Levi sat at his desk in the Survey Corps HQ, filling out paperwork and reading reports and such. What would have taken Erwin mere minutes to complete was taking Levi long and tedious hours. He couldn't get through more than a few sentences before his brain would tug at his eyes and force him to look at some random object in the room and speculate wildly about the germs cultivating on its surface.
Regrettably, he shared an office with Commander Erwin. It wasn't cramped or anything, but the way that man organized his desk made his "friend's" skin crawl. Seriously, you degenerate, Levi thought venomously. Papers everywhere with no rhyme or reason, dust piled up thicker than Jaeger's skull, Sheena only knows the last time you washed those pencils on your desk.
An infernal buzzing pierced the little man's ears. And not the buzzing of his incessant internal monologue (Clean this, ew, don't touch that, the hell is that…), no, far worse. An insect.
With his eagle eyes, Ackerman located the fly as it whipped around his desk. Got you, you son of a bitch, he thought, tasting victory. Eyes locked on his target, he reached for a stack of old papers to swat the bug when, to his horror, it landed on the lip of his cup of freshly brewed green tea.
Levi's blood turned to ice and, in spite of himself, his heart raced and he broke out into a cold sweat. No, no no no no… His stomach dropped to the floor as he imagined the piss and shit that was caked on that little asshole's disgusting feet. And now it was all over his cup. That was it; he could never touch it again. All of the cleaning supplies inside Wall Sheena couldn't convince him to put his mouth on that surface ever again. It was contaminated. He briefly mourned its loss, as well as the comforting liquid inside.
Suddenly, Hange Zoë popped her head in and squealed, making Levi jump, "Hey Captain, can I see you for a second?"
Levi didn't even raise his razor-sharp eyes: just continued staring at his cup of tea. Slivers of steam rose from the placid surface as though the liquid's very soul was seeping into the dusty air around it. "I'm busy, Shitty-Glasses."
The insult didn't bother the girl; she'd heard far worse from the vertically-challenged 3DMG prodigy. "That wasn't a question, Levi."
Still no movement. "Neither was mine. Don't you have a giant or something to go piss off?"
"Quite the opposite," Hange smirked. "I have you." Levi had to roll his eyes as Hange fired back the insult. Realizing he was quite literally backed into a corner, Levi reluctantly stood up, catching a quick and strange side-eye from Erwin. Still, he continued down the long stone hallway, Hange following close behind.
The pair arrived at a massive oak door to which Hange gestured. "Won't you be a gentleman and open the door for me, Captain?" She cooed in a mock-refined accent.
Levi huffed, but gave into her wide eyes behind her (shitty) glasses, pulling his sleeve down over his hand before touching the door handle. The coy voice in the back of his head chirped up to remind him that doorknobs have millions more bacteria than toilet seats. Bile and disgust bubbled up in his throat.
It looked as though Hange had been in here before. She had set up a table with a chair at each end right in the center of the relatively small room. For some strange reason, she locked the heavy bolt behind them. Now Levi was really trapped, with Hange, of all people.
He shuffled over to the far side of the table, whipping his emerald cloak around in a defiant gesture. Hange settled into her chair, tightened her ponytail, and opened up a fresh notebook.
"So," Levi hissed. "You gonna tell me what this is all about?" His mind continually drifted back to his desk. To the colony of germs cultivating on his cup, the dregs of dust stacked atop the wood's surface, preventing him from focusing.
"Some authorities higher up believed you were in need of a psychological evaluation," Hange spat out, staring right into the little man's soul.
The words stole breath right from Levi's lungs. His blood turned to ice again, then began to boil. Anger roiled in his belly.
"A psychological evaluation? Whose bright idea was that?" He paused, then thought back to the strange look his Commander had given him. Erwin. "Erwin? Mister Fucking Eyebrows? Are you for real? He's gonna need way more than a psych eval by the time I'm done with his ass-"
"Do you have obsessive-compulsive disorder?"
Again, Hange's voice rendered Levi breathless. His normally porcelain pale skin began to grow a reddish hue as he blushed. He even felt his heart skip a few beats. He'd felt calmer when slicing up titans, for crying out loud.
Her face hardened. "Captain Levi Ackerman, do you have obsessive compulsive disorder?"
Eyes wide, lips parted, Levi stared. She had cornered him: there was no right answer here. If he said no, Hange would know he was lying and pry him open like one of her test subjects. If he said yes, he would be admitting a secret to somebody else, a secret he couldn't even admit to himself.
Silence was his best, and only, option. He knew he was digging himself a grave, but couldn't bring himself to speak.
Hange adopted a professional and clinical tone of voice as she scanned the notebook in her hands. "I'm going to conduct a preliminary psychological evaluation to make tentative diagnoses and determine if any further action is indicated. You understand?"
Levi only nodded. The collar of his cloak darkened from the sweat.
"Do you experience repetitive or obtrusive thoughts that disrupt your daily life, regardless of how silly they seem to you?"
The fly, the dust, the doorknobs… Choking back 30-something years' worth of embarrassment, Levi mumbled, "Yes."
Hange scribbled in the notebook. "Do you worry excessively about germs: bacteria, viruses, fungi, or any other pathogen or otherwise harmful substance, such as chemicals and toxins?"
Each one of those words caused Levi's hands to spasm and tighten, until he looked down at their vice-like intertwining and saw dabs of blood underneath his fingernails. He immediately shoved his hands under his cloak. He hesitated to even open his slit-like mouth, for fear of inhaling airborne bacteria, so he stuck to nodding.
"Do you wash yourself or things around you excessively?"
An exaggerated nod, another check mark in the notebook. Everyone in the 104th, hell, everyone in the Survey Corps, knew about Captain Levi's cleaning escapades. They would last for hours, and sometimes days, creating practically surgically sterile surfaces. Given the chance, Levi could, and would, scrub the entire circumference of Wall Rose until it shone. His body would not let him stop.
"Would you describe these activities as ritualistic?"
Levi had to think about this one. He didn't actively think about what he was doing; it all sort of happened. There was really no order to his cleaning habits. It only ceased when his mind arbitrarily decided he was done. Humanity's Strongest shrugged, leading Hange to put the first 'X' in the notebook. Probably going to be the last, Levi sighed.
"While performing these activities, do you feel panicked, experience shortness of breath-" Hange noticed too late the poor wording of the question.
"I experience shortness of everything, Four-Eyes!" Levi snapped. Rage spilled out of each of his 160 centimetres of height. That does it. I'm out, done. I don't have to report to Hange! This is so humiliating. I am going to rip Erwin's eyebrows off and shove them down his throat so far they'll tickle his bowels!
"Are you afraid something bad will happen, or that you will lose something?"
Levi's heart stopped. His skin hardened and the neurons in his brain simply stopped firing. Across his vision flashed rapid images, memories of him with Furlan and Isabel. All those nights sleeping in and drinking the filth of the Underground: together. When Erwin mashed his face into the sewage and forced him to join the Survey Corps. Vowing to kill that cocky blond bastard. And finally, that night outside Wall Maria, the night his choices led to the deaths of his closest friends.
Without thinking, without telling his lips to move, words slid out of Levi's mouth. "Yes," he breathed. Hange's eyes flashed as she drank in the change in the man's tone. The air around her became so cold it threatened to condense on her glasses lenses.
This is it, she thought. I have solved him. Levi Ackerman is a dam. Full of cracks, yet holding back a torrent of oppressed guilt and fear. And here I am, like a sculptor, tapping at him with my hammer, until the levee breaks.
That dam, Humanity's Strongest Soldier, was leaking now. A single crystal tear eked out the corner of his thin eye and slid down his sharp nose. It landed with a deafening crash on the wood table, leaving a dark stain where it fell. On his back, the Wings of Freedom fluttered as the man beneath them trembled and shrank.
Oh god, this is so embarrassing, he moaned inwardly. I have never been so humiliated in my life. Able to smack down giant Titans, but I cower in the face of a speck of dirt on my hands. Just pathetic. Levi was focusing so hard on his hands, tinted rose from the blood where his fingernails had sliced his palms, that he didn't notice Hange stand up from her seat. She padded over to Levi and placed a hand across his back.
At first, the man jumped. But then, realizing it was Hange or nobody, he leaned into her embrace and let the sobs trickle out of him pathetically. She cooed and shushed him gently, long fingers stroking his jet-black hair.
"It's okay, Levi," she hummed. "It's okay."
Levi didn't think about the germ ridden snot dripping from his nose, nor the dirt on Hange Zoë's hands that she was now permeating into his hair. He drowned out the voice in his head, the voice of worry, and listened instead as his breath rushed in and out in sync with Hange's.