A/N: I broke my own heart writing this short one-shot.. enjoy?
Leave a review if you liked it :)
The wind was wheezing in earnest, whittling at the remnants of the roof's lofty eaves. A mighty conflagration of boiling grey clouds had blocked out the blue - almost like an opaque, moving sea above, occasionally crackling with little spurts of muted light and a distant rumble. The roof, cracked open like an egg, let in a wide expanse of this storm-impending spectacle.
Hange gazed up at the roiling heavens, the incessant breeze picking up a lock of her fringe and laying it gently across her forehead. On a normal day, she would have shivered, and curled up into a warm ball, but today was not a normal day. Her faculties were failing her. There was a fiery pain ripping through her abdomen - so torturous it was almost surreal - and she could diagnose her incumbent death, as if she'd disembodied her spirit and it now floated benevolently above her, casting a doctor's eye over her irreparably broken form. And so welcome it was; the thought of nothingness beckoned like a twisted sort of hug.
A rush of thick fog gushed out from her right, obscured the sky for a moment, then dissipated. She ignored the vaporizing giant beside her - the last one she had fallen, and she had fallen together with it. Suddenly, regret came, together with the taste of copper gurgling up her throat. She'd sliced the Titan's neck clean open, and before she could recover, it's hand that had been swinging at her had continued on its violent path (though now inhibited in it's agency) and slammed into her mid-air, crushing her neatly through the open roof of the abandoned - abandoned what? Stable? Barn? She couldn't tell from its dilapidated state - and onto the floor where she now lay. Caught at the wrong time. There wasn't anything she could have done, except not to have done anything in the first place, to have stayed on her flagging horse and attempted to outrace the lumbering Titan to the fringes of Wall Maria.
She couldn't feel her legs anymore. And the roof was becoming fuzzy around the edges, throbbing with the waves of pain that still licked at her crumpled abdomen. She never imagined she'd die like this. Hange had wanted to live a pretty long life; She'd pledged her life to the cause and there was so much research she'd yet to do, so many things she'd left to say. To die like this, in the most stereotypical way, the most normal way was so unexpected that she was almost in disbelief. Great things had awaited her! But this human end came so much faster than she could've predicted, it was ridiculous.
So consumed she was in her pain-ridden thoughts that she was just barely aware of a whirring sound in the distance.
She dimly passed it off as imagination - the last ditch attempts of the mind struggling to stay afloat in the murky depths of an inescapable riptide. So many dying soldiers she had come across who'd suddenly yelled out for Mama, babbled nonsensically, become transfixed on some nonexistent entity standing next to them. What was she but one of them now?
Her eyes were still fixed upwards; she didn't want to waste time blinking, to risk losing the remaining time she had to appreciate the world.
The whirring suddenly appeared again, but much closer. It was a series of metallic clicks... so familiar and unmistakably of the 3dmg. A shape flew over her, landed with heavy thud beside her body. Surprised, she struggled to shift her faltering gaze onto the soldier -
Levi. The recognition flickered brightly in her brain.
Their eyes met - and there was a rush of unsaid words flowing between them, a mutual assurance of her inevitable, incumbent death.
His brows were furrowed deep, almost etched into a marble face splattered with blood. Hange knew it wasn't his own blood, but a tinge of pain crept into her heart still - a pain that had nothing to do with her fall. She drank in his silent, brooding face as he stood over her, his lips barely parted, eyes almost glowing in their preternatural greyness.
He seemed to have trouble facing her, and turned away.
Hange was almost offended - here she was dying, and there he was, denying her of her last dying moments-! She feebly moved her hand, still clutching at her sword. The broken metal scraped against the floor weakly, pining for his attention.
"Stop it, Hange." She heard him whisper. It was a pained whisper, almost broken. She stopped. The sword rested against the heel of his boot. A sudden tiredness came over her. The end was near.
"...Levi," She mustered in hoarse crackle.
He finally turned, and she glimpsed his bloodshot eyes. Oh, he was glorious. So gloriously alive, she was almost envious of his perfection, his infallibility.
Levi crouched down, and gently swept the lock of hair off her forehead. "I'm sorry." He said. "I'm so sorry, Hange." He squeezed his eyes shut. There was a warm pressure on her palm - he'd removed the sword and replaced it with his hand. Her heart fluttered. She'd waited for this for so long, it was, like her death, almost an unreal happening. Another figment of her imagination. But so perfect it was, she willingly submerged herself in the moment. The practicalities of their jobs had kept them apart for years - but now, two exiled hearts rejoined in the stark wilderness and the raw emotion burst through.
How painfully ironic, considering the rush of blood that tried to bubble up her throat again, but faltered halfway up due to her flagging strength, seeping into her airway instead. Reflexive attempts to cough up the blood stifled themselves.
"...Take...care of yourself..." She mumbled vaguely, and tried to smile, but she couldn't tell if her muscles were responding anymore. Levi opened his eyes again. Shuddering with an inhuman sort of pain repressed, he nodded almost imperceptibly and bent over to deliver a gentle kiss on her parched lips, clutching her hand to his chest.
"Yes."
To say it out loud seemed wrong, as if it would taint the morbid perfection of the moment, but it rang out clear and loud between them - a silent exchange of love and final goodbyes.
Hange dimly registered Levi cutting out her Survey Corps crest from the breast of her cloak, and resting his cold cheek against her forehead, and smelling, oddly, a scent of wildflowers.
She'd crossed her heart for years, and now she'd hope to die.