A/N: I kept thinking about undercover AU Rivetra so I wrote something about it. For those unaware, I refer to the fic "All in a Day's Work" (can be found on my profile) as "undercover AU," and if you want to read this you should probably read that first. It's 10k words though, be warned.
Petra is used to living alone, hasn't had a roommate since she graduated school and is far too accustomed to silence in her apartment when she returns every night, so she's not sure how Levi becomes a constant in her domestic life so quickly.
She's only been out of the hospital one day when he appears at her front door the next morning, a bouquet of flowers in his hand. "They're not from me," he says immediately when she just stares at him—Levi and flowers do not mix well. "Your neighbor heard you had appendicitis and hopes you get well soon." He gives the bouquet a little toss, cracks his knuckles against the doorframe before catching it again. "Can I come in?"
"There's no point asking how you got my address, is there?" she wants to know, shutting the door behind him. He sets the flowers down on the coffee table, seats himself on the couch and drops his elbows on his knees.
"It's my job to know things," he says blandly, and she smirks.
"Right."
"So how are you?" He is studying his fingers intently, pressing them together so hard she can see his fingertips go white. "Do you feel okay?"
She sits next to him and pulls one of his hands away to hold it in hers. "I'm fine. I have pain meds but it doesn't really hurt. Just aches a bit."
"Don't forget to take them," he says, and Petra can't help laughing.
"I'm fine, Levi. Really." She squeezes his hand when he doesn't look convinced. "Don't worry about me."
His huff sounds relieved and she grins, leaning forward to peck him on the cheek. "Why, Mr. Robins, I didn't know you were this much of a mother hen. You can do most of the work raising our kids then."
"Shut up," he says, but when he turns his head so that her next kiss lands on his mouth, she can feel him smiling.
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"Why the hell are you up already?"
"Why the hell are you at my place so early?"
She gave him a spare key the last time he came but she didn't expect him to use it the very next day—it's seven in the morning and she's only just gotten out of bed, padded to the kitchen to fry an egg or two, and then her lock clicked and he came in.
"You need more rest," he says, clearly avoiding her question. "You just got out of the hospital—"
"I'm fine; that's why they let me out," she points out, vaguely exasperated, but his concern is touching. "I just woke up to make breakfast."
He nods, his eyes sweeping over her hair, her face, her body, and she becomes acutely aware of how she must look—she's only brushed her teeth and her hair must be a mess, her face oily, her eyes laden with sleep; she's wearing her most comfortable pajamas with the hole in one knee and she probably looks like something that just crawled out of a cave.
She's lived with him for one week already but that was in a hotel, on a mission; this feels different and she tries not to let it bother her. "Did you eat yet?"
"I'm not hungry," he says, and before she can respond he crosses the kitchen in two quick strides to take the carton of eggs from her hands.
"Go back to bed," he says. "I'll make you breakfast."
She raises an eyebrow at him. "Can you even cook?"
"I live alone. I have to survive somehow."
"No wonder you always seem to be in such a bad mood then, if that's what you eat all the time," she teases.
He scowls. "You haven't even tried my cooking. Don't judge yet."
Ten minutes later, he tells her he'll run to McDonald's and grab an Egg McMuffin or something ("Your stove is hotter than mine; it takes longer to fry an egg on mine, okay?") and before she manages to throw her wallet at him he grabs her wrist, plants a quick kiss on the shell of her ear and musses her hair in what she takes as a sheepish apology, and she decides if he doesn't mind her bedhead then she won't either.
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He comes over every day without fail for the next two weeks. Sometimes he brings his laptop and she sees him typing away as computer code scrolls across the screen; other times she watches him tap at his phone and curse and she expects him to be doing something important but frustrating until she sees Flappy Bird open.
"So your neighbors don't think anything's up?" she asks once. "That you're always coming here?"
"Nah," he says. "They think I work for the law firm and I've got clients from all over the world. That's why I go on so many business trips out of the country."
"What do you usually do when you're not on missions then?" she wants to know. "My neighbors think I work for the paper. Which I actually do." She gestures at the papers strewn about her coffee table. "Just not the paper they expect."
"You translate?"
She nods. "So what do you do?"
"No idea. Maybe I should take up golfing."
They order pizza most nights, taking turns choosing toppings, and she reads him articles and encoded messages in German, Russian, and Arabic as he tries to explain how he locates which system portals to hack when trying to access a mainframe. She doesn't get anything he says, but he can't understand her when she speaks Mandarin anyway so she supposes they're even.
"Are you sure you should be working?" is something he says often, something she always meets with an eye roll. "I'm not exerting myself," she has to reassure him just as often.
He takes her out for dinner one night when she feels up to it, making reservations at a fancy Italian place that opened just two blocks down from her apartment. The food is excellent, the service friendly and efficient, and at Petra's urging Levi tips the waiter so generously she's sure they'll be remembered if they ever come again.
"So was that our first date?" she asks when he drops her off at home before he heads back to the train station.
He seems to ponder the question for a moment. "Technically, I suppose it was," he says, "though we did spend a nice week at the beach together not long ago—"
She swats him on the shoulder and he ducks under her hand to avoid it, in the process stepping closer to her. She opens her mouth to tell him he's not funny but he presses his lips to hers before she can say anything, and when he runs his fingers through her hair, tilts her head back for better access to her lips, she decides talking isn't necessary right now anyway.
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One evening it starts to storm, rain pounding the windows in sheets, thunder crackling and lightning flashing across the sky in intervals. By ten PM it hasn't let up, showing no signs of stopping, so Petra rubs her arms awkwardly and says, "You should probably just stay here."
He insists on sleeping on the couch, so she prepares blankets and pillows for him, but in the middle of the night she hears her door open and then feels a weight settle on the edge of her bed, and she rolls over to make room for him.
"Couldn't sleep?"
"I don't like the rain," he admits. "Too many bad things associated with it."
She pulls the covers back and wraps her arms around him when he lies next to her. She rests her head against his shoulder and he breathes slowly, hands coming up to curl around her waist.
"I don't mind the rain. My mother used to tell me it was the heavens' way of cleansing the earth."
He snorts. "That sounds like a nice idea. My foster dad only told me it was great for washing away traces of blood and other evidence."
"Oh," she mouths, and he shakes his head a little as if to disperse the unpleasant thoughts.
"So… your mom?"
"Was killed in 2001. 9/11 terrorist attacks. She's why I decided to work for the government in the first place. To be able to prevent something like that from happening again." She swallows the words down, her tongue strangely heavy in her mouth, because she hasn't told anyone that in years. There hasn't been anyone to tell. "Your foster dad?"
He is quiet for a moment, but when he speaks again it is not to offer condolences, and she is grateful for that. He understands, she understands that he understands, and there is no need to state it. "He was an asshole. I ran away and lived on the streets until Erwin found me."
"And now you're here," she says, tightening her hold on him. He laughs, more a huff of amusement than anything, and she wonders if he knows exactly which here she's referring to.
"Now I'm here."
They both drift off into peaceful sleep that night.
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There are little signs of him all over her apartment—his pen on the bookshelf above her TV, the second chair that she never uses at her dining table pulled out, the kitchen utensils arranged in neat rows in the cupboards. Little signs she never notices until his presence is gone.
By the time he stops coming over, all lingering traces of pain have disappeared from her body and she hasn't touched her pain meds in at least a week, and she feels foolish because it takes her nearly as long to realize why his frequent visits have halted without a word of explanation.
They're never given advance notice, usually just told to arrive as soon as possible for a briefing before departure. Their things are always prepared for them, their new identities and possessions and anything they could possibly need. The moment the phone call comes, they can step out the door, leaving themselves behind.
Here in her little apartment on the outskirts of the city, Petra can be herself, be the person who reads other languages because she enjoys them and not because she is translating arms dealers' messages, who sketches people she sees on the streets because she likes drawing and not because she is trying to practice her eye for detail and memorization skills, who drinks green tea and reads gossip columns and laments all the lovely clothing she will never buy because she never has an opportunity to go out and meet people.
And now she sees Levi here as well, his obsession with order and cleanliness in the way he takes out and puts back things for her, his dependency on electronics in the way he left multiple chargers plugged into her outlets, his care for her in the way his chair left marks on the hardwood floor when he scraped it getting up multiple times to retrieve things she insisted she didn't need.
She's gotten used to having him around, and now that he is gone, the apartment feels oddly empty.
He'll be back soon, she reassures herself. He's been on far more missions than you, stupid. He'll be fine.
She repeats those three words so many times they lose all meaning. He'll be fine, she thinks, over and over, and she tries to believe it.
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When the phone rings, sharp and shrill in the silence of her living room, it takes her three seconds to rush over and pick it up.
"Hello?"
"Petra." She recognizes the voice instantly; she hears it before every mission, explaining what the gadgets disguised as everyday items do. Those gadgets have saved her life on more than one occasion.
"Hanji!" She considers one of the CIA's best engineers a good friend. "How are you?"
"Fine, thank you." Hanji's tone is solemn, and Petra has a bad feeling she knows what she's going to hear next. "I'm calling about Levi."
She doesn't stop to wonder that people already know about her and Levi—in the world of espionage, nothing about their personal lives is a secret, and if Hanji knows then Erwin definitely knows too. "What is it?" she asks, grip tightening involuntarily on the phone.
"The tracking device I gave him stopped transmitting. He should have been back yesterday but no one checked in for the flight I booked him."
It doesn't mean anything, he probably just ran into a few complications, but the sudden lurch in her stomach says otherwise. It happens to many agents; it's happened to her before too, losing contact, and she's always been fine, but she remembers the half-healed gashes in his back, the thick ropy scars and mottled bruises, the faded burn marks and raw skin, and her throat closes up.
"I'm sure he'll be fine," Hanji says quietly, but long after she's hung up Petra still can't force herself to do anything other than sit numbly by the phone, still repeating her three words like a mantra: he'll be fine. He'll be fine. He'll be fine.
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Long before she and Levi went on that joint operation she already decided she cared far too much for him, but now that she knows he cares for her too it makes the waiting a hundred times worse.
She's been on plenty of missions before, often at the same time as he, and she only knew of his condition when they ran into each other at the law firm or sat together at various dinners and other events their fellow employees liked to hold. She always had other things to occupy her mind, like her own work, but now that she is supposed to be on leave, recovering from an injury, now that she knows just what she will be missing, she can't stand the wait.
She sends off so many translations Mike wants to know if she's actually getting any rest and recuperation or if she's just working herself to death to make up for her physical break. She sketches Levi's face from memory, crumples up the paper because she thinks it's not good enough and then smoothes it out and tucks it away in her sketchbook, goes grocery shopping because she's running low on vegetables. She tries to keep herself as busy as possible, but even if she succeeds during the day at night she lies awake in bed, mind bursting with worries and possibilities she doesn't want to think about.
It's tiring, living like this, and she hates every minute of it. She focuses on that intense dislike, because if she doesn't she'll focus on other things too terrible for her mind to deal with. She calls her father, assures him that her appendicitis is fine because she doesn't want to unnecessarily worry him, promises to visit sometime soon.
It's become so familiar, that constant cloud of nerves and stress and anxiety, that when someone knocks on her door one evening and she opens it, expecting the neighbor, only to find Levi standing there like he's been dropping by every day this week, none of the tension dissipates and she just stares at him like he's going to disappear again before her very eyes.
"Holy crap," she says, looking him up and down. The circles under his eyes are more prominent, he's paler than before, and his hair is more windswept than usual, but other than that he looks exactly the same.
"Hey," he says with a little shrug. "Can I come in?"
"Holy crap," she can't help saying again. "You're back."
"Uh, yeah." He rubs the back of his neck and offers her a lopsided grin. "It's good to see you again."
She grabs him by the arm, yanks him into her apartment, slams the door shut, and whacks him as hard as she can across the chest.
He winces, more startled than hurt. "What the hell was that for?"
"For disappearing, you jackass!"
He presses his fingers to the spot she slapped and makes a face. "You know we have to leave the moment we—"
"No, not that. Hanji told me you lost contact!"
"Oh. Right." He exhales out of the corner of his mouth. "It was a stupid accident with the snowmobiles and the—you know what, never mind."
Petra shakes her head. "Fuck you."
"I'm back now though?" His glance is inquisitive, almost hesitant; his words sound like a question and Petra just shakes her head again.
"Fuck you," she repeats, and steps forward, slams him into the door, and jerks his head to hers.
He doesn't seem to mind, his lips meeting hers with equal strength, his tongue flickering across the ridge of her teeth. She tugs at his hair, hoping it hurts, and lets him scrape his teeth down her neck when she digs her nails into his arms.
His mouth is hot on her bare skin, his fingers burning through the fabric of her shirt, and she feels dizzy and light-headed with his warmth, the pressure of his limbs. She finds one of her knees between his legs and she pulls back a moment to breathe, cheeks flushed, and he pulls back slightly too, resting his forehead gently against hers.
"See? I'm fine," he whispers, and she half-laughs, half-sobs with relief.
"Fuck you anyway."
A smirk curls at the corners of his lips. "If you insist," he says, lowering his mouth to hers again.
After that coherent thought becomes hard to manage.
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Her memories of last night are full of sensations, the cool leather of the couch and then the soft silk of her bedsheets, surprisingly gentle movements and almost unbearable heat, so she's not quite sure when they went from the living room to her bedroom, but when she wakes up her first view is of the ceiling fan that hangs above her bed, its blades dotted with glow-in-the-dark stickers.
Morning light shines through the window and she turns away from its glare, her eyes falling on the figure lying next to her in bed. Suddenly something nags at the back of her mind and she feels her breath freeze in her throat as for one moment, she is positive that when she lifts the blankets slightly she will find—
But his bare back is smooth, scarred from old wounds but free of blood, the only red on his skin faint marks that look like her fingernails. She winces slightly for him and rubs tender circles around the crescents she dug into his back, and he stirs slightly.
His gaze is soft, his eyes oddly light as he looks at her, and she can only guess what he is thinking. "Morning," she says quietly, and he shifts to lie closer to her, winding his arms around her waist.
"Morning," he says, his voice a hoarse rumble against her chest, and she smiles, reaching up to brush a kiss against his jaw.
His arms tighten around her and she sighs, content. She'll be back to work any day now, he'll probably be off on another mission sometime soon after, but for now he is fine, she is fine, they are both fine and for now that is enough.
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A/N: My previous a/n still stands; I may or may not expand this into a multichaptered fic (posted as a new fic, not added on to this or the last one) because I have too many ideas about Eren Jaeger and TITAN's Colossal Project lol. But I guess I'll see; I have enough already on my plate for now. Would anyone be interested though?