que sera sera
For such an unlikely pair, there had to be some sort of fate-dictated intervention happening there. But then, the course of true love never runs smooth, does it?
/./
After Erwin recruits him into Recon, his welcome into the fold is lukewarm at the best, and simmering with suspicion and dislike far more commonly at the worst.
After all, he's little more than an erstwhile thug. To the uninformed (or ignorant) eye he is unprincipled, uncaring, and ill-suited to display the silvery wings of liberty that so many others have perished to keep intact.
But that causes hardly even a sliver of disquiet for Levi. His childhood had been built of nothing more than the warmth of his mother's presence and the familiar four walls of their ramshackle cabin. His adolescence had been characterized by fleeting friendship and the subsequent loss of it by Death's hand—as such, Levi felt no compulsion to renew such sentiments with any of his fellow soldiers.
Yes, his icy reception tenders none of the camaraderie or warmth he had found in his former friends as they traversed the Capital's underbelly…that is until he meets a loud-mouthed, four-eyed girl with nutmeg skin and an unsettling gleam in her gaze.
He is blissfully ignorant of it at the time, but this girl will eventually become, in order of succession: thorn-in-his-blasted-side, acquaintance-who-he-can-occasionally-stand, tentative companion, friend, lover, and wife.
But the first remains the prevalent definer of Levi's attitude towards her for quite a long while, and the last doesn't come about until the day that she nearly dies in his desperate arms.
/./
She is nine years younger than he is, he finds out. Eighteen years old, and yet his superior in the ranks.
Sergeant Hanji Zoe.
Or, as Levi soon comes to recognize her, Sergeant Pain-In-The-Ass-With-the-Greasy-Hair.
For some inexplicable reason, she takes it upon herself to relentlessly badger him. She sits beside him at mealtimes despite his general distaste for company in general, yammering on and on at great lengths about (of all things) Titans. She rushes to fall in step beside him in the corridors, greeting him with a manly slap on the shoulder that threatens to send him careening to the ground.
Attempts to dissuade her friendliness with silence and scowls doesn't work.
Attempts to repel her with outright requests that she just leave him the hell alone similarly have no effect.
Attempts to hastily sign his name up for every single venture outside of the walls in a try at escaping her society prove equally futile—not only does she happily accompany the troop on every single Recon mission, but Levi's ears discover that Hanji Zoe has the headache-inducing habit of enthusiastically screaming herself into a hoarse state when battling Titans.
It is not long before Levi begins to despair in regards to his chances at regaining any semblance of peace and quiet in his life.
/./
He quickly becomes enlightened to the fact that the rapid patter of feet on stone and a breathlessly hollered Leviiiiiiiiiii! are the preludes to an hour or more of having his ears nearly bored off his head as she natters ardently on about her experiments.
Experiments in which she seems to derive some unholy pleasure in nearly allowing her head to be chomped off by irritable giants who don't take too kindly to her attempts at baiting them.
By the second week of his new military assignment, Levi excels at ducking into obscure nooks and crannies about headquarters when his name echoes about the halls in a banshee-like scream. For once he appreciates his often-deplored compactness of stature, seeing as the point of contention between him and his genetics becomes an advantage when trying to wriggle into somewhere that will grant him some measure of invisibility.
It doesn't do any damn good though.
Somehow, the annoying woman always manages to find him, tossing open the closet or cupboard he seeks refuge in with a maniacally triumphant laugh and dragging him forth from it with playful chastisements about ignoring one's commanding officer.
Sometimes Levi thinks he'd gladly risk the punishment for insubordination if only to escape Hanji Zoe.
/./
One day, his temper threatening to erupt in a truly spectacular facsimile of a volcano, he ventures to ask her: Why. Why are you so eager to befriend me?
He uses 'befriend' for lack of a better word—although he thinks that 'incessantly annoy' might have substituted quite nicely as well.
Her round eyes blink owlishly at the inquiry, startled to hear the taciturn and sempiternally laconic man actually speaking. With her.
But recovery from her surprise was, in the way of Hanji's normal resiliency, very quick, and she lets out a thoughtful hum and summons a small smile.
I suppose, she replies softly, lacking even the vaguest hint of her usual boisterousness, it's because of your eyes.
My eyes?
He had never thought them to be anything that could be branded as exceptional—certainly nothing to unceasingly harass him about in her attempts to construct some odd semblance of a friendship between them.
Hanji seems delighted at his evident befuddlement, drinking in the crease between his eyebrows that denotes his frustration, the frowning quirk to his mouth that looks charmingly sullen on his serious face.
Yes, she elaborates, extending one finger to lightly touch the corner of one narrowed grey eye. You see, they're very sad.
He scoffs, irritably batting away her hand and trying not to allow his discomfiture at the oh-so-human contact to infiltrate his expression. That's hardly any different from the gaze of anyone else in this godforsaken place.
That wide mouth of hers abandons its perennial smiling state in favor of just a tiny little quirk at its corner. I'm a scientist, Levi. It's my job to observe—and observe accurately. So I guess you could say…it was my interest in those sad eyes of yours that captured me as a researcher, and that lovely personality of yours that captured me as a woman.
With a surprising serenity she collects her abandoned glasses and the large tome she'd been perusing, and departs with her usual sporadic method of walking. Levi, glaring a burning hole into her back, doesn't fail to detect the smugness in her movement.
/./
I'm older than you, he informs her tonelessly. Much older.
She laughs—a bright, nearly mocking sound. And I'm your commanding officer. But if you haven't noticed, Levi, the world's long since taken a one-way trip to hell and societal conventions accompanied them when they did.
Hanji's unerring reasoning in the face of all that would impede them was both impressive and slightly aggravating.
I'm not good with…people.
Gee, never noticed that before.
I'll probably end up hurting you.
How much worse can you be than having my body parts almost gnawed off by Titans? I think I'll cope.
Is that really how you go about seducing people, Shitty Glasses?
Mischief steals command of her features, an impishness pulling at her lips and brightening her eyes. Well, it worked on you didn't it? she comments airily, tinted with the satisfaction of seeing a hypothesis validated, before leaning down to kiss a petulant and newly-promoted Corporal.
/./
Levi doesn't ever think the prospect of losing her grating laugh and raspy voice and bouncing person could ever transition into the stuff of nightmares, but it does.
He sits on the edge of her clinically white and starched-sheet cot, silently fuming and frightening off hospital orderlies who dare to do little more than dart inside to check her temperature and pulse before fleeing from the room.
Her blood has long before been scoured and scrubbed from his hands, and yet the lingering sensation of her limp body burdening them with a lifeless heaviness has yet to fade. Levi fervently damns that reckless aspect of her, that heedlessness that is such a foil to his own levelheadedness; even as his fingers trail lightly against her own so as to reassure him of her warmth.
When Hanji finally wakes up, it was not in the graceful, eyelash-fluttering fashion of story princesses but instead with a jerk and a discombobulated yelp. Similarly, there was no starry-eyed prince with curling blonde locks awaiting her revival—only a glaring Levi wearing what Hanji privately termed his 'serious face' (that was only slightly different from his 'happy face' or his 'sad face', and could only be differentiated by the tilt of his eyebrows).
You jumped off a building, he intones with a deceptively calm voice. There's no profanity in the sentence—always a dangerous sign with Levi.
Hanji flinches, before summoning a winsome smile. Uh…caught that, did ya?
Levi's eyes narrow with an undisguised displeasure. Obviously, seeing as I was the one who had to try and fucking catch you when the new equipment—the untried, untested, unexamined new equipment—you were using decided not to work.
Wriggling wearily into an upright position—she's never been one to face her battles lying down, after all—she remarks, You know, I really thought the fresh modifications would work.
He has to wrestle her back into bed twice as she attempts to leap from it, yelping about relaying her findings to the research team and going back for another try at it. (Apparently free-falling from a very tall building and almost painting the street with her brain matter was of little consequence to Hanji Zoe in the name of progress. Unfortunately for her, Levi thoroughly disagreed.)
And suddenly, in her animated presence and under the scrutiny of soft brown eyes, it becomes nauseatingly clear to Levi that he could just as well have been crouching amidst a graveyard's dirt and tracing yet another name carved upon a nondescript grey stone.
Hanji. He grits out her name when she finally decides to pause and draw breath—it's the only time to get a word in edgewise when she gets into such a state.
Mm?
As though dictated by the control of manipulative strings, his mouth forms words that are utterly foreign to his tongue. Marry me.
She stares at him blankly.
And then she swears, pawing in an aggravated way at her still-tender skull.
Dammit! I knew this was a hallucination—you haven't called me 'Shitty Glasses' even once! She wrinkles her nose at him, leveling him a doleful look. Mister Hallucination, come back when you're ready to do a better impression of Levi, okay? I'm his lover, the person who knows him inside and out and up and down: you'll have to do better than that to fool Hanji Zoe!
With a huff and a crude flop, Hanji rolls over and falls asleep.
And that was how Levi's first-ever proposal was brutally dissected, laughed at, and subsequently dismissed by his girlfriend.
/./
She does marry him, eventually.
(After he manages to convince her, with the help of sworn affidavits by Erwin, Eren, Mike, Moblit, and countless others, that she had regained full function of her mental faculties and Levi's proposal wasn't a fantastical delusion.)
Their union brings about no magical alteration of the world, no generic happy ending—Titans still roam outside humanity's cage, and the broken forms of their mangled comrades are still crushing weights to be borne on the back of the grim-faced survivors.
But their marriage was not meant for the world…just them. It was meant for a lifetime of Levi awakening to a bed full of scribbled notes and a trail of pajamas when his wife hightailed it to the lab after inspiration struck during the night; for years of Hanji trying to impress upon her children that no, don't listen to Daddy's misconception that you have to wash four times a day or the germs will get you.
/./
A betting pool, courtesy of Jean and Eren, gets cobbled together on their wedding day (wisely, the entire affair was concealed from Corporal Levi).
Some say two months before two such dissimilar personalities are forced apart.
Some optimists claim a year.
The really optimistic people (like Armin) predict two years.
Five years later, Hanji and Levi declare themselves the winners and funnel the entire earnings into one very happy Major's research.
/./
que sera sera – whatever will be, will be
/./
I don't even know what the heck this turned out to be. I just start writing random Levihan drabble-y things….