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You had been part of Levi’s squad for almost a year when you realised you were in love with him. The truth came to you one storm-snarled night, after an expedition that had left half the unit dead. The survivor’s guilt was a hollow ache in your ribs; you’d cried for hours in the stables, trying to bury your face in the smell of hay and horses so you wouldn’t hear the echoes of the dying. That was where you saw him — your Captain — stepping in out of the rain as though some part of the night had taken human form. You told him everything, voice shaking, your words collapsing between breaths, tears and rainwater and snot all tangled together.
He had been kind that night. Steady. Guided you back to your quarters without letting the contact linger, spoke to you in the same even voice he used for orders. But nothing more ever came of it. He wouldn’t allow that.
And yet, in the year since, there had always been that unspoken thing between you — a constant low hum of tension that neither of you touched. Levi Ackerman wouldn’t allow himself that luxury. Not when he knew how death liked to take the people he loved.
Tonight is a night not unlike that first confession. Rain pounds the earth so hard it erases the sound of everything else. The sky flares occasionally with jagged blue, the light gone almost before it arrives. A single lantern burns weakly in the ruins, its flame shrinking with every gust.
Your tent sits just under the lip of a broken stone archway — the skeleton of an old building still standing from when Wall Maria fell. The rest of the squad have taken shelter where they can, scattered along the other side of the ruins. You, as the most senior under him, are set up close to Levi.
You've fallen asleep despite the noise, exhaustion dragging you under the moment you lie down. You didn’t even bother fully crawling into your bedroll; half of it lies twisted under you, the other half abandoned to the cold.
When Levi steps into your tent, the cup of black tea in his hand sends thin tendrils of steam curling into the damp air.
“I made you tea, brat,” he mutters, voice low, the way he always addresses you when he doesn’t want to admit the tenderness underneath.
You don’t answer. He looks down to find you already asleep, sprawled across the floor like you’ve simply stopped moving mid-thought.
“Tch. A few days of riding and you slack off,” he murmurs to himself. “Guess I’ll deal with any Titans that decide to eat us, then.”
He sets the tea down beside you and turns to leave, but something makes him stop — the faint rhythm of your breathing. Slow and even. The kind of breath that comes when the body is completely at ease. It’s so rare, seeing you like this.
He lowers himself to sit beside you, his cup balanced between his fingers. For a long moment, he just listens: the rain hammering the earth, the occasional groan of wind through stone, and beneath it all, the quiet rise and fall of your breath. Peace. Something he barely recognises anymore.
His eyes trace over your face. In the flicker of the dying lantern, your features are drawn in velvet lines, lashes resting on your cheeks, lips parted just enough to let that delicate sound escape. He’ll never say it aloud — not to you—but you’re beautiful. And more than that, you’ve been loyal. You have stood beside him through every loss, every order, every ugly thing that keeps you both alive.
“You really are perfect,” he hears himself whisper. It startles him — not the truth of it, but that he’s spoken it at all.
He reaches out before he can think better of it, brushing the back of his fingers across your cheek. Your skin is warm, alive in a way that makes something ache in his chest. It’s been so long since he’s touched someone like this without the sting of blood or the urgency of a bandage. He lets his thumb graze the curve of your cheekbone, slow and careful, as if afraid you might break.
His hand drifts lower, settling lightly over your sternum. Not to grope — just to feel the steady thrum of your heartbeat under his palm. Proof. You’re here. You’re alive. So is he.
The pang in his chest deepens — guilt sharpened by anger. He’s turned away from this once. From you. From the chance to be wanted by someone brave enough to say it out loud.
You shift in your sleep, and his hand glides without thought, settling over the swell of your breast through your shirt. The contact jolts him; he freezes, every muscle tight. Then, instinct curls in his gut, low and insistent, tightening in a way he hasn’t felt in far too long.
He snatches his hand back, pulse hammering.
“Shit,” he mutters under his breath, shifting his hips in a subtle, pointless attempt to will the need away. But the image is burned into him now — the softness of you beneath his palm, the way your chest rose against it — and the harder he tries not to think about it, the more it seems to anchor itself in his mind.
His fingers tremble before they make contact again. He hovers for a beat that feels far too long, then lets his hand settle over the thin fabric covering you. The warmth beneath it reaches him instantly. His eyes dart to your face, searching for the slightest twitch, the barest sign that you’re drifting toward waking — but you’re gone, deep under, breathing steady.
He screws his eyes shut, as though blotting out the sight might make the moment less real. His fingertips curl ever so slightly, sinking into the give of you, testing the suppleness as if he might convince himself this is an accident, something fleeting, something he didn’t mean.
A flash of tension coils low in his abdomen. The wrongness of it only sharpens the ache. His body answers before his mind can shut it down, a twitch inside the confines of his trousers that sends a flicker of shame up his spine. He tells himself to ignore it. He tells himself to stop. The telling does nothing.
One button. That’s all. One button, eased free from its hole with painstaking care, the fabric parting like it’s yielding to him alone. The lanternlight catches on the pale skin he uncovers — unmarked, untouched, the gentle radiance touching his palm before he even makes contact.
He lays his hand flat there again, appreciating the unhurried motion of your chest in sleep. He swallows hard. Tells himself that’s all he’ll take. But his hand moves anyway, easing beneath the open placket, fingers curving until he's cradling the fullness of you.
“What the hell am I doing…” The words barely leave his throat, worried that speaking them too clearly might force him to stop. His muscles twitch, ready to pull back — but then the delicacy of your body registers fully, the faint give, the heat. His thumb brushes higher instinctively, grazing the small peak of your nipple. It hardens under his touch like some unconscious invitation.
A sound escapes you, faint, caught halfway between a sigh and a breath — but you don’t stir. That’s all it takes for restraint to loosen in him. Touch-starved doesn’t even begin to cover it. At least like this, you can’t see the weakness in him. At least like this, there’s no risk of letting something bloom in the daylight, only to have it cut down later.
His thoughts should be enough to anchor him. They aren't. His free hand finds the tie at his waistband, driven entirely by reflex, working it loose without letting his eyes open. The cold air hits him and he nearly gasps, biting it back with his teeth clenched. He wraps his fingers around himself, the slow drag of skin over the tip making his breath catch.
He isn’t here for release. He tells himself that twice, then a third time. Just enough to ease the burn, to remember for a moment what it’s like to touch and be touched — even if only one of those things is true.
His palm flexes in slow, measured squeezes, kneading the warm weight of you with a precision that makes his own strokes falter. Every pass of his hand over himself threatens sound — a grunt, a hiss — that he has to catch in his throat before it can reach the air.
Then his gaze shifts lower, toward the shape of you beneath the bedroll. The thought isn’t planned. It just arrives — sharp, intrusive — and lodges itself there. He follows it, eyes narrowing, breath slowing, until something catches at the edges of his focus.
The bedroll drapes loose. And in the shadowed gap, he can see that the shape of your hips clearly. His eyes track the line of your thigh down to where the fabric should bunch at your knees — but there’s nothing. He flicks a glance to the far side of the tent, confirming it in the dim light: your slacks lie crumpled in the corner, abandoned hours ago.
A shallow breath lodges high in his chest. His first thought — just look. No more than that.
He peels the bedroll back in a slow, deliberate lift, keeping his attention fixed on your face for any sign of stirring. Nothing. When he looks again, his pulse gives a single hard kick.
The thin white cotton clings to the shallow rise between your thighs, barely concealing the soft curl of hair beneath. Your legs — lean muscle wrapped in smooth skin — lead up to the kind of plumpness that makes something primal in him ache. The scent is faint but there, even over the dampness of rain — warm, human, female. It scrapes at the inside of his skull, impossible to ignore.
The grip around himself tightens, an unbidden response. He tells himself the same lie as before only looking. But his hand hovers forward, palm out, feeling for the warmth that bleeds through the thin barrier.
When his finger presses down, the fabric pushes back against him with the spring of the hair beneath, and the sudden intimacy of it nearly steals control entirely. He swallows the sound in his throat and forces himself still, breathing through the surge in his chest. His fist moves again, quicker now, as though speed might burn out the impulse before it grows worse.
It doesn’t.
Then you stir. He goes rigid, every muscle seizing in place. Your body rolls onto its back, one knee falling slightly outward in a lazy sprawl. It isn’t an invitation, but the sight sinks teeth into him all the same.
He shifts lower, one knee between your thighs, keeping his hold on himself. When his fingers draw the cotton aside, the truth hits him harder than the sight has: you’re slick already, heat dampening the pads of his fingers.
His lungs stall. He slides one finger in, the wetness closing around him in a way that makes memory crash over him — the last time he’d been inside someone, the clutch of it, the warmth. The taste. Years gone, but here it is again, exact.
Levi dips his head before the thought can catch up, letting the barest flick of his tongue brush your clit. The taste is sweet and sharp at once, coating his tongue in something that’s all you. The memories drag him deeper — his finger curling, his mouth parting to take more, tongue slipping between folds to draw you in like he could drink from you.
Every instinct tells him he’s crossed a line so far back he can no longer see it. But you don’t move. You don’t wake. And the need hammering through him doesn’t care about anything but now. Release isn’t a choice anymore. It’s inevitable.
For a breathless moment, the thought hits him full-force — the image of prising your thighs apart and driving himself into you, whether you wake or not. The shock of the fantasy sends a jolt through him. You’ve told him before that you want him, that you’d take him if he’d let you. He seizes on that memory, turning it over like a blade in his hands, trying to cut the guilt away. If you wake, maybe you’ll match him — hips tilting up to meet his — until he empties every aching ounce of himself deep into you.
But the thought unravels as quickly as it comes. The reality would be different. He can see it in his mind already — the look in your eyes, the severing of whatever thread has tied you to him this long. And if you don’t wake… he isn’t sure he could live with himself afterwards, knowing he’d taken you in full while you slept. The idea alone sours the ache curling low in his stomach.
Still, it's a desperate, living thing now, gnawing at him. He wants something — something close enough to quiet it, without stepping over the final line. Just enough to feel you.
His hand settles on your hip, steadying you as he angles you square beneath him. Then he eases forward until the head of his cock brushes your folds. The first pass steals the breath from his lungs — slick warmth wrapping the most sensitive part of him. He lets it glide there in slow strokes, his other hand working him in a firm rhythm, the combination coiling tension tight in his gut.
He forces himself to look up, to anchor on your face instead of the sight of himself between your thighs. Lanternlight paints your features in gold and shadow, each soft curve pulling him further toward the edge.
Then you let out a low, unconscious sound — not loud, just a breathy hum — and it’s enough to tear the restraint out from under him.
Release rips through him, a sudden, brutal unwinding that leaves him biting hard into his lower lip. Even so, muffled grunts slip out with each heavy pulse. Heat spills from him in thick, jerking spurts, splashing over the curve of your sex, some streaking into the vulnerable parting of your slit. The sight — obscene and intimate all at once — drags another shudder from him, leaving his thighs trembling.
He braces himself upright, fighting the pull to slump forward over you, to bury his face in your skin and lose the last of himself. Instead, he forces his breathing to slow as the storm outside thrums in his ears.
When the spinning in his head finally eases, he draws the fabric of your panties back into place, his fingers twitching once before he pulls away. He wipes his hand on his thigh without looking at it, hiding every trace of what he’s done. And then the guilt arrives — hard and heavy, an ache almost worse than the one he’s just eased. He lowers himself to sit beside you, shoulders bowed, forehead resting against one knee. His jaw tightens until it aches, a muscle jumping with each slow breath. Beside him, both cups of tea sit untouched, the steam long since faded — a ridiculous, perfect metaphor for whatever this is, whatever he’s just broken.
He stays there longer than he should, long enough for his breathing to fall into step with yours, long enough for the edge of the storm to fade into a quiet patter. When the wind dies, he hears it — faint threads of birdsong weaving into the damp air, a sound so at odds with the heaviness in his chest it almost makes him laugh.
You’re still perfect in his eyes. That’s the worst part. Even after what he’s done, some selfish part of him wants to believe he hasn’t ruined you — that the you he sees now is untouched, untainted, that his actions live only in him. But the thought twists in his gut anyway: maybe he’s taken something from you that can’t be given back.
He loves you. He knows it in the marrow of his bones, but saying it — even to himself—feels like opening a wound. He leans closer instead, letting the feeling bleed out in the smallest gesture he can manage: brushing a damp strand of hair away from your face and pressing the lightest kiss to your forehead, barely there, like he could deny it later if he had to.
When he finally pushes himself to leave, the tent feels colder without him. His movements are clipped, economical; mask slipping back on as quickly as it came off. Only then do your lashes lift, your eyes opening to the thin light filtering through the canvas. The rain has slackened, the sky pale and streaked with the beginnings of morning.
You'd woken up to the weight of his hand on your breast, the quiet drag of his fingers. And you wanted it as much as he did. Not because of the secrecy or the risk, but because you understood exactly what it was. Why he needed it that way. The distance it let him keep, the way it spared him from having to see himself too clearly.
And you didn’t care. You wanted to give it to him like that — without questions, without the complication of words. Without consequence.
Before the others stir, you let your hand drift between your thighs. The heat there is still sticky with the proof of him. You gather it against your fingers, shivering at the texture, at the thought of him spilling there while you pretended to sleep. The want takes you quickly — hips tilting, breath catching — until release hits in a wave that leaves your body trembling, your heartbeat throbbing in your ears.
You lie there in the quiet after, legs heavy, skin flushed; covered in the man you love.