach," he said, setting down a completed requisition form and looking at Allison with the specific, assessing focus he brought to a tactical problem. "The direct method isn't working. You keep running out of things to say to him that don't sound insane."

"Thank you for that generous assessment," Allison said, not looking up from her own stack.

"You need something concrete. A hobby, an interest, something you can bring up that isn't strategy or history, because you clearly can't hold a conversation about either of those without your brain short-circuiting."

"It's not my *brain* that short-circuits, it's just—" She stopped, because there wasn't actually a good end to that sentence that didn't involve admitting something she wasn't ready to admit, even to herself, let alone to him. "Fine. What did you have in mind."

"We watch him," Levi said. "Off duty. Figure out what he actually does with his time when he's not in a briefing, find something specific you can use — something personal, not just facts you've memorized off a report."

Allison blinked at him. "You want us to spy on Commander Smith."

"I want us to *observe* him," Levi corrected, entirely unbothered by the distinction Allison clearly found both absurd and faintly thrilling. "There's a difference."

"Is there, though."

"Yes. Spying implies I care what he's doing. I don't. I care that you stop wasting both our time failing to talk to him properly." He picked his pen back up, apparently considering the matter settled. "Tomorrow evening. He usually finishes his own paperwork around nine and goes somewhere before turning in. We'll find out where."

---

They found out where the following evening, positioned in the narrow, dimly lit corridor outside a storage room adjacent to Erwin's office, peering through a gap where the door hadn't been pulled fully shut — an arrangement that felt, to Allison, considerably more like actual espionage than Levi's careful semantic distinction had suggested, though she kept this observation to herself in the interest of not derailing what was, for once, an evening she found herself genuinely curious about.

Erwin, it turned out, did not do anything especially scandalous with his free time. He sat, for the better part of forty minutes, at a small desk in the storage room that had apparently been converted, informally, into something like a private reading nook — a single lamp, a worn, much-handled book, and an expression of quiet, unguarded absorption that Allison had never once seen on him during official hours, where his face maintained the same composed, attentive warmth regardless of what he was actually thinking.

"What's he reading," Allison whispered, crouched beside Levi in the narrow gap of the doorway, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him in the cold corridor.

"Can't tell from here," Levi murmured back. "Something old, by the binding. Probably history."

"You said he liked pre-Wall strategy."

"I said that. Doesn't mean that's specifically it."

They watched in silence for a while longer, and Allison found herself, somewhere in the accumulating minutes, less focused on Erwin at all and more aware of the specific, quiet closeness of crouching beside Levi in a dark, narrow space — his shoulder nearly against hers, his breathing slow and even, his attention fixed with total, focused patience on the gap in the door, as though observing a commanding officer's private reading habits were a task worthy of his full concentration rather than a faintly absurd favor for a girl with an inconvenient crush.

She was in the middle of cataloguing, with some private discomfort, exactly how aware she'd become of his physical proximity when Erwin, abruptly, closed his book and stood.

"He's leaving," Levi breethd, and before Allison had fully registered what was happening, his hand was at her waist, pulling her backward, off balance, into the narrow architectural alcove set into the wall a few feet from the storage room door — a shallow recess meant for some long-forgotten decorative fixture, barely large enough for one person, and entirely, catastrophically insufficient for two.

She stumbled back into it with a small, startled gasp that Levi silenced immediately, his palm coming up to press firmly over her mouth as he crowded in after her, his own back pressed to the wall, her spine forced flush against his chest by the sheer lack of space, both of them wedged so tightly together that Allison could feel every breath he took, the steady, controlled rhythm of it against her back, his heart beating — not as steady as his breathing, she noted, with a small, private thrill she immediately tried to suppress — rather faster than his composed exterior would have suggested.

Footsteps passed, unhurried, in the corridor beyond — Erwin, presumably, heading back toward his own quarters, entirely unaware of the two figures pressed into the shadows a few feet away, holding their breath in perfect, terrified stillness.

Allison was, for the several seconds this lasted, acutely, overwhelmingly aware of an entire catalog of details she had no business cataloguing at all: the warmth of Levi's palm still resting lightly over her mouth, the specific, clean smell of him this close — tea, and something colder underneath, like the air right before snow — the way his other hand had settled, without either of them quite registering when, at the curve of her waist to keep her steady in the cramped space, his fingers pressed lightly but firmly against her hip bone through the thin fabric of her uniform. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against her back with every breath, the lean, coiled strength of him even in stillness, and found herself, despite the genuine tension of the moment, distracted by an entirely different and far less tactical kind of tension entirely.

The footsteps faded. Neither of them moved.

"He's gone," Levi murmured, finally, his voice low and close enough to her ear that she felt the small vibration of it more than heard it.

"I know," Allison whispered back, though she made no move to extract herself from the alcove, and neither, for several more seconds, did he.

It was Levi who finally broke the stillness, releasing her mouth and stepping back with the same brisk, efficient economy he brought to everything, as though the preceding minute had been nothing more than a tactical maneuver successfully executed rather than the single most physically charged thirty seconds of Allison's entire military career to date.

"That was close," he said, straightening his jacket.

"Very close," Allison agreed, a little unsteadily, and did not clarify what, exactly, she meant by that.

---

It was several days later — after the espionage yielded, eventually, the genuinely useful nugget of information that Erwin's late-evening reading was, in fact, a worn volume on pre-Wall military campaigns, precisely the kind of detail Levi had predicted and Allison had been thrilled, briefly, to actually put to use — that the second, smaller crisis of that stretch of weeks arrived, and it belonged entirely to Allison.

It happened during an unremarkable gear check, the kind of routine maintenance drill that occupied a good portion of every soldier's week — checking blades, testing gas canister pressure, confirming the tension in O.D.M wires — when a poorly secured latch on her own gear case snapped loose at an unfortunate angle and sent one of her contact lenses skittering off into the dust of the training yard, irretrievably lost within seconds under a dozen careless boots.

She had a single spare pair in her footlocker. She did not have a second spare after that, not for weeks, not until the next supply run to the interior brought fresh medical stock, which left her with exactly one option for the intervening period: her glasses, thick-framed and unglamorous, that she had not worn in public in over two years, not since she'd first learned to hide them behind contacts sometime in her final year of school, when she'd decided, with the particular brutal clarity of a teenage girl cataloguing her own perceived flaws, that glasses made her look plain in a way she refused to be seen as.

She wore them to the mess hall the following morning with the specific, hunched posture of someone bracing for judgment, and found, to her muted relief, that most people simply didn't care — Sasha commented, mildly, that they made her look "smart, like a librarian," which Allison chose to interpret generously, and Connie didn't seem to register the change at all.

Levi noticed within thirty seconds of her arriving for their evening session.

"What happened to your face," he said, without preamble, looking up from his paperwork.

"Nothing happened to my face," Allison said, sliding into her usual chair with rather more defensiveness than the comment warranted. "I lost a contact. These are temporary."

"Why do you say it like that's a bad thing."

"Because it *is* a bad thing," Allison said, more sharply than she intended, some old, familiar insecurity rising faster than she could suppress it. "I look different in them. Not — not good different. I've heard that plenty of times, thanks."

Levi set down his pen entirely, which Allison had come to recognize meant she now had his full, undivided attention, whether she wanted it or not. "Who told you that."

"Nobody specific. It's just — general knowledge. About glasses. They're not exactly flattering."

"That's stupid," Levi said, flatly, with the same unhesitating conviction he brought to correcting her paperwork errors, as though her insecurity were simply another mistake to be identified and fixed. "They frame your face. Your eyes look bigger. Whoever told you otherwise was wrong, or lying, or both."

Allison blinked at him, caught entirely off guard by the bluntness of it — not the kind of easy, practiced compliment she was used to giving and receiving, the sort that could be deployed or dismissed without much weight attached, but something flatter, more matter-of-fact, delivered with the same unadorned certainty he used for everything, which somehow made it land considerably harder than any amount of flowery flattery could have.

"You don't have to say that," she said, a little unsteadily.

"I don't say things I don't mean," Levi said, already returning his attention to his paperwork, as though the matter were now, as far as he was concerned, entirely settled. "Stop hiding them. It's a waste of energy you could be spending on something that actually matters."

Allison sat with that for a long moment, something warm and unfamiliar settling in her chest that she did not, this time, immediately try to talk herself out of.

"Thank you," she said, finally, quietly.

Levi grunted, which she had learned, by now, was his version of *you're welcome,* and the evening's paperwork session continued, and Allison wore the glasses for the rest of the week without once trying to hide them, and did not examine, too closely, why one blunt sentence from an objectively difficult, closed-off man had done more to loosen a two-year-old insecurity than any number of compliments from people who'd tried, over the years, to be kind about it.

---

The flute, that particular week, became something of an accidental thread running through several otherwise unconnected evenings, and Allison would later look back on it as one of the small, quiet ways their arrangement kept bleeding past its original transactional boundaries without either of them quite noticing it happen.

It started almost by accident. She'd taken to practicing on the rare evenings their paperwork session ended early enough to leave her with an hour before curfew, finding a quiet corner of the courtyard where the acoustics carried her playing pleasantly into the cool night air without disturbing anyone trying to sleep, and had not considered, until the third or fourth such evening, that her playing might actually be audible beyond the immediate courtyard.

Levi heard it the first time by accident, working late in his office with the window cracked for air, and found himself, mid-signature on a requisition form, simply pausing to listen — something slow and melancholy, unpolished in the specific way of something played for no audience at all, meant only for the player's own private comfort. He did not recognize the tune. He suspected, correctly, that there wasn't one — that she was simply playing whatever moved through her in the moment, without structure or destination, the musical equivalent of thinking out loud.

He told no one he'd stopped to listen. He simply noted, privately, that the sound was — he searched, briefly, for a word that didn't feel like it was admitting too much, and settled, finally, on *tolerable*, which was, for Levi, a considerable concession.

Hange caught him at it a few evenings later, finding him standing near his cracked window with his pen forgotten in his hand, visibly listening to something.

"What are you doing," Hange said, delighted immediately by whatever they'd stumbled onto.

"Nothing," Levi said, snapping back to his paperwork with rather more speed than the moment strictly required. "Working."

"You were just standing there. Listening to — is that Craver playing?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You absolutely do," Hange said, grinning, and did not push further, though the grin stayed for considerably longer than Levi found comfortable, and he made a private, irritated note to close his window earlier in the evenings going forward, a resolution he would, in fact, fail to keep on multiple subsequent occasions.

Allison, for her part, remained blissfully unaware that her private courtyard practice sessions had an audience at all, and continued playing whatever came to her in the quiet hours after their paperwork sessions ended, the flute the one place in her entire crowded, complicated life where she didn't have to perform anything for anyone, where the sound that came out of her was simply, honestly, whatever she happened to be feeling in that particular moment — which was, increasingly, though she would not have named it directly even under considerable pressure, something that had very little to do with Erwin Smith at all.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,300)*

# Chapter 9: The Tactical Demonstration

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from believing you have identified someone else's weakness before they have identified it themselves, and Allison Craver, sitting across the desk from Levi Ackerman on a cold Tuesday evening in early autumn, was very much operating under the influence of that particular confidence when she made the catastrophic mistake of asking him, directly, to demonstrate.

It began, as most of their evenings did, with paperwork — the familiar rhythm of forms and requisitions and the low, comfortable friction of the Organization Debate flaring briefly when Allison attempted, once again, to reintroduce her yarn-based color coding system to a stack Levi had already sorted chronologically.

"I'm just saying," Allison said, watching him methodically remove a small loop of green thread from the corner of a supply manifest, "there's a whole world of organizational innovation happening outside your little box of dates, and you're missing out on all of it."

"I'm not missing out on anything," Levi said, setting the thread aside in the small, growing pile he'd started keeping, with grim satisfaction, in the corner of his desk drawer — a private, silent trophy case of every attempt Allison had made to infiltrate his filing system with fiber arts. "I have a system. It works. It's worked for years before you showed up and started tying arts and crafts to military documents."

"It's not arts and crafts, it's a *visual language*—"

"It's yarn."

"It's yarn *with meaning,*" Allison corrected, entirely undeterred, and Levi, apparently deciding this particular skirmish had reached its natural conclusion, simply moved on to the next form without further comment, which Allison had learned, by now, constituted his version of conceding a point he'd never admit to conceding out loud.

It was somewhere past the halfway mark of the evening's paperwork, once the stack had thinned enough that conversation began to take precedence over administrative labor, that Levi decided the time had come to address, directly, what he considered the single largest remaining obstacle in Allison's ongoing campaign: her total, catastrophic inability to execute physical flirtation with any degree of competence whatsoever.

"We need to work on the physical side of this," he said, without any of the delicacy the topic might have warranted from a more socially graceful instructor. "You freeze up the second there's any actual contact involved. I watched you nearly faint when Erwin handed you a report last week."

"I did not nearly faint."

"You went red and dropped half the papers."

"That was a *draft,*" Allison said, with as much dignity as she could muster. "There was a draft."

"There was no draft," Levi said, flatly. "It's autumn. The windows are shut. You panicked because he touched your hand for half a second handing you a folder, which is going to be a serious problem if you ever actually manage to get him alone somewhere and need to do something more advanced than exist in his general vicinity without short-circuiting."

Allison opened her mouth to protest this characterization and found, with some private irritation, that she did not actually have a rebuttal, because it was, infuriatingly, entirely accurate.

"Fine," she said. "So what's your genius solution."

"Basic technique," Levi said, in the clipped, businesslike tone he used for everything, as though he were about to explain a piece of standard-issue equipment rather than the mechanics of physical attraction. "Touch is supposed to feel casual. Deliberate, but light — like it's an afterthought, not a decision. You touch someone's arm when you're making a point, not because you planned it three sentences in advance and now you're executing it like a military maneuver."

"Okay," Allison said. "Show me."

"I'm not going to *show* you—"

"You literally just described a technique. Demonstrate it. How am I supposed to learn what casual is supposed to look like if you just tell me about it in words."

Levi looked at her for a long moment, visibly weighing whether this request fell within the reasonable bounds of their arrangement or represented a bridge too far even for a man who had already tucked her hair behind her ear and adjusted her collar and pressed his palm over her mouth in a dark alcove without apparent second thought.

"Fine," he said, finally, with the air of a man capitulating against his better judgment. "Watch. If I were making a point to someone—" he reached across the narrow gap between their chairs and rested his hand briefly, lightly, against her forearm, the touch there and gone in under two seconds, entirely clinical, entirely without any weight behind it at all, "—that's it. That's the whole thing. Light. Brief. You don't linger, you don't make it a production."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"Okay, what about," Allison pressed, warming now to what she recognized, with some private delight, as an opportunity, "if you wanted to compliment someone. Physically. Like — noticing something about how they look, not just what they said."

Levi's expression flattened slightly, the specific look he gave anything he considered adjacent to unnecessary sentimentality. "You tell them something specific," he said. "Not generic. 'You look nice' means nothing, everyone says that. You say something that shows you actually noticed — a jacket, a color, whatever's different that day.

Something like—" he paused, visibly searching for an example that didn't feel entirely absurd to say out loud, "—if Erwin's wearing a new coat, you say the color brings out his eyes. Something specific enough that it sounds observed, not recited."

"Show me," Allison said again, and this time there was something almost mischievous in it, though Levi, entirely focused on the pedagogical exercise rather than any subtext lurking beneath it, did not catch the shift.

"I'm not going to—" he stopped, exhaled through his nose in the particular way that meant he'd decided further argument wasn't worth the effort, and gestured vaguely at his own jacket. "Fine. Like this. If I said, about this jacket—" he glanced down at the standard-issue Scout uniform he wore every single day without variation, clearly straining to find anything remotely complimentary to say about a garment he'd never once considered from an aesthetic standpoint, "—the green brings out something in your eyes. That's the kind of thing. Specific. Not generic."

"Huh," Allison said, filing this away with genuine focus, and then, because some reckless, delighted impulse had taken hold of her and refused to let go, she said, "Okay. My turn. Let me practice on you."

Levi blinked. "What?"

"You just demonstrated the technique. Now I practice it. On you. That's how learning works — you don't just watch someone do a thing once and expect to replicate it perfectly, you need repetition, feedback—"

"That's not—" Levi started, and then, apparently deciding the fastest way through this particular negotiation was simply to let her get it out of her system, sighed and said, "Fine. Go ahead. Practice."

Allison did not need to be told twice.

She reached out, without any of the hesitation or overthinking that plagued her every actual attempt with Erwin, and rested her hand lightly against his forearm — exactly the way he'd demonstrated, brief, casual, there and gone in under two seconds — and then, before he'd fully registered the first touch, she leaned in slightly, her voice dropping into a warm, low register she'd used a thousand times before on a thousand other people, and said, "You know, that new jacket really brings out the color in your eyes."

She was teasing. It was, in her own head, an entirely playful, entirely harmless bit of mockery — turning his own clinical instructions back on him, proving a point about how absurd the exercise sounded out loud, expecting, at most, a flat, unimpressed *very funny, Craver* and a return to the paperwork.

What she got instead was Levi going completely, utterly still.

Not the composed stillness he brought to everything, the deliberate economy of a man who never wasted motion — this was different, a full-body freeze, his eyes fixed on her with an intensity that had abandoned, entirely, whatever clinical detachment had governed the last several minutes of instruction. His jaw tightened. His breathing, for one full second, seemed to simply stop altogether.

Allison, delighted, immediately broke character.

"Oh my god," she said, sitting back and clapping her hands together, practically bouncing in her chair with the specific glee of someone who has just proven an experimental hypothesis. "It *worked.* You should see your face. You went completely rigid, I actually got you—"

"It didn't work," Levi said, too fast, his voice coming out sharper and more clipped than usual as he yanked his attention back to the paperwork in front of him with rather more force than the document required. "You startled me. That's different."

"That is *not* what startled looks like," Allison said, still grinning. "I've seen you startled.

Last week when Hange dropped that jar of pickled tissue samples right next to your desk — that was startled. That was, what, a flinch and a very quiet swear word. This was—"

"Drop it, Craver."

"—entirely different. This was you going completely stiff and staring at me like—"

"I said drop it," Levi said, and there was enough genuine edge in it this time that Allison, recognizing the specific tone that meant she'd pushed exactly as far as he was willing to tolerate, finally relented, though she couldn't fully suppress the small, satisfied smile still tugging at her mouth as she picked her pen back up.

"Fine," she said. "Dropping it. For now."

Levi did not look up again for the remainder of the evening's session, working through the rest of his paperwork with a focus so aggressive it bordered on punitive, and if Allison noticed that his hand, when he reached for his tea a few minutes later, was not entirely steady, she had the good sense, for once, not to comment on it out loud.

---

She thought about it, though, walking back to her own bunk that night, turning the moment over with the same careful, curious attention she gave any puzzle she hadn't quite solved. It didn't fit, cleanly, into any of the categories she'd built for reading people — she'd expected annoyance, maybe, or the flat, unbothered dismissal he gave most of her jokes, and had gotten, instead, something that looked, for one unguarded half-second, genuinely and specifically affected.

She told herself it meant nothing. She was getting quite practiced, by this point, at telling herself things meant nothing, and quite bad, increasingly, at actually believing it.

---

Levi, for his part, spent a considerably less peaceful night working through his own private reckoning, alone in his quarters long after the paperwork was done and Allison had gone, replaying the moment with a clinical, furious focus that felt, to him, distressingly similar to the kind of tactical after-action review he ran following a failed maneuver in the field.

It had been nothing. That was the position he settled on, finally, somewhere past two in the morning, staring at the ceiling with the specific dissatisfaction of a man who has arrived at a conclusion he does not entirely trust. She had touched his arm and said something absurd in an exaggerated, teasing voice, and his reaction had been nothing more than simple surprise — the same reflexive freeze anyone might have at unexpected physical contact, nothing about the specific warmth of her hand on his arm, nothing about the low, deliberate register her voice had dropped into, nothing about the way her eyes had held his for that one suspended second before she'd broken into laughter.

*It's a distraction,* he told himself, firmly, the same internal reprimand he'd been issuing with increasing, unconvincing frequency over the preceding weeks. *She is a means to an end. The end is getting my schedule back. Nothing about this arrangement is supposed to involve whatever that just was.*

He almost believed it. He was getting, if he was honest with himself — which he was determined, for the time being, not to be — considerably worse at believing it than he had been a month ago, and considerably worse, too, at explaining away the accumulating list of small, unexamined moments that kept stacking up between them: the jacket, the collar, the alcove, the glasses, and now this — this warm, teasing, entirely unplanned demonstration of exactly the kind of charm he'd spent weeks coaching her to deploy on someone else, someone who was decidedly not him.

He fell asleep, eventually, without resolving anything, and woke the next morning having decided, with the particular stubbornness that governed most of his emotional avoidance, that the matter simply did not require further thought.

It would, of course, require considerably more thought before long. But not yet.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,000)*

# Chapter 10: The Irony of the Written Word

## I.

The idea came to Levi somewhere around the fourth week of their arrangement, on an evening when Allison had just finished recounting, with the specific, deflated misery of someone reliving a public humiliation, her latest failed attempt to hold a conversation with Erwin about the pre-Wall military campaigns Levi had spent considerable effort helping her research.

"I had it," she said, dropping into her usual chair across from his desk with more force than the furniture strictly deserved. "I had the whole thing planned. I was going to bring up the eastern campaign, ask him about troop movement strategy, show him I'd actually done the reading — and then he looked at me, and said hello, and I just. Forgot every single word I know. All of them. Simultaneously."

"All of them," Levi repeated, flatly, not looking up from the requisition form he was signing.

"Every single one. I said—" she put her face in her hands, muffling the confession, "—I said 'the troops did a lot of moving around, historically speaking.'"

Levi's pen stopped moving.

"That's what I said," Allison continued, miserable. "Out loud. To a grown man. Who runs an entire military regiment."

"'The troops did a lot of moving around,'" Levi repeated again, and this time there was something almost dangerously close to amusement flickering at the corner of his mouth, quickly and deliberately suppressed. "Historically speaking."

"Don't."

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're thinking it very loudly."

"I'm thinking that you clearly cannot function verbally within ten feet of this man," Levi said, setting his pen down entirely now and giving her his full attention, which had become, over the preceding weeks, a small ritual Allison had grown unreasonably fond of without examining why. "Which means the direct approach isn't working, and hasn't been working, and at this rate we're going to be doing this for the rest of the war."

"Thank you for the encouragement."

"I'm not encouraging you. I'm identifying a structural problem." He leaned back slightly in his chair, arms crossing, the specific posture he adopted when actually turning a problem over rather than simply reacting to it. "You're fine — better than fine, genuinely good — with everyone else.

Sasha. Connie. Half the mess hall thinks you personally invented charm. The problem is specifically him, specifically in person, which means the issue isn't your ability, it's some kind of — I don't know what to call it. Interference. Nerves."

"It's not nerves," Allison said, too quickly, and then, at his flat, unconvinced look, amended, "Okay, it's nerves. A lot of nerves. An unreasonable, biologically excessive amount of nerves, for reasons I don't fully understand myself."

This was, of course, not entirely true — she understood the reasons perfectly well, had understood them since she was sixteen years old sitting four rows back in an auditorium, and simply had no intention of explaining any of that particular history to the man currently coaching her through overcoming it — but it was close enough to true that Levi accepted it without further prodding.

"Then take the nerves out of the equation," he said. "Write to him instead."

Allison blinked. "Write to him."

"A letter. You clearly think clearly when you're not standing in front of him having whatever malfunction you have. So don't stand in front of him. Put it on paper, where you have time to actually construct a sentence instead of blurting out something about troop movements."

"That's..." Allison considered this, turning it over, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that it was actually a genuinely good idea — the kind of clean, practical solution that cut straight through the emotional tangle of the problem to address the actual mechanism causing it. "That's actually really smart."

"I have my moments," Levi said, entirely without modesty, already reaching for a fresh sheet of paper and sliding it across the desk toward her. "Write something. Not a whole speech — something short, personal. Mention the campaign since you've apparently already done the reading, even if you can't say it out loud without malfunctioning. Make it sound like you, not like you're reciting a report."

"Right now?"

"Why not right now. You've got the desk, you've got the time, and the sooner you stop humiliating yourself with troop movement small talk, the sooner my schedule stops being collateral damage."

Allison picked up the pen he'd set beside the paper, turning it over once in her fingers, and felt something settle in her chest that she recognized, distantly, as the specific, steadying confidence she felt whenever a problem finally had a shape she knew how to work with. Words on paper, she could do. Words on paper didn't require her to manage her own expression, her own voice, the specific catastrophic betrayal of her own nervous system that happened every single time Erwin Smith looked directly at her.

"Fine," she said. "But I'm doing this at my own desk, at my own pace. Not with you hovering over my shoulder judging every sentence before I've even finished it."

"I wasn't going to hover."

"You were absolutely going to hover."

Levi did not deny this, which Allison took as sufficient confirmation, and gathered the paper and pen into her arms along with the rest of her things for the evening. "I'll bring it by tomorrow," she said. "Once it's actually good. Not a draft you get to mock."

"I don't mock things."

"You mocked my yarn system for a solid month."

"That was constructive criticism."

"It was *mockery,* Captain, and we both know it," Allison said, already halfway to the door, and did not wait for his response, though she caught, just before the door swung shut behind her, the faint, reluctant twitch of something almost like a smile on his face — gone the instant she registered it, but there, undeniably, for just a moment.

---

## 2.

She wrote the letter that night, in her own quarters, by the light of a single lamp, with Willy curled heavily against her hip and the rest of the barracks long since gone quiet around her.

It did not come easily, at first. She sat for a long while simply staring at the blank page, pen poised, trying to summon the specific, effortless warmth she brought to every other conversation in her life and finding, infuriatingly, that the moment she pictured Erwin's face — the specific, kind attentiveness of his expression, the way he listened to people like their words genuinely mattered to him — her mind went as blank as it always did in person, the words scattering before she could catch hold of any of them.

*Focus,* she told herself, echoing, without quite meaning to, the exact word Levi used on her constantly. *You're not talking to him. You're talking to the page. The page doesn't make your heart do something stupid every time it looks at you.*

She started small. A line about the eastern campaign — genuine, unforced, the kind of observation she'd actually formed while doing the reading Levi had pointed her toward, without the performance anxiety of delivering it out loud stealing the words from her mouth before they'd finished forming. Then another line, building on it, her handwriting growing steadier as the sentences began, finally, to flow the way they always did with everyone else.

And then, somewhere around the fourth paragraph, something shifted.

She wasn't sure, precisely, when it happened — whether it was the late hour, or the privacy of her own room, or simply the accumulated relief of finally being able to write to Erwin without her own nervous system sabotaging her, but the letter began, gradually, to take on a warmth that went considerably beyond a shared interest in pre-Wall military history. She found herself, without entirely deciding to, writing the way she used to talk to boys before any of this started — easy, playful, more than a little suggestive, the specific confident register she'd spent years perfecting and had lost entirely, for reasons she still refused to examine too closely, the moment Erwin Smith actually walked into a room.

*You have this way of looking at a map like it's the only thing in the world worth your attention,* she wrote, and then, a few lines later, warming further, *I've always found focus like that more attractive than I probably should admit on paper. Careful, Commander — a girl could get distracted watching you work.*

She kept going. The letter grew longer, and warmer, and considerably more forward than anything she'd have dared say to his face — a compliment about the way his uniform fit, a comment, half-joking, about how unfair it was that competence looked that good on a person, a line that skirted close enough to outright flirtation that she paused, pen hovering, and considered, briefly, scaling it back.

She didn't scale it back. Something in her — the same reckless, confident thread that had made her, years ago, the girl who could talk her way into anything — had taken over the page entirely, and by the time she finally set the pen down, past midnight, the letter in front of her bore only a passing resemblance to the measured, historically-informed opening she'd started with. It was, in fact, one of the more genuinely flirtatious pieces of writing she'd ever produced, brimming with the easy, unselfconscious charm that vanished from her voice the instant she was actually standing in front of him.

She read it back once, felt a small thrill of nervous pride at how good it actually was, folded it carefully, and set it on her desk to deliver the following morning, entirely unaware of the small administrative catastrophe already quietly assembling itself in the barracks' internal mail system, where a tired, overworked courier — new to the rotation, unfamiliar with the specific difference between *Captain Ackerman's office* and *Commander Smith's office*, both of which happened to be labeled, this particular week, with slightly smudged and easily confused designation cards — would, come morning, deliver Allison's letter to entirely the wrong desk.

---

## 3.

Levi found the letter waiting on top of his morning correspondence, unmarked beyond the handwriting on the front — which he recognized instantly, having spent the better part of a month staring at it across supply requisitions — and opened it with the mild, unsuspecting curiosity of a man expecting an update on the Erwin campaign, nothing more.

He got three lines in before he understood, with a slow, creeping horror, exactly what he was reading.

He should have stopped. That was the obvious, correct course of action, the one a reasonable man in his position would have taken immediately upon realizing the letter in his hands had been intended for someone else entirely, and was, moreover, considerably more intimate in content than anything he'd expected to be reading before his morning tea had even finished steeping.

He did not stop.

He read the whole thing, in fact, with the specific, mortified fascination of someone who knows they should look away and finds themselves, despite every rational instinct, unable to, and by the time he reached the line about competence looking *that good* on a person, his jaw had gone tight in a way that had nothing at all to do with irritation and everything to do with a reaction he was actively, furiously refusing to name.

He was midway through a third read — telling himself, unconvincingly, that he was simply assessing the letter's effectiveness as a coaching exercise, purely professional, purely evaluative — when the door to his office opened and Allison walked in, mid-sentence, entirely unaware of the small disaster waiting for her.

"—so I think today's actually going to go well, I finally got the letter finished last night, I'm going to drop it by his office before the strategy briefing and I really think—"

She stopped.

Her eyes landed on the paper in Levi's hands — on her own handwriting, unmistakable even from across the room, on the specific, telltale flush that had crept up Levi's neck despite his otherwise carefully composed expression — and every drop of blood in her body seemed to rush, simultaneously, straight to her face.

"That's not — that's *mine,*" she said, already crossing the room toward him, mortification rising in her voice with every step. "How do you have that, that was supposed to go to Erwin, give it back, give it *back*—"

"Interesting reading material," Levi said, and there was something new in his voice, something dry and dangerous that Allison did not have time to fully parse before he raised the letter over his head, well out of her immediate reach, with the same flat, unhurried composure he brought to everything.

She lunged for it anyway, several times, her face burning with an intensity she could feel radiating off her own skin, and each time he simply lifted it a fraction higher, and it was only after her third failed attempt that the fundamental, infuriating problem became clear: despite being shorter than her by a full two inches — five foot three to her five foot five, a fact she had privately, occasionally, found almost charming in the weeks since their arrangement began — his arms were, unfairly, considerably longer relative to his height than the rest of him, and held aloft above his head, the letter sat entirely, maddeningly beyond her reach no matter how she stretched.

"Give it *back,*" she said, breathless now, half-laughing despite the mortification, reaching up again with both hands.

"I'm reading it," Levi said, and to her absolute horror, began doing exactly that, his voice dropping into a flat, deliberately theatrical register as he read her own words back to her. "'You have this way of looking at a map like it's the only thing in the world worth your attention—'"

"Stop—"

"'—I've always found focus like that more attractive than I probably should admit on paper—'"

"I will actually die," Allison said, both hands now pressed to her own burning face, though she made no further attempt to grab the letter, apparently having accepted the inevitability of her own humiliation. "Please, just — give it to me, this is so much worse out loud—"

"'Careful, Commander,'" Levi continued, entirely unmoved by her suffering, reading with the flat, dry delivery of a man who had, despite every outward appearance of composure, been rattled considerably more by the letter's contents than he had any intention of admitting, "'a girl could get distracted watching you work.' " He paused, lowering the letter slightly, though still well out of her reach, and looked at her with an expression she couldn't entirely name — something sharper than his usual dry amusement, something that lingered a beat too long. "Didn't know you had this in you, Craver."

"I didn't either, apparently," Allison muttered, still crimson. "It just — came out. Once I actually had time to think instead of just standing there panicking."

"Clearly," Levi said, and there was something almost rough in the way he said it, a small crack in his usual flat composure that Allison, even through her own mortification, caught and filed away with the same instinct that had once let her read an entire room in under a minute.

She made one more attempt for the letter — stretching up onto her toes this time, closing the gap between them almost entirely in the process — and it was in that moment, reaching, off-balance, that she realized exactly how close they'd ended up standing: near enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him, near enough to see the small, sharp intake of breath he took when her hand brushed his forearm mid-reach, near enough that when she finally overbalanced slightly and had to catch herself against his chest to keep from stumbling, their faces ended up mere centimeters apart, close enough that she could feel the warm exhale of his breath against her own lips, close enough that neither of them, for one suspended, breathless second, moved at all.

Allison's heart was hammering hard enough that she was fairly sure he could feel it through the thin fabric separating them. Levi's eyes had gone very still, very focused, fixed on her with an intensity that had entirely abandoned whatever teasing composure he'd been maintaining moments before.

Neither of them said anything. Neither of them moved back.

It was the sound of the door — Hange, breezing in without knocking, mid-sentence about some unrelated supply issue — that finally broke the moment, and both of them sprang apart with the guilty speed of people caught doing something neither of them could quite name, Allison snatching the momentarily forgotten letter from Levi's now-slack grip and jamming it into her jacket with rather more force than necessary, Levi turning immediately and with excessive focus back to his desk.

"Am I interrupting something," Hange said, looking between the two of them with open, delighted curiosity.

"No," they said, simultaneously, with identical, unconvincing speed.

Hange's eyebrows climbed steadily higher, but they had, apparently, learned enough from prior experience not to push the matter directly, and simply set down whatever supply form they'd come to deliver with a small, knowing hum before excusing themselves, throwing one last, unmistakably amused glance over their shoulder on the way out.

---

## 4.

Allison did not deliver the letter to Erwin that day.

She told herself this was purely practical — that the letter, having already been read aloud by his second-in-command in a considerably more theatrical register than she'd ever intended, no longer felt like something she could hand over with a straight face, that the whole plan needed reworking before she tried again. This was, in fact, entirely true, and also, she suspected, not the whole truth, though she declined, for the time being, to examine what the rest of it might be.

She sat through the remainder of their paperwork session that evening in a state of careful, deliberate normalcy, both of them working through the stack with rather more focus than usual, conversation kept, by unspoken mutual agreement, strictly to the business at hand — supply totals, requisition approvals, nothing that risked drifting anywhere near the morning's events.

It was Levi, finally, breaking the silence, who addressed it at all — not directly, not in any way that acknowledged the specific, charged stillness of that moment in his office, but obliquely, in the flat, clipped register he used for anything he'd decided needed saying despite his own reluctance.

"The letter was good," he said, not looking up from his forms. "Once you get past the parts you clearly didn't mean to write."

"I meant to write all of it," Allison said, which was, strictly, true, even if she hadn't meant for any of it to end up in his hands specifically. "It just wasn't supposed to be read out loud. By you. In that voice."

"What voice."

"You know exactly what voice."

Levi did not dignify this with a response, though something in the set of his shoulders suggested he was, in fact, entirely aware of what voice she meant, and had perhaps used it with rather more deliberate intent than he was willing to admit.

"Rewrite it," he said instead, after a moment. "Same content. Fewer lines that could get you court-martialed if the wrong person reads them next time."

"Noted," Allison said, and let the matter drop there, though she found, walking back to her own quarters much later that night, that she kept returning, unbidden, to the specific memory of his breath against her lips, the stillness of his eyes in that suspended half-second before Hange's arrival, and could not, for the life of her, work out why the thought sat in her chest with such stubborn, persistent warmth, or why some small, traitorous part of her found herself almost — *almost*, she corrected immediately, firmly — disappointed that the interruption had come when it did.

She told herself, climbing into bed with Willy grumbling at being disturbed, that it meant nothing. She was, by this point, becoming almost fluent in that particular lie, and almost, though not quite, convincing herself she believed it.

---

*(Word count: approximately 3,000)*

# Chapter 11: The Shift in the Wind

## I.

Allison Craver had built her entire understanding of herself around one central, load-bearing belief: that she was, at her core, a reader of people rather than a mystery to be read, someone who moved through the world collecting other people's tells and never, under any circumstances, leaving any of her own scattered carelessly behind her.

It was, therefore, a considerable and unwelcome surprise to discover, somewhere in the quiet, accumulating weeks of her arrangement with Levi Ackerman, that she had begun leaving tells everywhere — tiny, involuntary things, the kind she would have caught instantly in anyone else and moved to correct, that she seemed entirely unable to catch in herself until it was already too late to take them back.

She noticed it first in small, cumulative ways she tried, initially, to explain away individually. The way her pulse ticked up a fraction whenever he leaned across the desk to correct her work, close enough that she caught the smell of black tea and cold night air that seemed to follow him everywhere. The way she'd started, without deciding to, timing her own arrival for their evening sessions a few minutes earlier than strictly necessary, telling herself it was simply efficiency, simply wanting to get an early start on the paperwork, and knowing, somewhere beneath the convenient lie, that she simply wanted more of the quiet, unhurried minutes before the session properly began, when it was just the two of them and the lamplight and the specific, comfortable silence that had somehow, without her permission, become one of her favorite parts of any given day.

She had told herself, for weeks now, that this was purely physical — an aesthetic appreciation, nothing more, the kind of observation anyone might make about anyone reasonably attractive they spent significant time around. He was objectively striking, in the compact, coiled way of someone built entirely for function rather than display, and it was, she reasoned, only natural that proximity to that would occasionally produce a flutter of interest that meant nothing beyond simple biology.

It became harder to sustain that particular fiction the longer the arrangement continued, because the moments kept accumulating in ways that resisted her attempts to file them away individually. The jacket he'd draped over her shoulders that first exhausted night, and the fact that she still, weeks later, caught herself thinking of the smell of it at odd moments during the day. The way he'd tucked her hair behind her ear with such brisk, unbothered efficiency and left her entirely unable to think clearly for several minutes afterward. The blunt, unshowy conviction in his voice when he'd told her the glasses framed her face — not a compliment offered to please her, but a simple correction of a fact he considered self-evidently wrong, delivered with the same flat certainty he brought to everything, which had somehow landed with more weight than any amount of practiced flattery ever had.

And then, more recently, more dangerously, the letter — the specific, charged stillness of standing close enough to feel his breath against her lips, the way neither of them had moved to close the distance and neither of them had moved to widen it either, until Hange's interruption made the decision for both of them.

She had lain awake more nights than she wanted to admit turning that particular moment over, examining it from every angle the way she might examine a read she wasn't fully confident in, looking for the detail that would let her file it safely away as nothing. She had not found that detail. If anything, the longer she examined it, the less convinced she became that "nothing" was an honest label for any of it.

*This is a problem,* she told herself, more than once, in the specific, clear-eyed tone she used when diagnosing a genuine strategic risk rather than an emotional inconvenience. *He is objectively not the mission. The mission is Erwin. Whatever this is — whatever these small, accumulating, entirely inconvenient reactions are — it needs to stop being a distraction before it costs you something that actually matters.*

She believed this, mostly. She had spent years training herself to trust her own read of a situation, and her read of this situation was clear enough: infatuation with a man like Levi Ackerman — cold, exacting, visibly uncomfortable with anything resembling sentiment, a man who had built his entire life around discipline and control and precisely none of the messy warmth she brought into every room she occupied — was not a strategy. It was, at best, a distraction, and at worst, a genuine liability, the kind of thing that could derail months of careful, painstaking work toward the actual goal she'd come into this arrangement chasing.

So she made herself a private, quiet vow, somewhere in the small hours after the letter incident, lying in her own bunk with Willy's steady weight curled against her side: whatever this was, she would not act on it. She would feel it, apparently — that much, it seemed, was no longer optional, some threshold having already been crossed without her permission — but she would not act on it, would not let it show, would not risk the fragile, transactional peace of their arrangement over something she was fairly certain, given every available piece of evidence, he did not and could not reciprocate.

It was, she told herself, the only sensible course of action available to her.

She did not yet know how quickly that particular vow was about to be tested.

---

## 2.

The expedition that took them beyond the Walls three days later was, by any objective measure, a fairly routine one — a survey mission into the outer territory, mapping titan activity ahead of a larger planned operation, the kind of assignment that carried real risk but not the specific, acute danger of a full engagement. Allison had been on two smaller expeditions before this one, both of which had passed without major incident, and she approached this third with the particular, hard-won calm of someone who had learned, over months of training and two prior missions, that fear was manageable as long as she kept it contained to a specific, useful channel rather than letting it sprawl into the kind of paralysis that got soldiers killed.

The one exception to that hard-won calm, the one fear she had never fully learned to manage, was the dark.

It was an old fear, older than the Scouts, older than Erwin, older than nearly everything else in her current life — rooted, she suspected, though she'd never examined it too closely, in some specific childhood memory she'd long since stopped consciously retrieving but never quite stopped carrying. She could function in daylight without difficulty, could face a titan in broad afternoon light with the same steady nerve as anyone else in her cohort. But full dark — the kind that swallowed even the shapes of familiar things, that turned every rustle of wind through distant trees into something that might, possibly, be moving toward her — undid something in her that no amount of training had ever fully repaired.

The mandatory night camp fell on the second evening of the expedition, in a shallow, half-forested clearing the scouting officers had judged defensible enough for a temporary halt, and Allison found herself assigned, by the particular cruel logic of a duty roster that had no knowledge of her private terrors, to the two o'clock watch — the deepest, darkest hour of the night, when even the faint grey suggestion of moonlight through cloud cover seemed to have abandoned the camp entirely.

She took her position at the edge of the treeline with her heart already hammering, every muscle held rigid, eyes fixed with fierce, unblinking effort on the black wall of trees ahead, cataloguing every faint sound with the specific, exhausting vigilance of someone convinced that looking away, even for a second, might let something terrible slip past unnoticed.

She did not hear Levi approach. She rarely did — he moved, always, with the particular silent economy of someone who had spent years learning to be unseen and unheard until the exact moment he chose otherwise — and it was only the sudden, solid warmth of him settling onto the ground beside her, close enough that his arm pressed firmly against hers, that told her she was no longer alone at her post.

"You're supposed to be asleep," she said, not looking away from the treeline, her voice coming out thinner than she intended.

"Couldn't sleep," Levi said, which Allison suspected, even in her current state, was not the whole truth, though she did not have the spare attention to examine it further. "Figured I'd check the watch."

He did not ask what was wrong. She noticed this, distantly, through the fog of her own fear — that he had simply looked at her once, in the near-total dark, and clocked something in the rigid set of her shoulders, the too-careful stillness of her hands, that told him everything he needed to know without requiring her to explain it, and had simply moved to sit beside her rather than demanding an accounting of whatever was wrong.

He did not say anything comforting, either. He did not tell her the dark wasn't dangerous, did not offer the kind of hollow reassurance people sometimes tried on her when they noticed her fear and didn't know what to do with it. He simply sat, his arm a steady, solid line of pressure against hers, his own gaze fixed on the treeline with the same watchful focus he brought to everything, and let his presence do whatever quiet work it was going to do without narrating it.

It worked better than any reassurance could have. Allison felt her own breathing, gradually, begin to even out, the rigid lock of her shoulders easing by degrees as the solid, unshaking warmth beside her gave her fear something to brace against besides its own echoing momentum.

They sat like that for a long while, in silence, the kind of silence that had stopped, weeks ago, feeling like something that needed filling.

It was perhaps twenty minutes later that the spider dropped.

Allison felt it before she saw it — a light, skittering weight landing directly on her shoulder, and her entire body locked instantly, every drop of blood seeming to freeze in place, her mouth opening on a scream that never quite made it past her own paralyzed throat. She could not move. She could not even properly look at it, her eyes fixed rigidly forward, every fiber of her being consumed by the specific, primal horror of the thing crawling, she was certain, closer to her neck with every passing second.

Levi's hand moved before she'd even fully processed what was happening — a single, precise flick of his fingers that sent the spider flying off into the dark undergrowth with no more effort than swatting away a mildly annoying fly, the whole motion executed with such economical, unhurried speed that it was over before Allison had even managed to draw the breath for the scream still lodged in her throat.

She sat, frozen, for several more seconds afterward, her eyes wide, her whole body still trembling faintly with the aftershock of pure animal terror, and then, slowly, turned to look at him.

"Thank you," she whispered, and meant it with a depth that surprised her, her voice thin and unsteady in a way she rarely allowed herself to sound in front of anyone.

Levi grunted, which she had long since learned to translate, and returned his gaze to the treeline as though nothing at all had happened. "Focus," he said, after a moment, his voice as flat and unbothered as ever. "This darkness isn't as clean as my office."

It should have sounded dismissive. Coming from anyone else, it might have. But there was something underneath the clipped delivery — some small, deliberate steadiness in how he said it, in the fact that he did not move his arm away from hers, in the fact that he stayed, silent and solid beside her, for the remainder of her watch rather than returning to his own bunk the moment the immediate crisis had passed — that Allison understood, with the same clarity she used to read anyone else, as its own quiet, unspoken form of care.

She did not examine, too closely, how much that quiet care had settled into her chest and refused to leave.

---

## 3.

The following afternoon, back at the temporary camp, exhausted and drained in the particular bone-deep way that came after a full night's watch on top of a full day's march, Levi allowed himself the rare indulgence of loosening his cravat the moment the day's official duties concluded, tugging the knot free with two brisk, efficient motions and unbuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt beneath it, rolling the tension out of his shoulders with a small, tired exhale that he would not have permitted himself in front of anyone whose opinion he cared about managing.

He did not, in that moment, remember that Allison was still seated a few feet away, reviewing a map by the fading afternoon light, until he glanced up and found her watching him.

She was not subtle about it. She had, in fact, entirely abandoned any pretense of subtlety, her eyes tracking the movement of his hands at his collar, the small, exposed stretch of his throat and collarbones beneath the open shirt, with an open, unhurried appreciation that she made no effort whatsoever to disguise, biting gently at her lower lip in a way that Allison, in any other context, watching anyone else, would have immediately identified and filed away as an obvious, unmistakable tell.

She had made her vow only days earlier. She would feel this, she had told herself, but she would not act on it — would keep it carefully, privately contained, would let none of it show.

She was not, in this particular moment, keeping that vow especially well.

Levi noticed her watching almost immediately, his own movements stilling, one eyebrow rising in slow, deliberate query. "Something wrong with my collar," he said, dry, the same flat, teasing register he'd used once before, though this time Allison did not have the presence of mind to manufacture a quick, deflecting excuse.

She held his gaze for a beat too long, something warm and unguarded flickering openly across her face before she could stop it — not embarrassment, this time, not the flustered retreat she'd managed the first time he'd caught her staring, but something steadier, more honest, an open acknowledgment that she found the sight in front of her genuinely, unapologetically attractive and had simply run out of the energy required to hide it.

"No," she said, finally, her voice quieter than usual, and did not look away. "Nothing's wrong with it at all."

Levi went very still.

Whatever he'd expected — another flustered deflection, another quick excuse about being distracted by unrelated thoughts — this was not it, and Allison watched, with the same careful attention she gave everyone else, the small, unmistakable shift in his expression: the flicker of surprise, quickly suppressed, followed by something else entirely, something that lingered in his gaze a beat longer than strict professional distance should have allowed, before he caught himself and looked away first, clearing his throat and reaching for the abandoned cravat to redo the knot with rather more focus than the task required.

Neither of them said anything further about it. But Allison, watching him retie his collar with hands that were, she noted with some private satisfaction, not entirely steady, felt something in her chest settle into a new, quieter certainty: whatever her vow had promised about not letting this show, she was, it seemed, already losing that particular battle, one unguarded moment at a time.

She thought, distantly, of the long road still ahead of her with Erwin, of the mission she had told herself, for years now, was the entire point of everything she did. The thought arrived with less urgency than it once had, and she noticed that too, filed it away alongside everything else she was determined, for the moment, not to examine any further than strictly necessary.

Not yet, she told herself. Not yet.

But the wind, unmistakably, had already begun to shift.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,150)*

# Chapter 12: High-Speed Dynamics and Subtle Stirrings

## I.

The expedition's third day began under a sky the color of old iron, low clouds pressing down over the survey team as they broke camp before dawn, and Allison spent the first hour of the ride in the particular, comfortable near-silence that had become one of the small, unremarkable pleasures of missions alongside Levi — not conversation, exactly, but a shared quiet that neither of them felt any pressure to fill, the horses' hooves and the creak of leather the only sounds between them as the terrain slowly shifted from open plain to the broken, forested foothills where the day's survey work was meant to take place.

"You're quiet," Levi observed, somewhere past the second hour, glancing sideways at her from atop his own horse.

"I'm always quiet in the mornings. You know this. You've complained about it."

"I've complained about the opposite. You're usually talking before your eyes are even properly open."

"That's a slight exaggeration."

"It's really not," Levi said, though there was no real edge to it, and Allison found herself smiling despite the early hour and the low, oppressive clouds, some quiet, comfortable warmth settling in her chest at the easy, familiar rhythm of their bickering — a rhythm that had become, over the preceding weeks, one of the small constants she found herself looking forward to regardless of whatever else the day held.

She did not examine, too closely, why that particular realization sat with her the way it did. She had made her vow only days earlier, in the wake of the letter incident and the night watch, and had been doing her level best to keep it — feeling whatever she felt, privately, and letting none of it interfere with the actual, practical business of the day. It was, she reminded herself, manageable. She simply had to keep it contained.

The morning's survey work proceeded without incident — mapping titan density across the foothills, noting terrain features that would matter for the larger operation planned in the coming weeks, the kind of careful, methodical work that required patience and precision rather than combat, and by early afternoon the small survey team had settled into the unhurried rhythm of soldiers doing a necessary but low-risk job well.

It was the abnormal that changed everything, arriving with the sudden, sourceless violence that made abnormals so uniquely dangerous — no herd movement to signal its approach, no warning at all beyond the sharp, startled cry of the lookout posted at the rear of the formation, and then the ground itself seemed to shudder as something massive crashed through the treeline at a dead sprint, moving with a speed and coordination that no ordinary titan should have possessed.

"Abnormal!" someone shouted, and the entire formation broke into practiced, immediate motion — horses wheeling, soldiers reaching for their gear, the whole disciplined machinery of Scout Regiment training snapping into place in the space of a single breath.

Allison's horse, a steady, well-trained mare that had carried her without incident through two prior expeditions, reacted to the abnormal's sudden proximity with a violence entirely unlike its usual temperament — rearing hard, screaming, bolting sideways in blind panic before Allison had fully registered what was happening, and she felt herself losing her grip on the reins, felt her balance tip past the point of recovery, and then felt nothing beneath her at all as she was thrown hard from the saddle, the ground rushing up to meet her with brutal, immediate force.

---

## 2.

The impact knocked the breath entirely out of her lungs, and for one long, disorienting moment Allison lay stunned in the dirt, ears ringing, the world tilted at some wrong angle she couldn't immediately correct, aware only of the ground-shaking thunder of massive footsteps drawing rapidly closer.

She managed, through sheer animal instinct rather than conscious thought, to roll onto her back, and found herself staring directly up at the abnormal bearing down on her — easily fifteen meters, moving with a horrifying, fluid speed that gave her no realistic window to scramble clear before it closed the remaining distance, its shadow already falling long and dark across the ground where she lay.

She had, in that moment, the strange, floating clarity that people sometimes describe in genuine mortal danger — a sense of time slowing, of details sharpening even as her own ability to act seemed to have entirely deserted her, her body locked, some distant part of her brain already, quietly, beginning to grieve the fact that this, apparently, was how it ended.

She did not see Levi's O.D.M gear deploy. She heard it — the sharp, familiar hiss of gas propulsion, closer and faster than she'd ever heard it before — and then he was simply there, cutting down out of the grey sky at an angle so steep and so fast that she had no time to brace for what happened next.

He did not catch her gently. There was no time, no margin at all for anything careful or measured — he collided with her at speed, one arm hooking hard around her waist, and the impact of it knocked what remained of the air from her already-empty lungs as he wrenched them both up and away from the ground in a single, violent arc, the abnormal's massive hand closing on empty air exactly where she had been lying a half-second before.

The world spun. Allison had no frame of reference for what was happening beyond the crushing grip of Levi's arm around her middle and the sick, vertiginous lurch of being hauled bodily through open air at a speed her body had never been designed to withstand, and it was only when they slammed, hard, into the thick branch of a nearby tree that she managed to get any real bearing on her surroundings at all.

They landed badly — or rather, Levi landed with the kind of controlled, brutal precision that came from years of practice, absorbing the impact through bent knees and a taut, coiled core, while Allison, still disoriented from the fall and the subsequent rescue, very nearly overbalanced straight back off the branch entirely. It was only the sheer, immovable strength of his grip around her waist that kept her upright, hauling her against him with enough force that the top of her head collided, hard, with his chin.

"Ow," she managed, dazed, one hand flying up to rub at the point of impact.

"Hold still," Levi said, his voice tight with the specific strain of a man actively bracing two full-grown bodies against a swaying tree branch fifteen meters in the air, one arm still locked hard around her waist, his other hand gripping the branch itself with white-knuckled precision. "You're about to fall again."

"I wasn't going to—"

"You were about to."

He was, Allison registered, distantly, through the fog of adrenaline and disorientation, entirely correct — her balance had not yet recovered from either the initial fall or the violent trajectory of the rescue, and it was only his continued, iron grip around her waist, his weight braced hard against hers, that kept her from tumbling straight back off the branch and undoing the entire, harrowing rescue in a single careless movement.

Below them, the abnormal roared in frustration, circling the base of the tree with the same horrifying speed it had displayed moments before, clearly unwilling to abandon the pursuit despite having lost its immediate target. Allison felt Levi's grip tighten further, his whole body angling instinctively to shield hers from the creature's continued attention, his focus locked entirely on the threat below even as his hands remained fixed at her waist, steadying her.

It took several more long, tense minutes — the rest of the survey team finally arriving to draw the abnormal's attention with a coordinated distraction, buying Levi the opening he needed to finish it cleanly with two precise strikes to the nape that dropped the creature in a single, decisive motion — before the immediate danger passed and the adrenaline finally, gradually, began to ebb from Allison's shaking limbs.

It was only then, in the sudden, ringing quiet that followed, that she became fully, overwhelmingly aware of exactly how they were positioned: her back pressed flush against his chest, his arm still locked firmly around her waist, his calloused hands gripping her hip with a strength that had, moments before, been the only thing standing between her and a second fall, now lingering there rather longer than the immediate danger strictly required.

"You can let go now," she said, a little breathlessly, though she made no actual move to pull away herself.

"Right," Levi said, and released her — not quickly, exactly, but with a small, deliberate care that suggested he'd needed a beat to actually process the instruction before acting on it, and stepped back along the branch to put a more professionally appropriate distance between them.

Allison turned to look at him properly then, adrenaline still coursing hot through her veins, and found him watching her with an expression she couldn't immediately name — not the flat, unreadable composure he usually wore, but something rawer, sharper, his jaw tight, his eyes tracking over her with a focus that felt less like a tactical assessment for injury and more like something he wasn't fully in control of.

"You're a distraction," he said, finally, flatly, though the words came out rougher than his usual clipped delivery, and Allison noted, with the same careful attention she gave everyone else, that his hand, when he finally let it drop from where it had lingered near her waist, was not entirely steady.

"Noted," she said, breathless, and did not point out that his own hands had lingered rather longer than strict rescue protocol required.

---

## 3.

They made their way back down to solid ground once the immediate danger had cleared, both of them silent, both of them, Allison suspected, privately working through the specific adrenaline crash that came after a genuine brush with death, and it was not until they'd rejoined the rest of the survey team — Petra fussing briefly over a scrape on Allison's forearm, someone else confirming the abnormal's kill with the flat, practiced efficiency of soldiers long accustomed to death as an occupational hazard — that Allison found a private moment to actually examine what had just happened between herself and Levi on that branch.

It should not have affected her the way it did. She had been rescued before — every soldier in the Scouts had, at one point or another, been pulled from the jaws of some near-miss by a squadmate's quick reflexes, and none of those previous rescues had left her replaying the specific grip of a hand at her waist for the better part of an hour afterward.

But there had been something in the way Levi had moved to shield her from the abnormal's continued pursuit, something in the tight, controlled strain of his voice telling her to hold still, something in the lingering weight of his hands at her hip that had gone on rather longer than strict necessity demanded, that Allison found herself unable to file away as simple professional reflex, no matter how many times she tried.

*He's like that with everyone,* she told herself, unconvincingly. *That's just how he handles a crisis. Efficient. Thorough. It doesn't mean anything about you specifically.*

She did not entirely believe this, and found, with some private discomfort, that she was no longer entirely sure she wanted to.

---

## 4.

The second engagement of the day came less than an hour later, when a smaller cluster of ordinary titans — drawn, perhaps, by the noise of the earlier fight — emerged from the treeline in a loose, shambling group that the survey team moved to clear before continuing their retreat toward the Walls.

Allison found herself, for the first time in weeks, with a genuine, unobstructed vantage point to watch Levi fight at full capacity, rather than the brief glimpses she usually caught during drills or the controlled, demonstrative sparring sessions he ran for training purposes.

It was, she discovered, an entirely different thing to witness in earnest.

He moved through the small cluster of titans with a fluid, terrifying economy that made every other soldier in the vicinity look, by comparison, clumsy and hesitant — no wasted motion, no unnecessary flourish, simply the precise, devastating application of exactly the force required to end each threat as efficiently as possible. He dropped from the sky in tight, controlled arcs, blades flashing in brief, brutal strokes across each exposed nape, already moving toward the next target before the previous one had finished crumpling to the ground. There was a rhythm to it, almost musical in its precision, each movement flowing into the next with a grace that had nothing decorative about it and everything functional, the kind of competence that came only from years of discipline pushed past the point of conscious thought into something closer to instinct.

Allison, watching from a safe distance, found herself entirely unable to look away.

She had expected, distantly, to feel something like fear, or at least the detached, clinical awe most soldiers felt watching Humanity's Strongest do his work. What she felt instead was something warmer, heavier, settling low in her stomach with an intensity that startled her — a kind of mesmerized, helpless admiration that had very little to do with tactics and everything to do with the raw, undeniable fact that competence, deployed with that particular lethal grace, was — she admitted this to herself with a heavy, unwilling flush of heat she couldn't entirely suppress — extraordinarily, inconveniently attractive.

She watched him drop the final titan with two clean strokes, landing lightly amid the settling steam of the dissolving corpse with the same unbothered, controlled composure he brought to everything, and felt her own heartbeat, which had only just begun to settle from the earlier rescue, pick up its pace all over again for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with danger.

*This is bad,* she thought, with the same clear-eyed, diagnostic honesty she usually reserved for genuine strategic assessments. *This is genuinely, seriously bad.*

She did not look away from him again for the rest of that engagement, and did not, this time, bother constructing an excuse for why.

---

## V.

Levi, for his part, was engaged in his own quiet reckoning that evening, back at the temporary camp, alone with his thoughts in the particular way he preferred to process anything he didn't yet have adequate language for.

He had not examined, in the moment, why his reaction to Allison's fall had been quite so immediate, quite so instinctive — he had simply moved, the way he moved for any soldier under his command in danger, and told himself, afterward, that the speed and force of his response was nothing more than standard operating procedure, the same reflexive urgency he'd have shown for anyone about to be crushed beneath an abnormal's hand.

It was harder to sustain that explanation once he allowed himself to actually recall the specific texture of what had happened on that branch — the way his hands had lingered at her waist rather longer than balance strictly required, the sharp, unfamiliar spike of something that was not merely relief when he'd confirmed she was unhurt, the tight, controlled restraint it had taken to step back and put proper distance between them once the immediate crisis had passed.

He turned it over for a long while, alone in his tent, with the same clinical, unforgiving focus he brought to any tactical after-action review, searching for the explanation that would let him file the whole thing away as nothing more than ordinary battlefield adrenaline.

He did not find that explanation. He found, instead, a slow, quiet, deeply unwelcome suspicion beginning to take root somewhere he had not given it permission to grow — a suspicion he was not yet ready to name, would not be ready to name for some time still, but which had, undeniably, begun putting down roots on that tree branch fifteen meters above the ground, in the space of a single, adrenaline-charged moment when he had held onto her rather longer than strictly necessary and found that he had not particularly wanted to let go.

He fell asleep late that night, as he often did, without resolving anything at all, though the shape of the problem had, for the first time, begun to feel less like something he could simply out-wait, and more like something that was going to require, eventually, an answer he was not at all certain he was prepared to give.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,650)*

# Chapter 13: Underworld Alignment

## I.

The briefing took place in Erwin's office, three days after the survey expedition's return, and Allison knew, from the particular gravity in Erwin's expression as she and Levi took their seats across from his desk, that whatever this assignment turned out to be, it was not going to be routine.

"We've identified a target in the Underground," Erwin said, without preamble, sliding a thin folder across the desk toward them. "A man who goes by Orlov. Runs a significant portion of the black market trade beneath the interior district — weapons, primarily, though we suspect some of what he's moving has military origins. There's reason to believe some of his contacts extend into corrupt elements of the interior government, which means his operation is directly affecting our supply lines and, potentially, our security."

Allison opened the folder, skimming the sparse intelligence gathered so far — a description, a rough sketch of the man's known territory, a handful of names belonging to associates whose full roles remained unclear. "You want information," she said, already understanding the shape of what was coming.

"I want information," Erwin confirmed. "Specifically, I want to know the extent of his connections into the interior government, and whether any of our own supply requisitions are being deliberately diverted through his network before they reach us. That requires someone who can get close enough to extract it without raising suspicion — someone with exactly your particular skill set, Craver."

Allison felt a small, familiar thrill at the assignment despite its obvious danger — this was, after all, precisely the kind of work she'd trained her whole life for without knowing it, the specific art of reading a stranger quickly enough, precisely enough, to extract exactly what was needed before they realized anything had been taken at all. "I can do that," she said, with genuine, uncomplicated confidence.

"Absolutely not," Levi said, at almost the exact same moment, his voice flat and immovable.

Allison turned to look at him, startled by the sharpness of the interruption. "Excuse me?"

"You're too gullible for something like this," Levi said, not unkindly, though the bluntness of it landed with a sting regardless. "This isn't flirting your way into an extra ration or getting a smile out of Erwin. This is a man who deals in weapons and probably has no shortage of experience spotting exactly the kind of manipulation you're good at. If he catches even a hint that you're playing him, you're not walking back out of that district."

"I'm not *gullible,*" Allison said, stung. "I'm good at reading people. That's the whole point of sending me."

"You're good at reading people who want to be read," Levi said. "This is someone whose entire livelihood depends on not being read. That's a different problem, and you've never actually had to solve it, because you've never had to work against someone who's spent their whole career learning to spot exactly what you do."

"That's not fair—"

"It's not about fair," Levi said, cutting her off, his tone hardening in a way Allison had rarely heard directed at her specifically. "It's about you walking into a compound full of armed men with no backup and no way out if it goes wrong."

Erwin, who had been watching this exchange with the careful, measured patience of a commander who'd learned, over years, when to let subordinates argue their way to a workable solution and when to intervene, finally raised a hand. "He's not wrong that the risk is real," he said, addressing Allison directly. "But you are, genuinely, the best option we have for this. So." He turned to Levi. "You'll go with her."

Levi's head snapped up. "What?"

"You'll accompany her," Erwin said, with the flat, decisive finality of a man who had already fully considered and settled the matter. "Posing as a couple — someone wealthy enough to be worth Orlov's time, curious enough to warrant an introduction, with you close enough to intervene if anything goes wrong.

She gets the access her skills can secure. You provide the safety net her skills can't."

There was a long, charged silence in which Allison watched a complicated series of emotions move across Levi's normally unreadable face — irritation, clearly, at being maneuvered into an assignment he hadn't chosen, but underneath it something else, something Allison couldn't quite name but recognized, with the same instinct she used to read everyone else, as a kind of grim, reluctant relief that he would, at least, be there.

"Fine," Levi said finally, flatly. "But she does exactly what I say the moment anything feels wrong. No improvising. No 'just one more minute, I almost have it.' The second I say we leave, we leave."

"Deal," Allison said, and found, beneath her own irritation at being called gullible, a small, warm thread of something else entirely at the specific, fierce protectiveness in his voice — something she filed away, as she'd filed away so much else recently, without examining too closely why it made her chest feel the way it did.

---

## 2.

The preparation for the mission took the better part of two days, and involved, to Allison's considerable and vocal delight, an entire wardrobe upgrade that Levi found almost unbearably tedious to sit through.

"We need to look wealthy," Allison said, holding up two different dresses against herself in the small fitting room the quartermaster's staff had set up for the occasion, both requisitioned from the interior specifically for undercover work of this kind. "Not just wealthy — *bored* wealthy. The kind of people who go looking for illicit thrills because regular life doesn't interest them anymore."

"I don't know how to look bored and wealthy," Levi said, arms crossed, watching this entire process with visible impatience from a chair in the corner. "I know how to look like myself."

"That's the problem. You look like you're perpetually three seconds from disciplining someone."

"I *am* perpetually three seconds from disciplining someone."

"Right, well, for the next few days you're going to have to be perpetually three seconds from ordering another bottle of wine you don't actually want because you're rich enough not to care," Allison said, holding up a dark, well-tailored coat and studying it with a critical eye. "This one. It'll make you look like old interior money instead of military."

"I don't want to look like old interior money."

"You don't get a vote. This is my area of expertise." She tossed the coat at him, and he caught it with the automatic, unbothered reflex of a man who'd spent years catching things thrown at him unexpectedly. "Try it on."

He did, eventually, with considerable grumbling, and Allison found herself, once he'd finished buttoning the coat, unable to entirely suppress a small, delighted laugh at the transformation — not because he looked bad, exactly, but because the dark, expensive tailoring sat so incongruously against his usual flat, unbothered scowl that the overall effect was somewhere between genuinely striking and faintly absurd.

"What," Levi said, catching her expression.

"Nothing. You look good. Just — weird. Like a very grumpy painting of a wealthy man."

"I'll take that as a compliment, since I assume that's the goal."

"It's exactly the goal," Allison said, and found herself, despite the genuine danger looming ahead of them, enjoying this particular preparation rather more than she probably should have — the easy, familiar rhythm of their bickering wrapped around the unfamiliar, faintly thrilling premise of playing pretend as his wife for the better part of an evening.

"We need a story," Levi said, once the wardrobe question had been settled. "Names, background, how we met. Something simple enough that neither of us trips over it under pressure."

"Obviously," Allison said. "Okay — I'm thinking old money, both of us, families who've known each other for years, arranged introduction that actually worked out. Gives us a reason to already know each other well without either of us needing to fake chemistry we don't—" she stopped, abruptly aware of the direction that sentence had been heading, and course-corrected with rather more speed than grace, "—without either of us needing to fake, you know, general familiarity."

Levi's expression did not change, though something in the set of his jaw suggested he'd caught the stumble regardless. "Fine," he said, after a beat. "Old money. Arranged introduction. What are the names."

"Something suitably pretentious," Allison said, grateful for the redirect. "I'll be... Adelaide. Adelaide Voss."

"Voss," Levi repeated, flat.

"It's a good name! It sounds rich."

"Fine. Adelaide Voss." He considered for a moment. "I'll go by Ansel."

"Ansel Voss," Allison said, testing it out loud, and then, unable to resist, added, "Husband and wife. Mr. and Mrs. Voss. Has a nice ring to it."

"Don't get used to it," Levi said, though there was something almost, almost warm underneath the flat delivery, gone before Allison could fully catch hold of it, and the two of them spent the remainder of that evening's preparation working out the finer details of their fabricated history with a focus that felt, increasingly, less like tactical planning and more like something Allison found herself reluctant to examine too closely.

---

## 3.

The descent into the Underground the following evening brought with it an entirely different atmosphere than anything Allison had experienced before — the close, sunless press of the district settling over her like a physical weight, gas lamps casting everything in the same sickly yellow glow, the air thick with the smell of tallow smoke and unwashed crowds and something else beneath it, something like desperation that no amount of wealth on display could quite disguise.

They arrived at Orlov's territory dressed exactly as planned, Allison in a deep burgundy gown that draped elegantly enough to suggest considerable expense without tipping into ostentation, Levi beside her in the dark, well-tailored coat, his usual sharp, watchful bearing carefully softened into something closer to bored aristocratic disinterest — a transformation Allison found, watching him execute it with the same clipped precision he brought to everything, genuinely impressive despite her earlier teasing.

The compound's outer guards proved to be exactly the kind of obstacle Allison had trained her whole life to overcome — two broad-shouldered men stationed at the gate, visibly unimpressed by the steady stream of wealthy visitors passing through, until Allison approached with precisely the right mixture of easy confidence and flattering curiosity, complimenting the elder guard's ability to spot troublemakers with what she assured him was a genuinely rare instinct, asking the younger one about the scar along his jaw with just enough warm, personal interest to make him feel, for one brief moment, like someone worth noticing rather than simply a fixture at the gate.

Within minutes, they were through.

Levi, watching this unfold beside her, felt the same reluctant, grudging admiration he always felt watching her work a room, mixed now with a considerably sharper undercurrent of tension he hadn't quite anticipated — the specific, uncomfortable awareness that every guard's eyes lingered a beat too long on her as she passed, that the ease with which she disarmed each obstacle came paired, inevitably, with the attention of men who had no idea she belonged, in whatever complicated, undefined way she currently did, to him.

He said nothing about it. He simply followed a half-step behind her, his hand settling, without deliberate decision, at the small of her back as they moved deeper into the compound — a gesture that fit, plausibly enough, the character of a possessive, wealthy husband, and which he told himself, firmly, was purely tactical.

They were separated at the compound's inner lounge, where only Orlov's most trusted associates were permitted entry — Allison passing through with a final, warm smile at the guard controlling the door, Levi left standing in the outer courtyard with strict, explicit instructions that he was not, under any circumstances, to follow.

He did not enjoy waiting. He had never particularly enjoyed waiting, as a general rule, preferring the direct, controllable satisfaction of solving a problem himself rather than trusting its resolution to someone else's judgment — but this particular waiting, standing in a dim, unfamiliar courtyard while Allison disappeared behind a closed door into a room full of armed men he could not see and could not protect her from, proved to be a considerably more acute torment than he had anticipated.

---

## 4.

Inside the lounge, Allison found Orlov exactly as the intelligence file had described — a heavyset man in his fifties, sharp-eyed despite his relaxed posture, surrounded by a rotating cast of associates who came and went with the easy familiarity of men who had long since stopped questioning their employer's business.

She played the role of Adelaide Voss with the same effortless, unhesitating warmth she brought to every other social maneuver in her life, laughing easily at his jokes, asking careful, curious questions about his business that never once tipped into anything that might read as suspicious, letting him believe, entirely, that her interest was purely social — a bored aristocrat's wife looking for an evening's entertainment, nothing more.

It worked. It worked, in fact, better than she had dared hope, Orlov growing progressively more expansive and unguarded as the evening wore on, dropping details about his network's reach into the interior government with the careless confidence of a man who had never once considered that the pretty, laughing woman across from him might be listening for exactly those specific details, cataloguing every name and connection with the same precise focus she brought to reading anyone.

By the time she rose to leave, she had exactly what Erwin needed — names, connections, confirmation of the exact channel through which Orlov's network had been diverting supply shipments before they ever reached the Scout Regiment's official inventory.

Orlov, walking her toward the door himself with the particular proprietary warmth of a man who believed he'd made a genuine, valuable social connection, rested his hand at the small of her back as they crossed the room — a familiar, casual gesture that meant, in the context of the persona she'd built all evening, nothing more than a host's ordinary courtesy, and which Allison, entirely focused on maintaining her cover through the final stretch of the extraction, gave no particular thought to at all.

Levi, watching from across the courtyard as the door finally opened and Allison emerged with Orlov's hand still resting low on her back, felt something in his chest go abruptly, dangerously tight.

---

## V.

He did not say anything in the moment. He could not, without breaking the cover they'd spent two days carefully constructing, and so he simply crossed the courtyard with measured, unhurried steps, slipping an arm possessively around Allison's waist the moment she was close enough, murmuring something appropriately warm and dismissive to Orlov about needing to get his wife home before the hour grew too late, and steered her firmly toward the compound's exit with a grip that was, Allison noted, rather firmer than strictly necessary for the performance.

They said nothing until they'd cleared the district's outer boundary entirely, climbing back up toward the surface streets where the air, though still far from clean, at least carried some faint hint of open sky above them.

"You got it," Levi said, finally, his voice tight and clipped in a way that had nothing to do with relief at the mission's success.

"I got everything," Allison confirmed, still riding the particular adrenaline high of a successful extraction, entirely unaware of the storm visibly building behind Levi's carefully controlled expression. "Names, the supply channel, everything Erwin wanted. It went perfectly."

"He had his hand on you."

Allison blinked, caught off guard by the sudden, sharp shift in subject. "What?"

"Orlov," Levi said, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed straight ahead rather than on her. "Walking you out. His hand was on your back."

"That was part of the cover," Allison said, genuinely confused by the intensity of his reaction. "He thought I was his wealthy new friend's bored wife. Hosts do that. It didn't mean anything."

"I know it didn't mean anything," Levi said, sharper than he intended, and then, visibly catching himself, exhaled hard through his nose and did not elaborate further, though his hand — which had not, Allison realized only now, actually left her waist since they'd exited the compound — tightened fractionally.

They walked the remainder of the journey back toward the surface in a silence that felt considerably more charged than the comfortable quiet they usually shared, Levi's hand remaining, without further comment or acknowledgment, firmly settled at the small of her back for the entire rest of the trip — not the calculated, tactical placement of a cover story any longer, Allison suspected, but something else entirely, something he made no move to explain and she, for the moment, did not push him to.

"You don't have to keep doing that," she said finally, once they were well clear of the district, nodding faintly toward his hand. "The performance is over. Nobody's watching anymore."

"I know," Levi said, and did not move his hand.

"Then why—"

"I'm not jealous," Levi said, before she could finish the question, with the particular, immediate defensiveness of a man denying something he had not, technically, been accused of, which told Allison considerably more than any actual admission could have. "I'm making sure you're not about to fall over. You've had a long night."

"Right," Allison said, unable to entirely suppress the small, warm smile tugging at her mouth despite her genuine exhaustion. "Purely protective. Nothing else."

"Exactly," Levi said, flatly, and kept his hand exactly where it was for the remainder of their walk back to the surface, and Allison, for her part, found she had absolutely no interest in arguing him out of it.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,900)*

# Chapter 14: Restless Evenings and Stitched Wounds

## I.

The intelligence Allison had gathered from Orlov proved, in the days following their return from the Underground, to be exactly as valuable as Erwin had hoped — a clear, documented trail connecting several corrupt interior officials to a supply diversion scheme that had been quietly bleeding resources from the Scout Regiment for the better part of a year, information detailed enough that Erwin spent the better part of two full days locked in his office cross-referencing it against existing records before finally, cautiously, allowing himself something like satisfaction.

"This is remarkable work," he told Allison, the following week, in the strategy room, and Allison felt the familiar flutter of pleasure at his praise — dimmer, somehow, than it once would have been, though she noted this without quite letting herself examine why. "Genuinely. I don't think anyone else in the regiment could have gotten this level of detail out of him."

"I had good backup," Allison said, and felt Levi's presence beside her though she did not look at him directly, some private, warm acknowledgment passing silently between them that had nothing to do with the conversation's actual content.

Erwin, watching this small, wordless exchange with the particular perceptiveness he brought to most things, felt a faint, unfamiliar prickle of something he did not yet have language for, and filed it away without examining it further, returning his attention instead to the documents spread across his desk. He had, after all, more pressing matters to consider than whatever small dynamic existed between his captain and this particular new transfer — though the thought, once planted, would return to him with rather more frequency in the coming weeks than he initially anticipated.

Levi, for his part, followed Allison out of the strategy room afterward with the same clipped efficiency he brought to everything, and it was only once they were clear of the corridor, alone, that he mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that he needed to stop by her quarters to review the remaining intelligence documents she'd taken notes on during the extraction.

"You've never needed to come to my room before," Allison said, a little surprised. "We always do this in your office."

"Your notes are in your room," Levi said, as though this were simple, unassailable logic rather than a decision that would, within the hour, come to feel like one of the more significant tactical miscalculations of his career.

---

## 2.

He should have known better. That much became evident the moment Allison's door swung open and he found himself confronted with the full, uncensored reality of her living quarters — a space so thoroughly, comprehensively chaotic that his first instinct was to check, briefly, whether the room had recently been ransacked before concluding, with growing horror, that no, this was simply how she lived.

Yarn — an entire spectrum of colors, in various states of half-finished projects — draped over nearly every available surface, a stuffed rabbit missing one ear sitting atop a pile of low-rise trousers, sheet music scattered across the desk in a configuration that bore no resemblance to any organizational system Levi could identify, two mismatched socks abandoned on the floor in the specific, orbiting proximity of objects that had clearly given up any pretense of finding their proper place. Willy, the enormous white cat, lay sprawled directly in the center of the unmade bed, regarding Levi's entrance with the profound, unbothered indifference of an animal who had never once in his life been disciplined for anything.

"Absolutely not," Levi said, standing frozen in the doorway.

"What?"

"This. This is not a room. This is a crime scene."

"It's a *lived-in* room," Allison said, with the particular defensive dignity of someone who had heard variations of this exact criticism her entire life and had long since stopped being genuinely wounded by it, though a faint flush still crept up her neck. "I clean it. Eventually. When there's actually a reason to."

"There's a reason right now," Levi said, already stepping fully into the room, his expression settling into the same grim, focused determination he brought to any tactical problem he'd decided needed immediate correction. "This is a fire hazard. This is also, structurally, an insult to every soldier who has to live in barracks half this size without turning it into a - a craft supply depot."

"It's not that bad—"

Levi crossed to the door, closed it firmly, and, to Allison's genuine astonishment, turned the small latch to lock it.

"What are you doing," she said, staring.

"We're cleaning this," Levi said, already rolling up his sleeves with the same efficient, unhurried economy he brought to everything, "and I'm not letting you leave until it's done. This has been building for weeks. I refuse to let it continue."

"You can't just lock me in my own room—"

"Watch me."

Allison stared at him for a long moment, torn between genuine indignation and a helpless, unwilling amusement at the sheer, absurd conviction with which he'd committed to this particular ambush, and finally, with a dramatic sigh that fooled neither of them, surrendered to the inevitable.

"Fine," she said. "But you're not throwing anything away without asking me first. Some of this stuff matters."

"None of this yarn matters."

"The yarn absolutely matters, that's an entire in-progress sweater—"

"It's a shapeless blue tangle."

"It's a *sweater,* Captain, use your imagination—"

They worked for the better part of two hours, the low, familiar friction of their bickering filling the small room as steadily as the actual cleaning progressed — Levi sorting with brisk, merciless efficiency, folding trousers into precise stacks, organizing the scattered sheet music by some internal system Allison found genuinely baffling given his earlier insistence that chronological order was the only acceptable method for anything; Allison trailing behind him, rescuing individual items from what she considered his overzealous purges, narrating the history and significance of each half-finished project with a passion that Levi found, despite his best efforts to remain unmoved, increasingly difficult to dismiss.

"This one," she said, holding up a small, lopsided crocheted owl, "was my very first project. It's terrible. Look at how uneven the stitches are."

"It's genuinely terrible," Levi agreed, taking it from her to examine more closely despite himself, turning the small, misshapen thing over in his hands with an attention that seemed, to Allison's quiet surprise, more careful than the object's admittedly poor craftsmanship warranted.

"You don't have to agree that fast."

"You asked me to look at it. I looked at it. It's terrible. It's also—" he paused, apparently searching for the right word, his usual clipped efficiency faltering slightly, "—it's fine that it's terrible. First things are supposed to be terrible. That's not an insult."

Allison looked at him for a moment, something warm and unexpected settling in her chest at the small, unpolished sincerity of it, and found herself, for once, without an immediate quip to deflect the moment. "Thank you," she said, simply, and took the owl back gently, setting it in a place of careful, deliberate prominence on her now considerably tidier shelf.

By the time they finished, the room bore almost no resemblance to the chaos Levi had first walked into — surfaces cleared, yarn organized by color into a set of small baskets Levi had requisitioned, apparently, specifically for this purpose, sheet music stacked and labeled, even Willy's various scattered toys gathered into a single, tidy corner.

"There," Levi said, surveying the results with visible, if grudging, satisfaction. "Now it's a room."

"It was always a room."

"Now it's a room that won't collapse into a yarn-based structural failure."

"You're never going to let the yarn go, are you."

"Not until the day I die," Levi said, with total, flat conviction, and Allison laughed, genuinely, the sound filling the small, newly tidy space with a warmth that neither of them fully acknowledged but both, privately, found themselves reluctant to see end.

---

## 3.

The skirmish that led, less than a week later, to Levi's injury began as a routine perimeter check gone unexpectedly wrong — a small band of scavengers, armed and desperate, mistaking the Scout Regiment patrol for an easier target than it turned out to be, the confrontation escalating from a tense standoff into brief, violent chaos before the patrol managed to subdue the threat entirely.

Levi took a blade across his abdomen in the confusion — not deep enough to be immediately life-threatening, the medic who examined him at the scene confirmed with brisk, professional relief, but deep enough to need proper stitching rather than the field dressing that would have to suffice until they returned to base.

He downplayed the injury considerably by the time news of it reached Allison, dismissing it with the same flat, unbothered composure he brought to everything, waving off the medic's recommendation that he rest rather than continue with the patrol's remaining duties.

Allison did not find out how serious it actually was until she caught sight of the blood-soaked bandage beneath his shirt later that evening, and felt her stomach drop with a fear considerably sharper than she expected.

"That needs actual stitches," she said, staring at the makeshift field dressing with open alarm. "Not whatever this is."

"It's fine."

"It is very clearly not fine, you're bleeding through the bandage—"

"The medical tent's overwhelmed," Levi said, with the particular stubborn dismissiveness of a man who had spent years treating his own injuries as an inconvenient afterthought rather than a genuine priority. "Three worse cases from the same skirmish. I'll wait."

"You will not wait," Allison said, with a firmness that surprised even her, and it was this firmness, combined with the medic's harried confirmation that yes, the tent genuinely was overwhelmed and no, they could not spare immediate attention for a wound that wasn't actively life-threatening, that led, within the hour, to Allison finding herself in Levi's private quarters with a needle, thread, and a considerably more nervous set of hands than she typically brought to any task.

---

## 4.

"I've done this before," she said, more to reassure herself than him, laying out the supplies with hands that were not, despite her best efforts, entirely steady. "During training. On dummies. And once on Sasha, when she caught her arm on a fence."

"Comforting," Levi said, dry, already unbuttoning his shirt with the same brisk efficiency he brought to everything, shrugging out of it to reveal the wound — a clean, deep line across his lower abdomen, still sluggishly bleeding despite the earlier field dressing — along with the rest of him, lean and scarred and considerably more muscled than the compact frame of his uniform usually suggested.

Allison, kneeling beside him with her supplies, found herself for one long, unhelpful moment entirely unable to focus on the actual task at hand, her eyes tracking instead the sharp, defined lines of muscle across his stomach, the various small, old scars that told the story of a lifetime spent at the front of every fight, before she forced her attention, with real effort, back to the wound itself.

"This is going to hurt," she said, threading the needle with hands she was actively, silently commanding to steady.

"I've had worse."

"That's not comforting either."

"Wasn't trying to be comforting. Just get on with it."

She did, working with careful, focused precision, cleaning the wound first before beginning the actual stitching, her attention narrowing entirely onto the careful, methodical work in front of her — until, midway through, she needed to lean in close enough to bite the thread free, her face dropping near enough to his bare stomach that her breath ghosted warm across his skin with every exhale.

She felt him tense beneath her before she'd even registered the reason why.

"Sorry," she murmured, not looking up, entirely focused on securing the stitch. "Almost done with this one."

Her fingers, steadying his skin as she worked, traced briefly and entirely without conscious intent across the defined ridge of muscle just beside the wound — and it was in that exact moment, her fingers pressed lightly against his abdomen, her breath still warm against his stomach from leaning in to bite the thread, that a low, involuntary sound escaped him — rough, and quiet, and entirely unmistakable in its meaning, gone almost as soon as it had emerged, but not fast enough that Allison hadn't heard it clearly.

She froze.

Levi's entire body had gone rigid, his jaw locked, his eyes fixed with sudden, fierce intensity on the far wall, a dull flush creeping up his neck that had nothing whatsoever to do with blood loss.

"Did you just—" Allison started, her own face heating rapidly.

"No," Levi said, too fast, still staring resolutely at the wall. "Finish the stitches."

"I heard something."

"You heard nothing. Finish the stitches, Craver."

She did, though her hands were considerably less steady now than they had been moments before, and the remainder of the procedure passed in a silence so charged that Allison found herself acutely, overwhelmingly aware of every point of contact between her fingers and his skin, every small, careful movement required to finish the job properly.

---

## V.

By the time she finished — the wound cleanly stitched, bandaged, Levi's shirt pulled back on with rather more haste than the moment strictly required — neither of them had said another word about what had happened, though the air in the small room remained thick with an unspoken tension neither seemed inclined to address directly.

"Thank you," Levi said, finally, once she'd gathered her supplies, his voice carefully, deliberately flat.

"You're welcome," Allison said, equally careful, equally deliberate, though she found, gathering her things at the door, that she couldn't quite resist one small, teasing glance back over her shoulder. "For the record, I've never had a patient make a noise quite like that before."

"Goodnight, Craver," Levi said, with the specific, clipped finality of a man determined not to continue this particular conversation under any circumstances, though the faint, persistent color still visible along his jaw told a rather different story than his tone attempted to convey.

Allison left with a small, satisfied smile she made no real effort to hide, and walked back to her own newly tidy quarters turning the sound over and over in her mind — small, involuntary, entirely unguarded — and finding, with a warmth she no longer had much interest in denying, that she rather liked being the one who'd put it there.

---

*(Word count: approximately 2,700)*

You have reached the end of the text.