Juxtaposition

A lone candle flickered in a room devoid of much else besides a long wooden table surrounded by sturdy chairs, all neatly tucked in save the one being occupied. A cooling cup of tea on a saucer rested nearby, untouched.

Levi was sitting with his elbows propped up on the table, staring blankly into the night sky which was visible through the moderately sized windows across the room. As pre-occupied with his thoughts as he seemed to be, his eyes still darted to the side immediately when he noticed a shadow flicker past the door leading to the corridor. The person outside of the room hesitantly pushed the door open a little wider, clearly intending to avoid spooking him, but he knew that wraith-like figure well enough by now to remain wholly undisturbed.

"You're still up." He wordlessly motioned to the chair beside him, which she pulled out and quietly took a seat. He studied the girl beside him. She was dressed in her uniform still, minus the outer blazer and gear. He noticed that she was missing the bright red scarf which had become something of her trademark. Her eyes were on him, and they were less flat than usual. If he knew her, which he was only really beginning to, he would have suggested that she was agitated about something.

"Captain…"

"If you're here to ask or threaten me about tomorrow's operation-"

There was really only so much about protecting Eren he could stand to hear her harping about. Although to be fair, she had been much better at keeping her rabid obsession in check lately; but on the eve of a battle Levi supposed it had to rear its ugly head again. In anticipation of the wrong subject, her next words surprised him.

"I wanted to talk about us, actually."

He raised a brow, but his expression remained neutral.

"Oh?"

Was the girl finally noticing how well they worked together? It would be a nice change from her usual dreariness. The past few days had been hellish to say the least, but he was still impressed with how well she had kept up under his orders. Regardless, it was hardly something worth verbalizing in the middle of the night. He ignored the slight warmth he felt and waited for her to continue with a purposely bland expression.

"I wanted to continue our conversation from before… about the Ackerman name. I'd heard that you spoke with Kenny before he died."

Oh. Hearing that name was like being doused with cold water. It was still a sensitive subject to him. It had bothered him more than he had expected, to find the man who had once been the closest thing he'd had to a father lying beneath a tree at death's door. Kenny had looked pitiful, half-burnt to death and seeping blood.

"Tch."

What was more, he had reverted to his child-self by finally blurting out all of the questions that he had been asking himself for years while he was alone in that hell. Levi told himself that it was necessary. It was closure for another chapter of his life. "My mother was Kushel Ackerman. Her brother was Kenny. He left me all those years ago because I was ready to be left alone…"

Mikasa was still talking.

"And you told me yourself that you had a moment like mine."

"….Yes."

She looked as though she wanted to ask more, but she didn't and he was grateful for her natural reserve. She was unusually chatty tonight, for her anyway. He considered humouring her unspoken questions just because she was Mikasa and conversations like this between the two of them were rare, but she began to speak again.

"Do you think we are related?"

Yes. Maybe. It was definitely a possibility now. He heard a girl's voice from the distant past, exuberantly calling to him. It made his gut twist, even now.

"Woooo! Big bro!"

Not that he could imagine Mikasa ever calling him anything other than 'Captain'. Maybe one day he could get her to call him just Levi. The idea interested him, oddly enough. He found himself wondering how closely they were related, before he squashed that train of thought. It didn't matter to him, because they might all be dead tomorrow anyway. He decided to be blunt with his response.

"I honestly have no idea. Does it matter?"

"Eren," there was a slight pause, "and Armin are my family, too." He didn't miss the pause, the catch on her thoughts before she'd tacked on Armin's name. Did she even notice that she placed Eren and Armin in separate categories mentally?

"Mikasa," he uttered in a sharper tone than intended due to the reverberation of a past conversation echoing itself in his mind. "If you've been wandering around at night just to let me know I rank below those shitty brats, I will seriously consider punishing you for wasting my time."

"I don't know why you're so attached to Eren…" He'd said those very words to her after the 57th expedition. Eren had looked between Levi and Mikasa, confused by the underlying tension in that moment. Levi himself had been more interested in the dark glower that lit her face afterward as she promised that there would be no more mistakes.

Wherever she had intended to take this conversation, it seemed that Levi had managed to derail it completely. He wasn't entirely sure what to make of this apparently organic conversation that had a mind of its own, possibly fueled by the sort of things they'd never bothered discussing with each other before.

"I didn't mean that I would reject you!" It sounded almost passionate, coming from someone as apathetic as her. She paid it no mind. Levi was certain she hadn't even realized how ambiguous her statement was, and her face was as serious and earnest as it always was whenever Eren was the subject that he couldn't imagine she meant anything else anyway. "He saved me. The moment, the one that was like waking from a dream… It was all because of Eren."

"The murder that you and Eren supposedly committed when you were nine… The one they mentioned in the court house that day." It had been easy enough to piece together on his own, given what little information he had heard. He found it morbid that the two would be tied together by such an event, but he supposed extenuating circumstances got the best of better people. He and his own friends had been bonded together by the misery of the Underground, and by their "adventures" which would more properly be labelled surviving. She made a low humming noise in her throat in agreement.

"I watched them kill my father, and then my mother. I couldn't do anything because I was weak." He felt real empathy for her as she delivered those lines without so much as a flinch, although the darkness creeped into her voice near the end. Either the wound had mostly scarred over, or she handled the idea of being weak well enough to let it motivate her rather than cow her.

"Mikasa… was it like this for you too?" The conversation he'd overheard while Sasha was patching him up in the barn had interested him greatly, especially because he assumed that her silence implied that the answer to Armin's question had been "no". There was a ruthlessness, a deliberateness without particular malice in Mikasa's combat skills against humans. Unlike the rest of his new squad, Levi felt that she had immediately sensed the gravity of the situation and locked away her feelings. She certainly had not hesitated.

He was genuinely curious to hear the rest of her narrative now, but the odd piece of the story was Eren. Eren had a spirit that was self-righteous and frankly, sometimes obnoxious. And yet, the boy had moments where he showed real heart. What he lacked was the prodigious skill that Mikasa possessed. He genuinely struggled to imagine Eren saving Mikassa.

"And what? Eren came in and saved the day right before they murdered you too?" He prompted curiously, but the statement came out cynically. He was still having trouble picturing it, but the kid could be vicious when he wanted to, Levi supposed. It certainly sounded like the correct trajectory of Mikasa's story.

"No. Killing me… Killing my mother… That was never the intention."

This was interesting. She had revealed that her father's Ackerman family had been persecuted that night in the cart with the rest of the squad. He recalled his last conversation with Kenny "…it's the reason we Ackermans opposed him…". Perhaps she knew more than she had let on, and he was finally going to learn more about what Kenny had been going on about before he died.

"How fishy that they only wanted your father dead… Maybe it wasn't a random accident," he mused aloud and was rewarded when her mouth twisted into a grimace.

"No, you're right. It wasn't an accident. It was targeted. They knew who we were and where we lived. But not because of our surname." She was quick on the uptake, as always. It was like they were almost always on the same page nowadays. Levi narrowed his eyes, waiting for her to finish. Tonight's conversation was nothing like how he thought it'd end up going. Mikasa was sure to have a punch line ready.

"They killed my mother because she fought them. What those smugglers really wanted… was to sell us to some brothel in the Underground. Asian flesh- people are willing to pay a lot for it, apparently." Her eyes were cold, and her soft mouth set itself into a deep scowl.

Well. That wasn't what he was expecting to hear.

He froze, startled. His heart beat an arrhythmic stuttering staccato. For the first time, he really looked at her fine, straight black hair, the dark eyes rimmed with heavy lashes and ever so slightly tilted. Pale skin. She had always been pretty- the other men in the squad had noticed it enough for him. Delicate looking if you looked only at her face and not her lithe, well-muscled figure, but that face had a dark, lethal look to it that always impressed him as being so much like his own countenance that all understanding of its prettiness was buried somewhere deep. Plus, she was always glowering or glooming when she looked at him.

"Eren found where they were hiding, and he killed two of them, but he got hurt in the process. He could have died… But he turned to me and told me to fight and to live." She continued, but Levi barely heard her. She said something about nature and butterflies and shit like that too, but he was too busy looking to comprehend whatever metaphor she'd come up with.

She must have finished speaking, because she was looking at him expectantly. Finally, she must have realized that her story had done something to him. She was staring straight into his eyes now, but he was already seeing her and seeing through her. Her hair suddenly seemed so much longer, the eyes became heavy-lidded, lips painted. Her features began to morph before his eyes into something more like his own and his breath was caught as his mind super-imposed a nearly forgotten image over his subordinate.

"Levi… My precious Levi."

Instead of seeing her sailing gracefully through the air, ripping through Titan flesh in a flash of silver blades, he pictured naked flesh and thin, delicate arms wrapped around some unknown man. The scene flickered. A dark room. A starving, filthy child with eyes like a wounded animal. Back to the woman. Something twisted deep in his gut when the woman turned her face to look at him and it was entirely Mikasa's face staring into him with dead eyes.

"The world must be full of sick jokes. It might just be one never-ending, sick joke after all." He murmured more to himself than to her. Her face betrayed her confusion, but Levi thought it was too funny that he got his punch line after all.

"Captain?" Tentatively, she reached a hand forward to touch his arm.

"Mikasa..."

What came next was instinctual.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, tugging her forcefully toward him so that her head was resting on his chest, tucked snugly under his chin. She shifted slightly, feeling awkward with herself in such a comfortably uncomfortable position. A light flush bloomed across her face, but she stilled when he tightened his hold on her. She could feel his heart pulsating beneath her cheek.

"!"

She was so very warm, and so very alive. His memory flashed with images of Mikasa standing tall and proud, eyes full of cold, furious fire. The memories of his mother- beautiful, sorrowful, sick, and dying- faded back into the deep recesses of his mind.

"I am glad to have you on my team." His statement was met with silence, but he felt her lips curl into a small smile against his chest. She gradually relaxed in his hold, and they stayed like that for what felt like an eternity before she responded in a shy whisper.

"I don't quite understand yet, but thank you… Captain."