Chapter Text
The commander blinked the pink afterglare from his eyes and began to pen the post-expedition reports. He shelved the meat shortage notice he had started the night before the expedition. There was no shortage anymore.
He never checked the time the night after they returned to the walls. No night was ever longer.
Erwin saw him before he heard the knock. The lamplight had dimmed and the stand was crooked so the light curled sloppily across the folds in the captain's crossed arms and threw a glare on a belt buckle and little else.
"You're listing," he said. The words were low but they shot through the silenced room. They pierced through the ringing in Erwin's ears. He didn't remember when it had started.
"To the right," he added when Erwin said nothing. His steps echoed on the hardwood floors and the ringing was almost gone. Erwin straightened as he drew nearer. His back protested the move with a rich crack.
Erwin had noticed. His shots had been off. A degree or two and no more, but at such exorbitant heights and speeds, the smallest miscalculation is fatal. He flew as if he carried stones. Medics found no bruises or fractures to corroborate the change. He laid down his pen.
"You shouldn't be up this late, captain."
The words were low but scraped at his throat even so. He hadn't stopped giving orders since sunrise.
Erwin thought he saw something change in that impassive face. It might have been the light. Levi rounded the desk and passed behind him. His arms uncrossed and his hand rose and at that, the midnight haze lifted and there was nothing in the world but the breath in his lungs and the curve of that hand. It hovered over his shoulder. A nail caught on a fold in his shirt. Erwin felt the palm's heat radiating through the cloth. He didn't dare turn as Levi passed behind him. He felt a firm grip on the back of his chair. Cool air rushed over his shoulder again.
"Fix it," Levi said. He let go of the chair and left.
Erwin wasn't disappointed. Levi doesn't touch. Levi isn't touched. He scolded himself for expecting any different.
There was another knock the night they returned from the next expedition.
The footfalls were heavier. Sharper. In the right light, he almost looked angry.
"You're still listing," he said as he rounded the desk once more. It wasn't accusatory. It didn't have much bite. Erwin felt his eyes on him like an itch, like a burn.
He braced a hip against the desk and Erwin looked up from the expense reports. The lamplight pierced the dewy drops the towel had missed on his arms. His sleeves were bunched at his elbows. His arms were crossed.
Erwin hummed in response. It was a noncommittal thing, and the captain wasn't satisfied. Erwin glanced at his exposed arms, at the angry blush of skin scrubbed nearly off the bone. It wasn't wise to think these things so soon after an expedition, he reminded himself a thought too late. He blinked away the lingering images of soldiers and dreamers painting electric green fields.
He tried again, eager to return to the blessed cerebral void of figures and statistics. "I recalibrated my anchors before we left," he said. "The gear must have-"
"It's not the gear," Levi muttered as if Erwin was missing something maddeningly obvious. Then he did it again. He raised his hand and stepped behind him. Erwin waited for the grip on his chair.
It was a petty thing to want to clap him on the back or squeeze his shoulder or his hand or offer something, anything, when they were more dirt and grime and titan blood than flesh or when a job was well done or when a friend or a teammate was coming back in pieces or not at all or when words were too cheap or too hollow but Levi doesn't touch. Levi isn't touched.
From what the commander understood of acclimating soldiers from the underground, the beasts were a hideous relief. The titan threat was real and fast and shared. The traumas of that aborted city were invisible. They were slow. They were singular.
It had taken months to convince him to walk about with one blade and not three. Months before he stopped habitually locking doors and windows and peering into every corner of every room, and if they weren't on such an unforgiving schedule, Erwin wondered if he'd spend his days peering into every corner of the sky. He wondered if he'd peer into every corner of the sea.
"Keep working," Erwin heard him say and he could think of a thousand reasons not to and a thousand more questions but he forgot them all when small but heavy hands traced the slope of his shoulders and closed on his neck. A thumb brushed past his rising pulse and kneaded hard, widening circles into his nape and though they were nowhere near his windpipe, he was winded all the same.
Levi murmured a correction to one of his figures. Erwin recalculated as his nape burned and his shoulders fell, though he hadn't imagined he'd held them so high, had wound them like a pair of aching springs.
The hands wound farther and skirted against his collar. With each pass, Erwin hated the fabric a little more. His free hand twitched and he would have parted the first button from his collar had some part of him not emerged from his stupefied haze. He wondered distantly if this was a shade of unprofessional before his face became a shade of something else when a hard dig between the blades of his shoulders rocked from him an airy sigh.
The commander meant to draw this novelty to an end in earnest, but it was all he could do to wrap his mouth around his name, to trap his lip on the v as the hands lingered on a knot.
He was sobered a touch by the fading echoes of footfalls on a neatly lacquered floor as a single blink separated the brush of calloused fingertips at his nape and the snap of a shutting door.
Erwin would have been content to consign the odd evening to the back of his mind if he hadn't begun to mind his back. The very next morning, he woke before reveille with filled canisters and didn't touch the ground again until they had emptied. His form had never been so exact, his turns never so sharp.
The evening after the next expedition, he heard a knock.