Warning: Lots of spoilers for manga up to Return to Shiganshina arc (Chapter 81).
This was it. This was reality, this was the situation that they faced. Erwin was gone, lost in that final charge that had allowed them to take the beast titan down. And she, Hange Zoë, was officially the 14th Commander of the Survey Corps.
The air itself felt different. Suffocating, like a Titan was crushing her ribs in its hand.
In the days where she had acted as interim Commander while Erwin had been kept under arrest by the Military Police, there had always been the underlying reassurance that if anything went spectacularly wrong, Erwin would be there with his unflappable steadfastness to fix things up.
But now Erwin was dead, and she was sitting in the Commander's office listening to Levi drone on about the following week's schedule and some new proposed training regime. She was sitting there, sitting in his chair, but she couldn't concentrate; the documents laid out across the table before her seemed to swim before her eyes. Dammit, there wasn't time for this! They had managed to plug the hole that the Colossal Titan had made in Wall Maria, but plenty of Titans still roamed within the wall's boundary that they needed to exterminate before the citizens could move back there. Not to mention that they were still far from getting to the root of the Titans' origins, particularly in regards to the shapeshifters. There was so much to be done, so much that had yet to be done... Her hands clenched into tight fists, fingernails digging into her sword-calloused palms. Why... why had Erwin thought it possible for her to step into his shoes? That responsibility now felt impossibly large. To be Commander, to take up his mantle... At the end of the day she was just a researcher. How could she do it? And yet here Levi was acting as if nothing was amiss, seeking her decision on matters as if it were something natural. As if she was Erwin.
Levi's voice faded into silence. She felt his sharp eyes on her, and shakily she dragged her gaze up to meet his.
"I'm not Erwin," she told him, in a voice that sounded strangely far away.
The Corporal almost scoffed. "Of course you're not."
And it was a statement that despite its tone came with no judgment, no disappointment. Dark eyes remained in their customary half-lidded state, but they watched her carefully. It was in that instant that Hange realized that it had never been Levi who she needed to convince. No, Levi had already long understood it. From the beginning, he never said, 'Erwin would have done this'; he only asked, 'what do you think'. Even more than her, he had already understood and accepted this fact – she was the Commander now, but she was not Erwin. Had never been, could never be. And if the choices she made weren't the same ones that Erwin would have made, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
This whole time, the only one who had needed convincing was herself.
She stood, the thud of her palms hitting the table making the papers flutter. "I'm going back to the labs."
"Hn." Levi's only reaction to that was a flat sound of acknowledgment. No surprise, no disapproval. Just... Levi being Levi, as always. It made Hange crack a smile. Why had she thought that she was alone in this?
"We'll try out that new regime. I'll be at the training grounds tomorrow as well to take notes on it and see if there's anything we can improve further. There's also a new weapon that I've been making, that we could potentially start running test trials on, so that's a second agenda for tomorrow afternoon. And one more thing, tell Eren to come to the labs today after lunch, I have a few things in mind to check up on in regards to the things we found in the basement of his house that would probably need his assistance."
"Understood." The dark-haired Corporal uncrossed his legs and stood to leave.
"Hey, Levi." Her call stopped him in the doorway. A sincere smile lit her tired eyes for the first time since she had sat down in this chair, but he didn't turn round to see. "Thanks."
"Go back to your musty labs, four-eyes," her old friend took a final shot over his shoulder as he left the room. She childishly stuck her tongue out at the door, before starting to collect up all the documents that she needed to take with her.
A few minutes later, the door to Erwin's office swung close behind her with a resounding click. Pulling in a deep breath, she drew herself up as she walked briskly down the hallway, easily taking the familiar turn down to the research labs.
She was Hange Zoë, 14th Commander of the Survey Corps, and she was going to lead them to the end of this war, as herself.
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