A Theory About Smiles
Attack on Titan/ Shingeki no Kyojin oneshot. OC. Levi centric. Set after the events of 'No Regrets'. Not cannon-compliant. Complete. Reviews are appreciated. Thank you.
When he first sees her, it's only a snatching, offhand sort of glimpse. He had been young then, still not accustomed to the tight, straight-laced line of command and doubly more volatile than he is now.
(It is when Shadis is still Commander Shadis and Erwin is just another soldier, albeit one pegged for the seat of command when the current one retires. Farlan and Isabel's foolish, unneeded, stupid deaths still weigh on him like a hundred stones, and he drifts along in the world around him in their loss, unable to connect to anyone else like he had with those two. Sometimes he feels like he's breathing water instead of air, and no amount of detergent and soap can ever hope to block the ugly scent of blood he remembers that had all but covered him on that rainy day. But then again, the ghosts of his dead comrades follow his footsteps everyday, so why not just another reminder to go along with it?)
It is the red that catches his eye first. A true hue, not a maroon, not red-brown like what Isabel's hair had been, but red red red like blood, fresh and hot from a body on the dirt ground that a Titan had just recently slaughtered. It is a jolt from his normal, detached cycle of things that he has adopted since a few days ago, and he turns to see who it is that's dying, but finds her instead.
(It's her hair that is the red he had seen out of the corner of his eye. A soldier, judging by the standardized uniform that everyone in the military wears. Skin so pale it can't possibly belong to anything but a corpse, only it's clear that she is alive.)
She sits alone with a set of 3D-maneuver gear on the table in front of her. Deft hands clean the equipment with a natural grace that only comes with doing the same task a thousand times before. No one else seems to take notice of her, and she doesn't seem to give much acknowledgement to the people milling about either.
He's never seen this woman before.
He doesn't think to give much thought on it, even so. There are many people in the military that he hasn't met yet, because he's still a fairly recent addition to the ranks. And, for all that the mortality rate for serving in the military is, the divisions still have a decent amount of soldiers in each, and rarely intermingle with each other. So there is a chance that this woman is merely another soldier in the Brigade, or the Garrison.
The next time he sees her, it is when he's about to be gruesomely eaten by a particularly persistent Deviant type.
"God-fucking-dammit," he mutters to himself fervently, like a prayer, as he fumbles with the straps of his now-useless 3D-maneuver gear. It has just been a really, really Bad Day for him. 'Small perimeter scouting trip' his ass. One thing led to another, and now there's an entire flock of Titans pressed up against the Wall, and the people on the other side refuse to open the gate for fear of letting the Titans in along with them. A totally justified decision, but still fucking problematic when one has lost the use of his 3D-maneuver gear due to the idiocy of some untrained amateur's mistake.
He'd lost his horse a while back in the entire wild chase to the gates with the Deviant-type breathing down his neck. It's one ugly fucker, but that's just typical for any sort of Titan, he supposes.
There was a close call with several eight to nine meter class Titans, and an incident where he literally had to cut one soldier out of the jaws of a Titan, only to have him run around like a cheap imitation of a demented chicken-monkey and get eaten anyway. It's unfortunate, and disadvantageous as a whole, but someone like that (inexperienced, unprepared, unbroken, still soft, kids who don't have any clue what it's like on a real battlefield like those two) shouldn't even be on the field in the first place.
Then some idiot decides to swing right into his own wires and they both end up crashing to the ground— the other person unluckily disappearing straight down the gaping gullet of another Titan.
After crunching to a halt in the dirt and probably getting a rather nasty bruise down his back where he had landed, he gets up to discover that his equipment has become one giant, tangled, useless mess. He isn't dumb enough to believe that he can detangle that monstrosity in such a short amount of time, so that leads to what he's doing right now: taking his gear off and hoping to all high hell that he can survive long enough to get a hold of another from one of his fallen comrades.
That is, until he discovers how hard it is to unbuckle leather straps when one is covered in Titan blood. Quickly evaporating Titan blood, but he has enough caked on his clothes that it is taking a while to disappear completely. That is to say, it is slippery like none other.
He looks up at the scene around him and mutters another, "Fuck" for good measure. Three Titans plus one Deviant-type converging on him didn't look like good odds at all. He ditches any sort of caution to the wind, grabs one of his blades, and starts hacking away at the leather instead, deciding that risking the loss of his fingers is better than the loss his life. He idly wonders where everyone else is, but decides to focus on getting detached from his gear. Not that it would help now, because Deviant-types run faster than anything else when they have their eyes set on a target- and that titan had its beady little eyes on him ever since it crashed into the company with all its ugly-ass friends.
(Well, I guess I'll be meeting them again soon.)
He refuses to greet death in any other way than with a dead-on stare in its hideous face. It comes close enough that he's able to smell its breath permeate the air around him, and it smells like an entire zoo of zombie animals.
Then-
There is a blur of red and white and brown and flashing steel. The familiar whizzing, screaming-whistling noise of wire that came with someone pushing their 3D-maneuver gear to its limits.
The neck of the Deviant-type explodes. The other three Titans meet the same end in the next moment, taken out so impossibly quick it nearly looks simultaneous.
And suddenly the sound of two feet landing on the ground next to him. He has finally freed himself from the tangle, leaving a mess of destroyed leather and twisted metal parts. His fingers are cut from holding the blades, but he is in one complete piece nonetheless, that's all that matters. He turns sharply to properly look at his rescuer.
(Red blood hair.)
The woman from the other day.
A pack is promptly shoved in his face. He already knows what it is as soon as he takes it into his hands, recognizing the weight of it. They don't say anything. On the battlefield there is no time for conversation, and they've apparently both been soldiers long enough to be able to communicate without words.
He is back in full gear within seconds, grateful for the familiar weight at his hips and the feel of the straps on his thighs and his shoulders because he's always felt half naked without them on. And then he's flying.
She's a whirlwind. He can see, even as he slashes and swings and slices again, that for every Titan he kills, she downs two more. She takes down Titans in the natural practice that breathing is for other people, and the way she moves through the air is like her 3DM gear has welded together with her bones and it became just another body part, like her legs, or her arms. It renders her all but a deadly streak in the wind, and the Titans don't even see her before they're reduced to a steaming mess of blood and bone.
She disappears when the deed is done, when everyone still alive has gotten over the wall, to safety, and before he has the chance to say a single word.
It is Erwin who tells him what her name is. It's a delicate, pretty name, something that he didn't expect to belong to someone who wields death and steel blades so well in their hands.
"She's from a project that the authorities had a few years ago. I'm not important enough to know all the details, but apparently the goal was to create some sort of super-soldier-" Erwin's mouth had twisted as he said this, as if he tasted something sour. He looked at him, and said meaningfully, "...it's best to stay away from her, Levi. People like her are too far entwined with the messy politics of the higher ups to be safe to be around."
Their next meeting is another impromptu. It is on a Thursday afternoon.
He stands in the back entrance of the residency building he lives in. (He had refused the dormitories that were freely offered to all soldiers, simply because the military had too much sway over things there, and he would have never been able to get any privacy there.) It's a quaint, three-story thing— just secluded so he's not crowded by people but close enough to military headquarters that it won't be an inconvenience. Days are normally quiet around there, and those wall-cultists tend to overlook such a sparsely populated area in their door-to-door routines.
There's a tub of dirty laundry in his arms, but he has stopped at the doorway that leads to the courtyard. The reason for this is sitting not too far away from him, oiling her 3D-maneuver gear. Red hair falls like a curtain over her shoulders and pale skin shines nearly white in the sunlight. She is still wearing her full uniform, he noticed, even though by all appearances it looks like she's off duty.
He forges on anyway, and sets the tub down a few feet away. It doesn't matter what Erwin says, he has laundry to do.
"Hello."
It's a surprise. He glances back up. "Good afternoon," he says back, just as a common courtesy.
Green eyes. She has green eyes the same dark shade of the shadowed leaves of the Titan forests outside the wall. There are dark shadows under her eyes, as if she hadn't been sleeping properly.
There is silence for a bit- with him filling up the tub with water and her moving on to another metal part to clean and polish— and then the silence got too irritating.
"So... is cleaning your gear all you do?" It's true. Both times he's seen her off-duty she's cleaning her 3D-maneuver gear.
Titan-forest eyes look up at him in a gesture of something he quite can't place. Her hands never stop their mechanical movements. She's probably done the same exact routine a hundred times before that she just might be able to do it in her sleep. He wonders about that absentmindedly. Maybe she has.
"I like to dream as well." Comes the quiet response. It is a flat, succinct, unemotional noise, sounding as if she doesn't actually care about... anything, in fact. Not about the things she does, not about the things she says she likes to do, or how his earlier question came out more like an insult than a proper inquiry, or, or- anything.
He raises an eyebrow, which is a severe understatement to the whirling thoughts in his mind. He doesn't understand his interest in this woman. Perhaps he was bored? But no, he crosses that one immediately out in his mind; it's simply too insignificant. Then, a distraction, something to keep his mind off of... no, because he's already gotten that settled. That was practically months ago, and he's garnered a remarkable reputation, grown much stronger since then. Perhaps-
Ah, that's it. She reminds him of himself. Only somewhat, but still enough to connect points between her and himself. And that's... well, it's different, to say the least.
Nonetheless, he still asks, "About what?"
"Flying."
And that is the end of the conversation. He feels eyes on him as he's lathering the soap, but ignores it in lieu of reaching for the washboard.
He sees her several times after that; around the headquarters and the training grounds, and the mess hall where she sits alone, and at the market where she always asks for rosemary bread no matter what. It is when he realizes that their sort-of conversation on that Thursday afternoon is something of a miracle. Rarely does he ever notice her speak to another person, hold a conversation with or even look at them other than a cursory glance simply to acknowledge their presence.
It probably isn't a good idea to go snooping, but when has he ever lived the life of the safe?
It's sickening. He wants to throw up, or kill someone, and he can't quite tell which one he would rather do.
Eleven orphans, children, in between the ages of seven to nine— taken and trained like dogs to serve the military. The way they were raised had been not so much training than techniques he has seen used in psychological torture.
(In the end, there's an initiation test where they're thrown out the walls and into the Titan infested forests to fight their way back over the wall again. Only six of the eleven never return, which tells him more than anything else about how far the sick bastards had trained these children that they would be able to do what a desperate adult soldier could not do.
The remaining five had been pitted against each other in a brawl to the death.)
They had only wanted one. Only one, because any more than that would be too difficult to control and keep watch on, because even the very ones who had programmed these children to become like this were afraid of the killing machines they had created.
She is the result that came out of it all.
She is nothing but a weapon to them. A tool, or a weapon of mass destruction, where they can drop her amongst a particularly dense knot of titans and leave her to do what she is meant to do and then within seconds there will be nothing but steam and death and quickly evaporating bones. To them, she is no more than a particularly useful pawn to push around on a game board.
She's like that. It is how she was raised to be. And he's seen her. Met her face to face and even spoke to her but he knows that she is more.
She is...
An enigma. A silent predator. A human with just enough of a soul to be considered one, but so, so suppressed because of the things done to her and the things she had been forced to do; deprived of the little, often taken for granted twitches and quirks that no one should be able to get rid of.
As powerful as a force of nature on the battlefield, but practically losing all sense of presence when she's not fighting, as if she has lost her purpose and can only regain a reason for existence when there's orders to be given, to be carried out. Isolated from society so much as a child that she's forgotten how to find a place where she belongs among people. Still as a rock, a tree, or even a piece of furniture like a chair- then all of a blur of swift movement in the wind the next moment.
She's also like that. It is what she has become as an individual being, born from what remains of her personality that they had never been able to completely eliminate.
And she never, ever- not once that he's seen of her- smiles.
He gets a chance to talk with her again, a significant while later, because she comes and sits across from him at the same table at the small cafe where he's reading a book.
"Why don't you ever smile?" He finds himself asking after nearly half an hour of him staring at the same word on his page and her staring out the window. It's a boring book anyway.
"You have been investigating me." It isn't a question. Other words were left unsaid. You broke into my background information.
There isn't any good way to answer this statement, so he settles for a noncommittal hum; so light it is barely discernible. He's saved from replying when she answers his question with another non-sequitur, another not-quite-a-question.
"I'm told that the first conscious expression an infant makes is a smile."
"So I've heard." He finds himself under the intense scrutiny of Titan-forest eyes. It is a feeling similar to being under a microscope.
"Then is it possible," said she. "To forget how to smile?"
He stares at her. She looks back. He inhales, then brings it back out in a long sigh and leans back on his seat, closing his book on the table.
"I have a theory about smiles," he says eventually, feeling somewhat silly to be saying this. He is no idealistic fool, anyway. "We all have the capability to smile. Some people can forget. Anyone can learn again."
There are many different ways to battle in this world. Many causes as well. He knows most of them, has used some of them, has fought against others.
Of his life he divides it all into four main battles that he can use to properly sum everything up. The world is already far too complicated, and there is no need to make things harder for himself.
The first kind of battle starts when he is born, and lasts up until his whore of a mother dies in the very bed she uses every night. A lowly, gruelling crawling sort of battle that isn't so much a fight than it is a desparate slough for basic survival, where he hasn't really lived until he meets the man who teaches him what waging war actually is.
The second kind is his time in the underground city below Mitras. It is then that he meets Farlan, and then Isabel not much after. It is a criminal, honorless dogfight that he plunges headfirst into, becuase this time he has comrades— friends who depend on him, and in turn whom he depends on, and that scares him at first but Farlan and Isabel each have their own issues as well, so there's something that they can all take comfort in each other.
The third is the time immediately after their deaths. A remarkably short battle waged within against himself, where he detaches his mind from the world and shutters everything away and becomes the sort of lethal, vengeful man that he sometimes still lets through years after, in retrospect.
(The fourth battle is one he can't judge yet, because he's still fighting in it right now.)
Shiganshina is breached.
Why, after nearly a hundred years of relative peace from the Titans, that suddenly one particular Titan decided to appear and literally kick a gaping hole in the district's wall he would never know, but it isn't as if he had time to care about these things.
Currently, he's trying to prevent the unfortunate and rather pathetic demise of as many people as it was possible. Which isn't exactly a lot, but to be honest those Titans are really having a field day with the civilians of the district. The soldiers aren't faring much better either. Everyone's dying left, right, and center.
Then shit gets even shittier and Wall Maria is blasted right through by what seems to be a Titan with shining plates of armor. It's nothing he has ever seen and he doubles, then triples his efforts in destroying the Titans that keep pouring in from the outside.
That's when she gets called in.
He sees her- all of a blurry smudge in the distance moving seemingly too fast for it to be humanly possible, but the brilliant red of her hair is unmistakable against the greys and whites of smoke and steam. Just a tiny speck in comparison to these monstrous Titans and she all but leaves a path of death and pale plumes in her wake as she tears them apart.
They say that he's humanity's most powerful soldier. This- this is humanity's greatest weapon.
(It's almost beautiful.)
Then he catches the sight of these two kids and the blond soldier that gets crushed underfoot by the fourteen-meter class Titan right in front of their wide eyes, who then sets its sight on them.
He's already cursing to himself, kicking off the neck of the titan he downed a second before, 3D maneuver gear whirring at his hips to catch onto a wall a block away and all the while his eyes are on the two children, and he thinks, it's too late, I'm too far away.
One of them- a boy, he notes in the back of his mind- dashes out in front as if he's planning to kill the Titan barehanded. The other one- a dark-haired girl- grabs her friends's hand before he could kill himself in his rashness. But it doesn't matter anyway, because the Titan is already smiling down upon them.
A flash of steel in the sunlight. The Titan's reaching hand is severed and its neck flowers in a fountain of blood and muscle. As his vision is obscured by steam, he glimpses a blurry blob of red off to the side, shooting out of the white.
It's her, of course, and she has the two children tucked neatly away under each arm.
He's not relieved. Not yet, because with her arms being occupied by two pale, traumatized kids, she's a walking, swinging, flying target. So he flies with her, blades whistling through the air.
They make their way together through the swarms of Titans and across the district to where they can deposit the children on the barge full of refugees that's headed into the safe confines of Wall Rose. The rescued kids are utterly silent by the time they reach it, but they don't have any time to do anything more than to hand them off to the soldiers guarding the barge.
As they return back into the fray of battle, he receives a sidelong look from the woman that he somehow knows is a gesture of gratitude. Thank you. He returns it with a nod. It was nothing. Then they're off.
It has been more than a year since he was recruited into the Survey Corps, a year since their first meeting on that battlefield. He discovers that he's now just almost on par with her now. It's an encouraging observation. He's able to keep up at her breakneck speed now, and together they cut into the Titans as swift as wind.
In the end, though, with no way to plug the breach in the wall, humanity is driven back into Wall Rose. The Titans devour approximately ten thousand people in all, and more than a hundred thousand times more than that have become refugees within Rose.
It is now the year 846. Central Government launches a campaign to retake Wall Maria using the refugees. All able bodied men and women above the age of forty are drafted into it.
The Maria Reclamation Expedition is a total joke. It's nothing more than a fancy name for killing off part of the refugee population so that the rest of them could eat.
250 thousand refugees, including a little more than a third of the Scouting Legion only so that the true purpose behind the supposed expedition isn't so blatantly obvious. Everyone still knows anyway. No one protests, because they're all too aware of the famine and food crises. No one protests, because they all understand.
Which is all fine and good for them, he supposes, but something he absolutely does not understand, is why they're sending her along with them.
"Well." He finally says. "The higher ups have finally lost it. This is a suicide mission, and they decide to send you too?"
There's a horse standing regally next to her, silent and patient like a sentry, packed and ready for the journey. She's performing a final checkover on her gear just before the expedition is set to go, her movements methodical and automatic. He wonders how many times she's done it. Her entire life, perhaps.
"Our leaders have dispatched me in the expedition in order to boost morale within the people." She says mechanically. "If they see that humanity's greatest weapon is with them, they will fight harder because they will think that there is a chance of survival."
That doesn't answer any questions and it's still very suspicious. He's not fooled, and he's not about to accept that it's all there is to it. But it isn't his business anyway.
"Don't get killed." It comes out entirely too hopeful. He nearly winces at himself.
She glances at him in the middle of inspecting the metal fixtures that attach the double scabbards to her thighs, flat, expressionless, hands never pausing, but there is something about it that changes ever so slightly, and it sets him on edge. Several moments pass. He waits.
"I told you I like to dream." A non-sequitur. She likes them a lot apparently.
Yes. Flying. "What about it?"
"When the expedition initiates, when I leave these walls-" She finishes her thorough inspection with a final tug on the strap across her shoulders and moves on to the horse next to her, making sure that everything is secured tight. "I will never come back."
His eyes narrow by a fraction and the corners of his mouth draw ever so slightly down before he can help it.
"You're not serious?" But even as he says it he's studying her, and he knows that she isn't the type to joke. She never learned how to.
So he tries for another question, "Why?" (Why this way? Why now?) But he realizes that it's already answered in his mind as well.
Eventually, he settles for: "It's impossible to survive outside of these walls."
There are no words. What he receives in reply is worse than anything he would ever expect.
He's only allowed half a second of that faint, brilliant, shadowed smile before it slips away, like rainwater draining down into underground pipes below. Honestly though, he should feel honored, or some inane thing like that, by seeing her smile for the first time, knowing that it's directed at him. But it's a horrible feeling.
Flying. Freedom. Of course she wants to leave the walls, even if it meant her death at the end.
Unjust, unfair, inhumane. Unbelievable.
She is not a god. She isn't even a weapon. She- for all that she's trained to become, and kills Titans as easily as breathing- is only a human. A being of soft flesh and fragile bone and so very much an easily breakable life.
Oh, she will fight her way through as far as she can go- that's practically a given- but eventually the blades will dull, the gas will run out, her wings will fail her, and she will fall from the sky.
There's a distant shout somewhere behind him; the expedition is about to depart. He finds himself under the intense gaze of her eyes once more.
"I hope you find what you're looking for out there, soldier." The words grate against his tongue, and he can't help but question how he has allowed to connect himself to this woman that her departure would leave him feeling like this.
That's about as close as a farewell they can ever come to. There are no more words between them after it, because there isn't a reason for any, and they aren't people of idle talk and pretty words anyway. The horse nickers gently beside her. She turns to it, gives it a pat, and hauls herself up onto its saddle in one smooth, fluid motion.
There is a certain confidence, a purpose, in her actions now, much like how she seems when there are orders to carry out. But this time it isn't an order. This time... it's her own decision. She doesn't look back. He doesn't want her to.
Then she's gone.
(Perhaps, he speculates- in one of those rare instances where there's a lull in the world itself and he allows himself to dream- in another world, in another lifetime, they could have been something. Nothing more, but just something. It would have been nice.)
And now, nearly three years later, when he looks at this kid, this Eren Jaeger, and his fierce green eyes that speak of the world beyond the wall and of freedom, whose role is to become humanity's next greatest weapon-
He can't help but remember blood red hair and eyes three shades darker, and a cynical smile on lips as pale as death.