Agape (/ˈæɡəpiː/ or /əˈɡɑːpeɪ/; Classical Greek: ἀγάπη, agápē) - unconditional love, a selfless love, a love that is passionately committed to the well-being of the other.
Levi Ackerman has been sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair in the communal lounge in his dorm for nine hours. Nine hours of looking back and forth between the fluorescent blue-white of his laptop screen and an eighteen inch high stack of books that smell of moldering paper. He has gotten up six times: four to go to the bathroom and two to feed himself things that are edible but not quite food, sour gummy worms and Bagel Bites and strawberry soda. Levi never eats like this, subsists on lean meats and leafy greens (and the occasional slice of pizza — after all, he's only human), but he doesn't feel capable of thinking of anything besides finishing his senior thesis. He feels as though the stress has broken him, so he is eating the first things he grabbed at the convenience store, guided only by his agitation. The only thing that comforts him is that he has managed to get dressed with his usual meticulousness, his crisp white shirt and thin black tie still giving him a look of respectability as the shadows beneath his eyes begin to extend toward his cheekbones.
He takes another swig of soda. After he swallows, his mouth feels greasy with chemicals. He takes a look at his reflection in the screen of his phone and grimaces as he sees that his mouth is now stained neon pink, made even brighter when contrasted against the dark fatigue around his eyes.
Nine hours of this. And he has fifty-nine to go.
Levi wonders if he should stretch his legs, suddenly paranoid that staying sedentary until Monday means that he will die of a pulmonary embolism without finishing his thesis first. The lounge door opens; the noise interrupts him from his spiraling anxiety and a mental image of himself at fifty years old, still sitting at the same table, trying to finish this paper so he can graduate. He sees a black backpack go flying through the air. After it, a familiar lithe form in a baggy maroon hoodie and frayed denim shorts vaults over the back of the couch that sits in the middle of the lounge, facing a flatscreen television. Levi's table is behind the couch, tucked away in a corner alcove. She won't notice him if he stays silent but he is too frustrated not to let out a noise halfway between a growl and a sigh, alerting the newcomer to his presence. He pulls at the knot of his tie as he turns toward the girl; suddenly the familiar pressure against his neck feels like it is choking him.
"Oh hey, Levi. Didn't see you there. Whatcha doin'?" the girl on the couch asks, smiling at him.
"Hi, Mikasa," Levi drones. "If you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of finals and I'm a senior."
"And?"
He gestures toward the stack of books next to him. "A little thing called my fucking major thesis that I need to write so I can graduate?"
Mikasa shrugs, unconcerned with his stress. He clenches his teeth, wonders how she can be so calm when it feels like his world is about to end. "How much do you have left?"
"Too much," he replies, dropping his head forward for a moment. All he wants to do is go with the forward momentum and crumple to the floor, but somehow he remains seated.
"That sucks. Want a beer?" She reaches down, out of his sight, and comes back up with a can of beer in one hand.
Levi closes his eyes and takes a deep sighing breath. "You're not supposed to have that. You're underage. I'm supposed to report you."
"Whatever, dork. Nice tie, by the way," Mikasa taunts him. "Look, I know you're my RA and all, but you're not seriously going to narc on me, are you? Plus you know my dad is going to give you so much shit for getting me in trouble, considering that time he caught you sneaking me beer at your high school graduation party."
He waves his hand at her dismissively. "Don't worry. I'm not leaving this room until my thesis is done, so you can underage drink in peace." He turns back to his laptop, but feels the need to make one last point. "And I'm not afraid of your dad," he adds. "He loves me as long as I mow his lawn for him when I'm home. Plus he'll lock you in your room for a month if I tell him you're getting shitfaced instead of studying."
Mikasa rolls her eyes. "Come on, have a beer with me. It's Friday. I bet you've been in here all day." She grins while shaking the beer can gently from side to side, tempting him.
"Nine hours," he groans.
"You know it's good for your brain to take a break, right?" She leans over the back of the couch and waves the can toward him. "'Drink me, Levi! I'm delicious!'" she says in a high-pitched voice. "I think you should listen to the beer. It knows what it's talking about."
"Please just let me work," he implores her.
"Fine, fine." She gets up from the couch and deposits a beer on the table next to him. It looks so tempting, condensation clouding the graphics on the aluminum can. The beer is a cheap, watery brew, something a freshman like Mikasa would drink, but he figures if he's been quaffing strawberry soda by the liter then he's not too good for a frosty can of piss beer. "Peace offering," she says, then ruffles his hair. Levi scowls and reaches out to smack her away, but Mikasa is already gone, flinging herself back onto the couch and cracking open a beer of her own.
Levi turns back to his laptop, but the drink before him seems to fill his vision instead. A perfectly clear drop of condensation runs down the side of the can and, for the first time in his life, Levi's mouth literally waters. He groans in defeat. "All right, brat, I'll come hang out with you. Half an hour, tops."
"Yay!" Mikasa cheers, clapping. She gets up to put a DVD in the player above the TV.
"What are you watching?" Levi asks. He sits down on the couch smoothly, leaning back and stretching out his legs.
"Some anime Eren said I should check out," she replies. "I'm still trying to get in his pants so I figure this will help."
He takes a long swig of his beer, trying to finish it before it gets warm. "You know he's fucking his roommate, right?"
Mikasa stops in her tracks, still standing in front of the television. "What? No, they're just best friends."
"That guy is as gay as the day is long. You're barking up the wrong tree," Levi smirks.
She scowls. "I have faith in my attractiveness," she mutters.
"Seriously, he's not into women. Do you really think you're going to turn him?" He cocks one eyebrow and crosses his arms, waiting for her answer.
Mikasa sighs, her shoulders slumping forward. "Honestly, I just feel like a moron now because I've been trying to get with him since orientation and I didn't even have a clue."
"Yeah, really. Everyone knows. Aren't you supposed to be smart?" Levi laughs at her.
"Shut up!" she whines, walking over to the couch and smacking him with a nearby throw pillow. She plunks herself down next to Levi, then folds herself around him the same way she always does, the way she did when she first met him fourteen years earlier. Mikasa's family had moved next door a few days earlier, and Levi's family had invited them over as a neighborly gesture. Levi was sitting on the couch in the den, calmly watching television, when Mikasa crawled up next to him without saying a word or making a noise. She laid her head on his shoulder and rested her legs perpendicularly across his lap. She fell asleep on him that way, trapping him beneath her deceptively heavy body. Her father and his stepfather, who'd been drinking beer in the yard, bonding over their shared last name and love of horror movies, came down to find Levi sitting perfectly still, murder in his eyes, as Mikasa sucked her thumb and sighed dreamily against his chest.
When she was five and he was eight it was cute. (Kenny had Levi's mother take a picture of the two of them, which to this day remains framed on the mantle in both Ackermans' living rooms.) Now, at nineteen and twenty-two, Levi hates it. She's too fucking pretty for this not to be an endurance test of his ability not to get an erection. This close, he can smell her shampoo, some chemical floral aroma that nonetheless makes him want to bury his face in her silky black hair. He silently thanks himself for not having worn shorts; his nerves are so frazzled that the feeling of her skin against his would be too much to bear.
He has loved her for three years now. He has hated every minute of it.
Mikasa presses a few buttons on the remote and starts the first episode of the anime. "Wanna play a drinking game?" she asks, her cold beer can resting against her lips.
Levi twists his lips into an arrogant sneer. "Do you seriously need an excuse to drink?" His voice is flat, dripping with scorn.
"Are you morally opposed to fun?" she retorts. Levi frowns. Mikasa loves questioning him, evading him, disobeying him in small ways that sting his ego like a hail of needles. Like everything else about her, it annoys him just as much as it makes him want to kiss her.
"Do you always have to answer my questions with questions?" he grinds out.
"No," she pouts. "But it's so fun. I like when you get mad."
Levi rests his head on the back of the couch and sighs exasperatedly. "You are so annoying. Now tell me about your stupid drinking game because I know you're just going to tell me anyway."
"It's not stupid, Levi," Mikasa insists.
"All drinking games are stupid," he says to the ceiling.
"You're stupid," she retorts, poking him in the stomach. He tries to retreat into the couch somehow but only succeeds in flexing his abdominal muscles under her touch. Levi wonders if he actually sees her blush as she feels how muscular he is beneath his clothes, or if he is just imagining it. He slaps her hand away, so she pokes him again, her finger lingering against his torso this time.
He grasps her hand, stopping her from touching him further. "I'll play the game if it means you quit doing that."
Mikasa grins and nuzzles her face against his shoulder the way she always does when she is able to bend Levi to her will, which occurs far more often than he would like. Levi closes his eyes and inhales slowly, hoping that she can't hear how shaky his breath is. "It's pretty straightforward. Eren says every time you yell at the television, you take a drink. If you yell a curse word, you take two."
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," Levi grumbles.
"No," Mikasa points out, "the dumbest thing you ever heard was when Kenny said he was thinking about getting a motorcycle." Levi laughs bitterly at the thought of his stepfather tooling around the neighborhood on what he would undoubtedly describe as his sweet hog. "Don't laugh, he got one," she tells him.
Levi's eyes widen. "What? Are you kidding me?"
Mikasa giggles. "Yeah, he looks like a total dickhead on it, too. I went home last weekend and he showed it to me. You're going to laugh so hard when you see him, Levi. I think Kenny didn't get the memo that he's a 50-something guy who lives in the suburbs, not Easy Rider. Now my dad's thinking of getting one too."
"Did my mom say anything about it?"
"Oh, you know her. She's too nice to be honest about what a tool Kenny can be, so she's just happy he's happy."
"Sounds like Mom," Levi says.
The episode starts and Mikasa falls quiet, resting her head against his chest. Levi concentrates on his breathing, slow and deep, in the hopes that his heart doesn't race beneath her ear. She stretches out one arm and places it over his shoulder, running her fingers through the closely cropped hair at the nape of his neck. Levi keeps his eyes trained on the television but cannot stop the corners of his mouth from turning up in contentment.
Over the years she has transformed from his surrogate obnoxious little sister to something more insidious. She still fills the former role quite adeptly, alternately able to annoy him to distraction and do the perfect thing to soothe him when he is upset. Now he admires her for being so damned cool, so smart and compassionate and confident in herself, bold where he is timid, soft where he is hard. She is utterly perfect save for the fact that she thinks Levi is utterly perfect.
Her eternal constancy would be easier for him to swallow if he hadn't spent most of the past three years obsessing over how badly he wants to fuck her. His thoughts drive him to distraction, torment him in his sleep, cause him to seek out other dark-haired women with knowing smiles that cut into him like razors. He can never be with her. Aside from the fact that their families are too intertwined for this to be anything short of a disaster, she is far too good for him. It just seems wrong that this girl who had been his annoying shadow for so long suddenly became a beautiful, brilliant, talented woman who just happened to believe he was the greatest person who ever lived.
She had been a late bloomer, all gangly limbs and long dark hair obscuring her face through her freshman year of high school. He had been on the varsity gymnastics team; she, a member of the mathletes. He warned her not to hang out with him too much when they were at school together so instead she would stare at him from across the cafeteria, a haunted look in her dark eyes. At the end of the year he graduated with honors and went off to college, silently thanking fate that he would be able to escape her oppressive, omnipresent love once and for all.
In honor of the completion of his freshman year, his mother and stepfather threw a barbecue at their house, a small affair which Levi quickly realized was really just an excuse for his parents and their friends to hang out and drink beer. He had been talking with Mr. Ackerman, drinking a beer that the man had pilfered for him; he remembers the man bragging about Mikasa's perfect PSAT score when, out of the corner of his eye, Levi noticed a tall, slender girl speaking to his mother. She wore a pink flowered dress and had her hair cut in a trendy angular style just past the nape of her neck. In retrospect he knew he should have figured out who the dark-haired girl would turn out to be, but he was too busy trying to maintain his conversation while not making it too obvious to Mr. Ackerman that he was far more interested in the curve of the girl's ass than in Mikasa's academic achievements.
The girl must have felt his eyes on her because she looked over her shoulder at him, revealing a delicate face with large, haunting dark eyes, which Levi could see light up from across the yard. And then she was apologizing to his mother and running full tilt toward him, shrieking, "Levi!" and enveloping him in a fierce hug before he realized, Oh, fuck, Mikasa grew up.
"I just cut off like all my hair a few weeks ago," she said after she disengaged from him. She struck a pose, putting a hand on one hip and tilting her head to one side. "Do you like it?"
Her new shorter haircut accentuated the bold line of her cheekbones and the soft pout of her lips. He looked down to see that her scrawny frame had broadened a bit, rounding out her breasts and hips and calves. Levi was forced to conclude that Mikasa Ackerman, without her baggy clothes and curtain of hair to hide behind, was beautiful. He felt like he'd been punched in the stomach.
"Yeah," he said in a strained whisper, his mouth utterly dry.
Later, Kenny yelled at him for skipping out on the party early. Levi sat on the living room sofa, stone-faced, letting go of his usual resentment at being disciplined by a man who was not his father. He let Kenny's words wash over him and simply nodded along with rude this and ungrateful that. Levi felt he deserved it.
After all, couldn't exactly tell his stepfather that he had to leave so he could jerk off twice, because otherwise he'd be trying his damnedest to fuck Mikasa Ackerman. Knowing Kenny, he'd probably call Mr. Ackerman right then and there just to crow about his boy (at which Levi rankled, but he supposed he should credit his stepfather for at least pretending that Levi was his son) taking a shine to little Mikasa. Knowing Mr. Ackerman, Levi would probably find himself at the receiving end of a frank discussion punctuated with incredibly polite veiled threats.
No one could ever know. His sudden attack of infatuation could tear apart their families' friendship. And besides, Mikasa was too young. And so Levi tried to pull away from her, which naturally made her pursue him further. She would "drop by" his parents' house when she knew he'd be home from college. When looking at schools, she visited Levi's, claiming she had heard good things about their biology department. A small part of him hoped that she wouldn't get in — it was a very good school, after all — but then his mother called him to tell him of Mikasa's perfect SAT score and, in the same breath, that she would probably end up valedictorian of her class and a member of the all-county cross country team. At that moment, he felt the inevitability of her constant presence clamp down on his leg like a bear trap.
At that moment, he loathed her for being so damned good at everything, and for being best at ingratiating herself in his life no matter how hard he tried to claw himself away from her. Short of emigrating, he just could not escape her. (And even then, she would probably be on the first plane to whatever remote corner of the world he'd sequestered himself in. She would gather him in a huge hug and sigh in his ear about how much she missed him while he would try to squirm away, hoping his uncontrollable arousal wasn't too apparent.)
He started working an RA at his college, gladly taking on the petty problems of freshmen in exchange for free housing and a large room all to himself. After he heard that Mikasa would be coming to school with him the next year, he requested that he be placed with sophomores. His request was denied; he was too good at his job not to take on a third class of freshmen.
In the cruelest twist of fate, the first name on his list of students was Ackerman, Mikasa.
He has managed to keep his cool for the entire year, knowing she lives just down the hall, even having seen her wearing nothing but a towel as she walked from the bathroom to her room, her hair wet from a shower. At the time he wanted nothing more than to throw away her towel and press his lips to every inch of her damp, clean skin. Instead, like always, he retreated to his room and roughly stroked his cock, wondering what she would taste like.
Luckily, she had not been quite so clingy when she arrived at school, preferring instead to make her own way socially. It was still painful for him to watch, the way everyone just seemed to like her, the easy, confident way she aced her coursework, the way she just happened to always have an extra few slices of pizza for him whenever she ordered out. The way she was content to sit by herself on a Friday night three days before final exams, drinking beer and watching fucking cartoons without a care in the world.
It soothed him to know that, despite his simultaneous infatuation with and jealousy of her, all he had to do was show up for her to be happy. And someone who is that easy to please can't possibly hold that much sway over someone as stoic and rational as Levi, right?
Right?
Mikasa shakes her beer can; a couple of drops rattle around inside. She reaches behind her for her backpack, then furrows her brow as she realizes she's dropped it on the floor, out of reach from her current position. "Hold my legs?" she asks.
"What?" He turns to her; the show is more engrossing than he had anticipated and he has thankfully been able to ignore her for the past few minutes.
"Hold my legs."
"What? Why?"
She scowls. "My backpack is over there. I'm gonna grab it."
He narrows his eyes at her as he lifts his beer to his mouth. "Just get up."
"I don't feel like it. I'm comfortable here. Hold my legs."
Levi tries to estimate how long it will take one of them to give in but realizes he's too tired to determine whether her desire to drink more beer will trump his insistence that she act like an autonomous human being. She lifts her legs slightly to remind him of her request. Levi puts down his can of beer and wraps his hands around her shins as Mikasa bends backwards, lifting her arms over her head to retrieve her bag. Her sweatshirt rides up, exposing her smooth, peach-pale flesh. Unconsciously, as he watches the lengthening muscles in her stomach, Levi starts to rub his left thumb against her leg, feeling the softness of her skin and the occasional roughness of stubble.
It is strange, he realizes, to think of her as a real person, as a nineteen-year-old girl who forgot to shave her legs that day. He thinks of her as a cat, seemingly toying with him — by now, she has to have figured out the effect she has on him — until she finally decides to pounce and tear him limb from limb, grinning.
Sometimes he thinks of her as a dog, stupidly loyal and surviving off of the few scraps he can bear to give her. When asked, "If Levi jumped off a bridge, would you do it?" twelve-year-old Mikasa said, "Absolutely." Mikasa loves him with an intense purity, an almost religious zeal, which he finds ludicrous. Not for one moment has he understood her insane, unwavering devotion to him.
"I gotta take this thing off," she mutters after depositing her backpack on her lap, pulling at the sleeves of her sweatshirt.
"I think this might be the first time I've seen you without that hoodie all year," Levi remarks, trying to forget the mental image of the deep red towel wrapped around her wet body.
"Well, knowing that the guy who gave this hoodie to me is never, ever, ever going to sleep with me unless I invent some kind of laser that changes sexual orientation, it feels a lot less meaningful. Plus I'm sweating." Mikasa sits up and pulls off the sweatshirt, then shoves it in her backpack next to the remaining cans of beer. Beneath she wears a thin black tank top.
Levi freezes when he sees so much of her skin, the ridge of her clavicle, the outline of her breasts. His mouth opens before he can stop himself and he blurts, "Are you not wearing a bra?" Mikasa looks up at him, a confused look on her face.
"I live here. I'm not going to wear a bra when I'm just hanging out, watching TV," she explains, a sarcastic edge to her voice. "Are you really that threatened by unfettered boobs?"
Levi says, "No," but he means, "Yes, if they're yours." Mikasa responds by lightly scratching his back in a circular motion through his now-wrinkled oxford shirt. He resists the urge to purr. She knows that's his off switch, the one thing she can always do to get him to calm down. She has done this to keep him from trying to fight Kenny on more than one occasion.
As the animated images on the television screen erupt with unexpected gore, the two of them start yelling in shock and surprise, overlapping swear words flying so quickly that by the time they are spent, they look at each other for a moment, mentally calculating how many drinks they need to take and, simultaneously, decide to chug their respective beers. Foam drips out of the side of Mikasa's mouth, staining her tank top.
"You spilled some," Levi says, pointing at the wet spot on her shirt. When she looks down, he hits the tip of her nose with his finger.
"You dick!" she shrieks, embarrassed that she has fallen for such an easy trick. Her cheeks burn and Levi's breath hitches as he sees the flush spread across her face.
You have to take two drinks now," he teases, reaching for her backpack and handing her another beer.
"That's only if you yell at the television, not at nerds who get dressed up to write papers about a bunch of dead Greek guys."
"Says the girl who's staying in on a Friday night to watch anime."
"At least I'm not working. That makes you a bigger nerd than me."
The bickering, annoying though it is, comforts him. Mikasa cracks open his proffered beer and hands it back to him, then takes one for herself. He accepts the drink with a smile and realizes that he is having fun, and the show he's watching is actually quite entertaining. He shifts a bit, putting one arm around her, his hand on her hip. The episode ends and Levi finds himself not wanting to go back to trying to find new meaning in the words of men who died 2000 years before he was born.
Mikasa seems to sense his reticence. "That episode was only twenty minutes long," she says softly, looking up at him. "You should watch another one."
Levi fights the urge to kiss her forehead. "All right, one more," he says in mock resignation. The show's theme music plays and he finds himself heckling the television, shouting curses at the screen, as the beer starts to go to his head and he gets wrapped up in the show. Mikasa is right there with him, raising her can of beer to her lips until she starts to forget the rudimentary rules of the game.
"You're drunk," Levi says four episodes later.
"You're drunk," Mikasa mocks.
He finishes his can of beer and cannot remember whether it's his fifth or his sixth. "Yeah, I think I am."
"And you actually enjoyed yourself. I saw you resisting a bit at the beginning, but you definitely had fun," Mikasa says.
Levi drops his empty beer can onto Mikasa's stomach. "Drinking games are still dumb."
"You played a drinking game and you had fun! You had fu-un," she taunts him in a singsong voice, ignoring his attempt to annoy her. "Levi had fu-un!"
"I did not. I never have fun!" he counters, grinning lopsidedly.
She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, I bet you'd much rather be writing your thesis."
Levi scowls at her, but the effect is somewhat ruined by the smile that peeks through. "My thesis doesn't nag me like you do."
"You love it," Mikasa insists.
After a few moments of silence, he murmurs, "I do," curling his lips into a small, sad smile. He reaches for the remote and presses play on the next episode in the hopes that Mikasa doesn't ask him to repeat what he just said.
His alcohol-soaked brain realizes far too late that this half-baked plan was never going to work. She looks up at him, her lips parted, her dark eyes luminous. With emotion or with alcohol? he thinks. He legitimately cannot tell. She leans into him a little and kisses his jawline, which is rough beneath her lips. She smiles as she notes that he also forgot to shave today. "I love you, you know," she says, her voice barely audible. "I always have."
Levi shifts beneath her, feeling uncomfortable in his own skin. "Mikasa, I don't think—"
She sits up and looks at him, nearly pressing her nose to his. At this point she is practically sitting in his lap, one arm hooked around his neck. Mikasa can kiss his lips if she wants to. Levi prays she doesn't, because he knows he won't be able to resist and doesn't know if he'll ever be able to recover, especially not with his thesis still hanging over his head.
"Please just let me be drunk and emotional this one time," she begs him. "I'll never do it again, I swear. It's just… I still have three more years of college and you're going to go off and be an adult. I might not see you very much after this and it kills me. I can't let you go without being honest with you. I know you just think of me as this annoying weird kid, and you're mostly right about that, but I'm only weird because I love you so much and I'm constantly trying not to blurt that out. But I already did, so I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore." She looks away from him now. "I'll shut up and we can just watch TV like normal people." She starts to swing her legs down, but he grabs them and holds them tight to his lap.
"No," he breathes, pulling her in closer to him. "You're fine right here." In that moment, he stops caring about what it means to love Mikasa Ackerman. He stops caring about what her father and Kenny will say, about his embarrassment over his crippling lust for her, about how much he resents her for how utterly and totally she has captivated him.
Right now, all that matters is that Mikasa is in his arms, and that she loves him too.
Instead of his usual litany of self-loathing, he has only one thought in his mind: Maybe the reason we fit so perfectly together is because we belong like that.
Suddenly, everything seems very simple, and Levi realizes he has to kiss Mikasa or he may actually die. Slowly, inevitably, as though he is being pulled by a magnet, his mouth descends to meet hers.
Her eyes widen in shock and confusion. "What's happening?" she whispers against his lips.
Levi brushes a strand of hair away from Mikasa's face. "What do you think?"
He kisses her then, and for both of them the world simply falls away. In that moment there is only the two of them, the pressure of cold, beer-wet lips, the caress of their tongues, Mikasa's fingers threading themselves through Levi's hair and tugging gently. One of them whimpers; neither can tell whether it was them or the other. She shifts beneath him, not breaking the connection between their mouths, until she is straddling him, rubbing herself against the thickness of his erection through his dress pants.
His timidity falls away as though he is demolishing a building, hundreds of tons of rubble collapsing into dust. His hands come alive, one sliding down her back to slither beneath the waistband of her shorts so he can cup her ass and press her more firmly to his erect cock, the other palming a breast, his thumb circling her nipple.
Their kiss only breaks when Mikasa loudly moans against his mouth. Levi remembers that they are in the lounge, that anyone can walk in at any moment to see him attempting to undress her.
"Shit," he pants. "That was intense. We should get out of here if anything else, uh, happens."
Mikasa giggles and grinds against him once more, causing his eyes to flutter closed for a moment. "Cursing means you take two drinks." Her voice is dark and husky with desire. Levi has never heard anything sexier.
He reaches around on the couch until his fingers close around his most recently discarded beer can. "Empty," he says, lifting it up. She leans to the side and drags her backpack over, but the only thing inside is her hoodie.
"We're out of beer," she tells him. Mikasa falls silent for a few moments until her lips curl into a wicked smile. "Cursing means you have to kiss me twice."
Levi happily responds with a string of obscenities so filthy they make Mikasa's ears burn, then fixes his lips to hers again.
Thirty-eight hours later, he types the last words of his thesis while sitting at the desk in his room, wearing nothing but a pair of black boxer briefs. As he spell checks the document one final time, he sighs in relief. A moment later, with almost preternatural precision, his mother calls.
"Hey, Mom," he says, unable to keep himself from smiling as he answers the phone.
"How's the thesis going, hon? You sound a lot less stressed."
"I just finished it. Emailing it to my adviser as we speak." He opens an email, types a terse, "Please see attached." in the body, attaches his essay, and clicks "Send."
"That's great! I'm so proud of you, my college graduate."
"Not yet, Mom," he reminds her gently, "I still have a couple of exams."
"You've got it."
"I know."
Levi's mother changes the subject. She knows her son can barely stand to be praised. "Did I tell you Mikasa's dad is getting a motorcycle like Kenny's?"
Levi perks up at the news. Mikasa is going to be furious, he thinks with a smile. "Yeah, when did Kenny get a motorcycle? Mikasa told me about it the other night."
"I thought I told you!" his mother exclaims.
"You most certainly did not," he insists. "I would remember if you told me."
"He got the bike like a month ago. He loves it. You know, he convinced me to go for a ride with him the other day. It was actually pretty nice."
Levi chuckles. He can't wait to see the sight of Kenny tooling around on a Harley. For a brief moment he imagines himself speeding down the highway, Mikasa's arms wrapped tightly around him, and finds himself wondering if Kenny will let him take the motorcycle for a ride as a graduation present.
Suddenly, he understands why Kenny bought it.
His mother's voice snaps him out of his reverie. "How's Mikasa doing? Is she holding up okay through finals?"
Levi spins his desk chair around and looks at Mikasa, who is asleep on his bed, nude. She lays her side with one arm still thrown across the mattress where he slept a few hours earlier. She snores softly, smiling in her sleep. Levi walks over to her and sits on the bed, running one hand over her shoulder and down her arm. Mikasa rouses, blinking her dark eyes slowly, and wraps her fingers around his hand, bringing it to her lips. He smiles down at her.
"She's great, Mom." he says. "She's really great."