Levi
He knows that they wonder about his compulsion to keep everything clean. At first he thought they saw it as a weakness; now he knows that what they think about it doesn't matter at all – his unmatched ability to kill Titans is everything that matters. If he cared to dwell on the reasons for such a trivial obsession he might trace it back to the time before – before Erwin, before the Survey Corps, when violence was a matter of surviving other humans rather than the common enemy. Down there, in the bowels of the city, a festering cut was more likely than not to mean death, left disinfected. Someone – the mother he barely remembers? – told him about germs, bugs, bacteria and viruses; legions of formless enemies doing battle inside the body, breaching cell walls, invading; implacable destroyers of humanity. The image of it gave him nightmares from time to time, even into adulthood, until his first patrol beyond the wall gifted him new nightmares.
Friends he trained with ripped to bloody shreds. A boy called Theo Arneson decapitated by a Titan's flailing arm, blood spraying everywhere. A moment of paralysing horror as his line caught on a branch leaving him suspended above an open maw. He still remembers the breath-stealing, heart-squeezing terror - the most basic human dread – soulless Nature - blank eyes, teeth, and only darkness beyond. The jaws of death gaping for him in the most visceral, literal sense – and all he could think, over and over: is this it? Pathetic. All of human intelligence so much meat, and the shocked understanding: all we are is prey.
Erwin saved him – a two-handed, neat slice across the back of the creature's neck, and Levi regained his wits just in time to swing wide of the Titan's falling corpse. Untangling his line, he rejoined the battle, killing a grinning seven-metre class on his own, before Erwin ordered a retreat in the face of impossible numbers.
Back behind walls, Levi washed everything clean – his 3D manoeuvre gear, his uniform, himself, standing in the shower transfixed by the bloody swirl of red water vanishing into the darkness beyond the plughole, and then scrubbing until his skin hurt, pain only a relief from the knowledge that not all – not most – of the blood was his enemies' or his own.
This world is cruel, they remind each other, and it's odd how the phrase comforts them. New recruits often think he's cruel - his mocking words, and cold demeanour – his willingness to use physical punishment. Well, perhaps he is cruel, and perhaps that comforts them, too. He loathes the Titans for their inhuman imbecility, their lolling, lumbering flounderings, their unknowable senselessness. He strives for precision in all he does. The Titans represent chaos: he, order. In that battle he will use whatever weapons are necessary, and he finds pain an effective teacher.
They think he doesn't feel, and he wishes that were true. To be as insensible as a Titan – what a merciful relief that would be. As he watches the brat Eren rant like an animal behind his bars, screaming for vengeance, vowing death to all Titans when he is unable to control so much as his own childish emotional vomitings, who among his men would guess at the answering scream he has to swallow in his own throat? He keeps it down, jails it behind cool sarcasm. Pity is useless now. What Levi has learned over years of hard experience, this boy has no time to learn – but learn he must: without control we are all Titans.
They think he doesn't feel, and he tries to make it true. Soulless bodies shouldn't matter. In towns they are meat to be cleaned away, incinerated before infection spreads. Beyond the walls, when speed is necessary to survival, they must be left behind for the crows. But still, if he can, he brings them back. He finds humanity in symbols – these insignia, and the memories they hold. Grief is a Titan – vast, amorphous, insatiable. He can do nothing with it but seal it away inside immaculate walls.