curtain call
In which Hanji Zoe discovers it's bloody annoying to have your every mask stripped away by a stone-faced Captain with a cleaning complex.
/./
Most childhood memories are characterized by unburdened laughter, by sunny afternoons lounging about with other children, by smiles and games and the occasional hurt that could be easily rectified with a bandage and kiss.
But that is not what Hanji recalls of those days.
No, when Hanji thinks back to her early youth, it is unfailingly accompanied by the taunts of her classmates and their leering, jeering faces, lined with a special brand of cruelty only children are capable of.
Broad-shouldered, too-tall Hanji Zoe, her facial characteristics excessively wide for traditional beauty, her gangly body awkward compared to the flouncy, petite ones paraded by other female peers.
Giant Hanji.
Titan Hanji.
Hanji the weirdo who would simply rearrange her features into a painfully broad smile and release a cheerful laugh, before retreating behind a children's book to allow the tears to desecrate the brightly-colored pages.
/./
Growing up, Hanji has one crush—a handsome neighborhood boy who grimaces upon hearing her stammered confession, and loudly wonders what kind of deranged guy would ever be interested in so unfeminine a girl to an audience of snickering spectators.
It actually turns out that the aforementioned 'kind of deranged guy' will be petite, perpetually exhibiting a scowl, and characterized by moods that swing between tetchiness and not-as-much-tetchiness (he'll also be a shining beacon of hope for humanity, coincidentally), but that is later—much later—and as of now all Hanji can do is choke out a strangled agreement and flee from the scene of her humiliation.
After that, her hair is painstakingly kept in a sheared fashion that most girls would lament as being criminally short, but that Hanji dully considered fitting to her angularly sharp bone structure and indelicate disposition. Bangs are left to drape her forehead, long enough to provide a convenient curtain behind which her eyes can peek shyly out from—a technique useful for when she has none of her trusty textbooks propped up before her to do the job.
Hanji was rarely confident as a girl, feeling rather like a clumsy outsider in a body that ill-suited her personality. Possessing none of the usual softness associated with the feminine gender, her voice was cumbrously loud and brash, her mannerisms too eager and unpolished to be considered anything even remotely alluring.
And so she hides; concealed behind loose shirts and tight chest bindings and baggy pants.
/./
When she is seventeen she joins the Recon Corps, donning their green cloak and symbolic wings.
She ends up with the biggest icicle bastard of a Captain imaginable…someone considerably older than her with an odd penchant for giving filthy looks to people who venture to sneeze without utilizing a tissue.
Because of her considerable height, Hanji's quite familiar with the phenomenon of encountering men who are shorter than she is, but her newfound superior hilariously takes this to an unprecedented level. The uproar of the entire situation is that when she first meets him, she is unable to restrain the tiny grin of glee at this fact as she literally looks down at him.
She later learns from her fellow soldiers, during grueling extra training hours spontaneously assigned that evening by the Captain, that Levi is uncannily perceptive as to the emotions and thoughts of other people.
In other words, her new commanding officer evidently hadn't shared in her discernible amusement at their height disparity and soundly gotten her back for it.
Suffice to say, the relationship of Lance Corporal Levi and future Squad Leader Hanji Zoe does not have very auspicious beginnings, and sets the tone of their slightly antagonistic camaraderie that will forever define them.
/./
She revenges herself against him though. It happens during her first attendance of a Recon strategy education lecture session for the new recruits.
Hanji sticks her finger as far up her nose as it will go, grabbing and evenly maintaining the Captain's narrowed gaze. With slow, measured movements to ensure that he'll see it, and hopefully agonize internally about it, she drags that same finger on the tabletop with a saccharine smile.
She can practically feel, and knows that he can visualize, the lovely bacteria she's potentially scouring the surface with.
His jaw visibly tightens; Hanji feels delightfully insane for successfully provoking the man that Titans cowered before and civilians revered.
In her perverse enjoyment of the situation and fearlessly returning his glare, she completely forgets to angle her head down just so in order to tuck her face away from the mocking scrutiny of others she's always sought to avoid.
/./
Cantankerous leaders and rampaging monsters aside, Hanji is wholly endeared to the life of a soldier.
Here she is under no pressure, not from her mother to 'settle down' and produce a brood of crying children to further humanity's survival, nor from the embarrassment of whispering girls on the street, garbed in their frilly frocks, eyeing Hanji's boyish figure and outfits with smug superiority.
Despite the fact that all the squad (including Levi) thinks her to be a man, Hanji does nothing in the way of discouraging or disabusing them of this notion.
Here, she can tentatively grasp onto the previously elusive persona of Hanji Zoe, the one always far too preoccupied with shying away from the agonies of not fitting in to really and truly flourish into an individual of her own worth.
And as it turns out, she quite likes that individual—a brash, outgoing girl with an inherent ability of aggravating the Captain and an increasing captivation with the mechanics of the physical world.
/./
After one recon mission, Hanji prods a Titan skeleton with a disturbed sort of curiosity, the shine of her newly acquired glasses doing little to mask the intrigued gleam in her eyes. The flesh had long since melted away from the skeletal structure, muscles and blood and ligament and tendon having burned themselves into oblivion.
Fascinating. There was no other word for it—these creatures with a basic anatomy that mimicked humans to such a degree, and yet gifted a physiology that simply defied the stalwart medical rules of science that governed every normal human out there. Most soldiers would simply have passed the remains with a searing glare of hatred and a sense of vindication, but Hanji—not that she didn't perfectly understand and share those sentiments—was incapable of being immune to the thrall the seeming monstrosities presented.
Hanji had pored relentlessly over all known texts pertaining to the subject of Titans just as soon as she had been granted access by way of her military standing, and had just as relentlessly been discouraged to find so little official research as having been performed on the matter (not that she blamed anyone—it was kinda difficult to pin down a mindless giant that just wanted to snack on your extremities), and a scarcity of facts beyond that which could be observed by a warrior's hasty eye.
She reaches one hand out to gingerly touch the skeleton.
Immersed with the heap of pristine white bones laid before her like an inviting array of puzzle pieces, she remains deaf to Levi's light-footed approach.
"You shouldn't be so unaware of your surroundings," comes his gravelly rebuke, making Hanji release a hoarse yell and half-scramble for her equipment before she remembers that Titans don't talk.
Commanding her rapidly pattering heart to slow, she flashes her typically toothy grin at her expressionless Captain. "Sorry 'bout that," she says sunnily, sparing a nod of acknowledgement before refocusing her attention on the dried up corpse (the Titan, not Levi). "And I was paying attention…just not to the same things everyone else was. Then again, it's always been like that, ahaha!"
He trails her gaze to the diminished enemy on the ground. "Something caught your interest?" he asks, that succinct and monotonous personality of his woven within the question.
"No," she says, mechanically. And then, "Yes." She carves a small line into the dirt with her finger, tilting her head to the side as she absentmindedly regards her handiwork and ignoring Levi's flinch as she purposefully soils her skin.
"It's just that…these things are undoubtedly our greatest foes, and yet we continually discard that most crucial battle strategy of all: 'Know thine enemy'." She takes a breath, unused to having an ear attentive to her ramblings. "There's so little information available—a hundred years of waging war and nothing to show in the way of scientific progress. What constitutes their biological composition? What is it about the one sliver of their neck that lends itself as a weak spot? How do they procreate to attain the numbers they have? How do they react to stimuli other than hostility?"
Drawing back her hand, she tucks her chin to her knees with an undisguised forlornness. "So many comrades die, and maybe—just maybe—we could use an approach other than war to stymie that death."
Hanji hazards a side glance at her mute leader, her mouth suddenly turning dry at her uncommon forwardness and her cheeks blotching a brilliant red. "But then again, just feel free to ignore—"
"There may be some merit in your idea," he interjects, his blank demeanor betraying neither condemnation or overt encouragement of her peculiar interests. "I'll discuss it with our superiors." There is a strange tinge of disdain in the final word, but Levi has disappeared before Hanji can remark upon it.
Four days later, he wordlessly clasps her forearm and drags her protesting form down to the basement level of the abandoned castle that serves as the unit's headquarters. He continues his tight-lipped behavior until they finally reach one large, dusty room piled with boxes and wooden crates.
"Aaaahhh," she complains as soon as he releases her, rubbing her arm in an exaggerated fashion. "Captain, you can't just lug people about like they're luggage, ya know? I'm totally going to be brui—"
"This is yours." The deadpan interruption succeeds in what it was meant to do—silence Hanji's bawling woes. Levi's eyes flicker from filthy corner to filthy corner, an expression of long-suffering scrawled openly on his normally shuttered features. "For your research."
She can no more stuff the gasp of surprised elation back into her mouth than she could stuff dirt into Levi's (at least, not without suffering extreme bodily injury first). "Seriously? Seriously?"
"As much as we may loathe the Titans, it was unanimously agreed upon that efforts to further understand them would be…beneficial." If Levi realizes that his explanations are traveling in one of Hanji's ears and directly out of the other in her euphoric state, he intimates no indication of it. "You'll be funded with a small grant and crew to start you off—after that, the relevance of your results will be what perpetuates your subsidies."
But Hanji is far too immersed in rushing about the vacant room, gently caressing the colorless walls like a firstborn child and displaying a strange dance of jubilation that involves a series of haphazard skips and jumps. "You did it!" she cries, uninhibited in her gratitude. "You did it, you did it, you did it!"
Levi sighs. "Oi. Hanji. Stop shouting—you really sound like a girl when you do that."
That brings her to a screeching halt, a secretive tilt stretching up the corners of her mouth into a strangely sweet smile. "You know, Captain," she laughs happily, heading to the pile of boxes to enthusiastically begin prying them open. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were true."
/./
He finds out eventually.
How could he not? There was little privacy in a warrior's crimson-stained world, forever cramped shoulder to shoulder with teammates as you fought or chest to chest as you cradled a dying one.
Battling a Titan was never lacking in risks, and Hanji's sporadic movements that constituted her fighting technique one day bring her into far too close in proximity to one of the hulking beasts…close enough that its teeth manage to mercilessly latch upon her shoulder, sinking bloodily through sinewy muscle and hard bone.
And Hanji might have become yet another pitiful human whose comrades' last sight of her were chilling screams and a pleading face—except Hanji stubbornly refuses to die, and that coolly clinical segment of her brain directs her hand to drive her weapon into the damn thing's eyeball. Her cheeks are splattered with a slew of burning liquid—their blood is hot?—and she is granted a brief reprieve as the monster recoils in pain.
Another soldier twists gracefully through the air (all her beleaguered eyes can catch are black hair and a steady hand) and slashes his sword into that tender little sliver of skin at the neck. The final Titan is dispatched with a groan and a resounding thump as he collapses to the ground. Hanji falls with it, her damaged shoulder becoming the unfortunate recipient of a majority of the impact and causing beautiful stars and not-so-beautiful black dots to erupt in her hazy vision.
Her Captain strides unblinkingly past the staring dead and focuses on those whose faces still flicker with life and whose lungs raggedly persevere and draw in air—he has no present concern for those who are beyond what meager aid his own two human hands can achieve.
And then Levi is crouching down beside her, a comfortingly fixed point amidst the soldiers running rampant behind him with first aid kits clutched in their hands and high-pitched tones buzzing with alarm. That detached voice of his, the one that is such a foil to her tendency of exuberant shouting, is speaking in her ear…but not even Hanji's brilliant mind can decipher the words between blood loss and a befuddlement she suspects might be the beginning of a concussion.
Or the middle of one.
Whatever.
She catches brief snatches of fuming mutterings as he hauls her into an upright position against the uncomfortable bark that lends a tree trunk its jaggedness, things like 'reckless moron' and 'goddamn stupid erratic idiot' that normally would have elicited a wide, carefree grin and a teasing response meant to send her Captain into an even deeper realm of 'pissed off' instead ignored in favor of the fire making its way through her upper torso.
Dying would really suck, but Hanji thinks she'll be even more depressed if she loses a tool necessary to efficiently perform her valued research—her arm.
Still, even as the Captain moves to tug at her shirt, presumably to attend to her wound, her hand reacts just as reflexively as it did in survival-mediated defense against the Titan—whistling through the air to sharply prevent Levi's progress in the action of getting the top half of her uniform off.
The blatant irritation the movement evokes from him sparks heat in that bleak gaze of his. Her hands are ruthlessly shoved away and his thin fingers nimbly undo the buttons in her shirt.
To Levi's credit (and further proof of Hanji's suspicion that very little can faze him) he does nothing more than quirk a dark eyebrow as the blood-strewn cloth of her shirt falls away from her bound breasts. And then the sounds of harsh tearing reverberate in her ears, and warm canteen water is drizzling over her partially-mutilated shoulder, and a blissful pressure is being applied in the form of clean white bandages.
To this very day Hanji's memory is plagued with gaping holes as to what occurred next, due to an inconvenient case of unconsciousness that followed hard upon the heels of Levi's arrival.
Petra's claims that she witnessed the Captain swinging her up into his arms and bearing her away to the medical carriages seem a little inconsistent with who she knows him to be—likely he had slung her over his shoulder like a burlap sack and promptly dumped her in the nearest wagon, all the while grumbling about her blood dirtying his hands.
Still, Petra's explanation seemed more plausible than Hanji's own vague recollection before she fainted, which involved her Captain spontaneously mutating into a giant pink-frosted cupcake and offering himself as dessert.
/./
If she thinks the newfound discovery will dampen his callous attitude towards her—simply by merit of being a girl—it doesn't.
"Hey. Hanji."
First she freezes, her foot pausing midstep without the soft clack of boot on stone.
Then the trepidation bubbles up like an ulcer in her gastrointestinal tract, for her policy of Levi-avoidance has evidently been thwarted. Her fingers tighten painfully on the thick sheathe of lab papers in her grasp, her breath catching within her suddenly thick throat. Like some bizarre ballerina she slowly pivots on that same heel, reluctant to meet the stoic gaze that she knew matched that equally apathetic utterance.
Except she hadn't expected that stoic gaze to be nearly so close, those narrowed eyes barely an inch from her face.
Damn Levi's disturbing predilection for soundless movement!
That is the only inward curse she has time for, because in the next moment a lithe hand descends hard upon her head. As a hapless puppet subjected to the whims of her marionette, Hanji's face is lightly directed so that she has nowhere to stare but at his own listless features.
She steels herself for an upbraiding, for reprimands and recriminations. For I helped you attain what you wanted, and your repayment was lies and other verbal barbs that she herself had dreaded ever since she had came to be under Levi's command. Since the day he had brought her to the room that was to be her lab, successfully outdoing every other freakin' gift she'd ever received in the course of her eighteen years.
"Don't hide."
Hanji blinks.
Well. That certainly hadn't been yelled at her. In fact, it hadn't been spat, fired, or hissed in her general direction.
"W—what are you…?"
As though addressing someone of limited mental faculties, Levi slowly enumerates. "You're crap at following orders, but if there's just one you're gonna listen to, make it this one: Don't hide. If you want to act like a guy, act like a guy. If you'd rather be a girl, that's fine too. The Titans don't particularly care about who they devour, and life's too damn short to pander to the opinions of others."
Stunned, Hanji cannot twitch even the tiniest pinky toe as her Captain's face twists into the closest thing she has ever, and will ever, see from him that resembles a slight smile.
"You're fine just being your usual Shitty Glasses self, endlessly irritating me to bring back something for you to experiment on," he concludes wryly, utterly ruining his eloquent streak with the addition of that damn nickname.
Still reeling from the prospect of Levi actually offering her a piece of advice, as opposed to his usual pointed commands or blunt observations, Hanji limply falls back against the wall as he abruptly releases her.
Hanji stays, and numbly watches as Levi continues to make his way down the hall: straight-backed, clad in a crisp uniform, and as nonchalant towards the brief interlude as Hanji was in a confused frenzy about it.
/./
But she falls in love with him then.
(Just a little bit).
/./
And the next year she grows out her hair and brushes away her bangs and runs amok in the city in a soft, swishy dress—an extremely exasperated Levi with grudgingly amused eyes dragged along with her.
fin
Author's note: My first Attack on Titan story ever, after a rapid marathon of watching all the episodes and falling hopelessly in love with the whole damn thing. Especially Levi and Hanji. And Levi and Hanji together.