Captain Levi sat with his legs crossed. Currently, he was more enthralled with his cup of chamomile rather than the array of manila envelopes before him. Trivial names matched up with empty faces and he aimlessly wandered through the piles, clicking his tongue at his flaw or her weakness. This one had a family and children, which was far too much baggage for what he was looking for. The next one had an amazing survival rate, but lacked synergy. Different names, same dilemmas, repeat that on a grand scale of over a hundred soldiers.

He stared into the porcelain cup, heaving a defeated sigh. Scanning the room he already knew was empty, Levi took his time decompressing when knowing he was truly and utterly alone. His facial features softened, heavy-lidded eyes closing in utter sorrow. Shoulders were trained to always be perpendicular to the floor, no matter what the circumstance, but he relaxed the muscles that kept his spine so erect. He was melting into the chair, reclining in a way that left him feeling weak and undisciplined.

Elbows supporting the weight of his hunched over back, he kept with thumbing through the files on the table before him. A particular photo piqued his interest, if only for a little bit. Charcoal black silk of hair curtained alabaster skin, pink lips pressed in a guarded line, orbs of ink portraying a familiar sense of disdain that was carefully contained with a level head. A red scarf dolled her neck, like a pretty bow on a perfect package. A beautiful face, a face that wasn't designed to be so deadly. She was exotic and threatening and he found it in himself to open her file.

Levi's tea had gone cold at this point, but he didn't seem to notice. Or he did, but he was too wrapped up in the transcript of her data to care. This girl graduated first in her class at the 104th Trainees Squad, she was frequently regarded as the most elite of every mission she was sent on, always coming back with a striking survival rate. Her comrades respected her authority and influence. From what he read, she had no family, no prior commitments, nothing that would hold her back from giving it her all.

He could see the emotional void in the the picture as he looked again. A feminine face was already hardened by the tragedy of war. This girl was nearly ten years his junior, barely rounding out the finer points of puberty, and she was already perfecting herself in the art of slaughter, in the art of survival, in the art of triumph.

"Mikasa Ackerman," He read out loud, surprised at the ease in which it rolled off his tongue. Levi sighed, disposing her file into the pile of names he would thoroughly consider. She was no longer at the forefront of his mind as he meandered through the rest of the files that came after hers.

Minute after minute ticked by. Levi's bones ached and his heart lurched. These files were drowning him. He could feel the pressuring of his ribcage on his vital organs, threatening to implode any minute. Someone would be assigned the job of extracting the shards of bone from the porous mush of his lungs and that pain, he realized, would be drastically tolerable in comparison to the null throbbing in the darkest crevices of his psyche.

There was a certain heaviness he became adept at identifying. It was a sensation of gravity adhering to the pink lining of his esophagus, pulling the tissue downward into the fiery pits of his Anahata. Then that's when he felt a stinging in his sinuses, tears converging at the corners of his sunken eyes. Fingers trained to kill were quaking, his body in near-convulsions as he held in the wretched sobs. His cranial innards were a deliquesce of hemic memories sloshing in the confines of his skull, and he just so desperately wanted to crack open the marrow and devour the soup until he was on the brink of vomiting.

Hooded lids slowly blinked completely shut and Levi couldn't bring himself to bother with the papers. The papers were a grave reminder of what happened, and so were the papers before that, and the papers before that. This situation was all too familiar and he was deepening a justified self-loathing. This wasn't an honor, what he was doing. It was acute selection for deciding who was most qualified for glorified execution.

He could predict the faces of those privileged with the honor of serving Captain Levi in the Special Operations Squad. Countenances would portray the very precious, naïve senses of empowerment and misguided hope. His newest soldiers, however, would always lack mentioning how the positions on his squad opened up.

People died, it was only natural. What wasn't natural was Levi sending his best of the best on missions that would be their ultimate demise. He was a butcher in the slaughterhouse, lining up his finest hogs for a gruesome, tragically unheroic death.

Levi was a vegetarian, suffice to say.

He let his tears fall in shame. He didn't deserve to cry because they were all dead. He was gifted with the means to survive, he managed to make it home for another day, and he was filled only with ideations of puking until he asphyxiated on the slimy guts lodged in his trachea. Levi was deemed The Man Worth a Thousand Soldiers but there was no grandeur he could revel in. He was a sad, sordid little boy that was so good at unintended murder of his friends.

Nevermind the titans. He slayed titans to save humanity, but his sense of humanity was delusional anyway because humans were dead on his accord.

He possessed no strength, no willpower. Levi was a shell of grief. In the confines of his cerebrum, images of those beautiful soldiers churned and simmered. So many comrades he grew to trust, to love. These men and women he was graced with, they were his family. The Special Operations Squad was a precious gift he valued, the lives of his soldiers he valued even more, and he was the sole survivor.

Gunter, Erd, Auro...

They were the men he was never capable of being.

Then there was her.

Levi acknowledged the capabilities of women, never discriminated against sex when choosing his squad, and then he came across Petra.

It wasn't her particular skill that held his attention, it was that tender maternal obligation she possessed that would act as the glue of his squad. Between bandaging wounds and dissolving the tensions built up within the testosterone-heavy squad, he managed to fall in love with her.

Levi always watched with his beady eyes he hated so much, observing the way she was as neat with her meals as he was, picking up on how she was religious and always managed to put faith in a higher being, and he especially loved that she made it a point to take a weekend every other week to visit her sister back in the walls. Petra sang her hymns bashfully, even when she thought no one was around to hear. She knew how to tie Levi's cravat just the way he preferred. Most importantly, she wasn't afraid to push Levi into a corner, forcing him to expose the most private parts of his memories, forcing him to feel, forcing him to be a human for once.

Levi loved her, oh god he loved her so much. She was sure to be his wife when the hellish warfront came to a cease. Her apricot hair would be worn up the way she liked it, her cherubic face behind the wedding veil. He would be watching her walk down the aisle, looking at her cheeks flush the way they always did when eyes were on her. He would take her hand and commit his life to her, he wanted it so bad.

He recalled those tender moments he shared with her in bed. He remembered the smell of soap in her hair, and the suppleness of her skin. He played connect-the-dots with the freckles on her shoulders with kisses, making a point to suck the hollow of her throat and relish in the shivers that quaked her body.

Pleasuring Petra brought him so much joy, watching the furrowing of her brows as he trailed his tongue down the length of her torso. Delicate chest heaving and vocal chords spewing the most innocent of whimpers, he would flick his tongue—

Levi, alone and silently weeping, saturating in the sexual reminiscence of his dead lover, felt an inferno raging in the root of his entire body. Blood was rushing, muscle was tightening, and without even noticing it, the tip of a lone finger was tracing the expanse of rough fabric in between his legs.

Wetness streaked his hot cheeks, tears evaporating on the surface of his boiling skin. He was pale, Petra always teased him for that, but he was sure there was a flush of pink spreading over his face like a wildfire. He hadn't touched himself since he was a young adolescent experimenting behind a locked bedroom door, and Levi was beyond mortified for starting up the habit again.

Roughly palming the growing bulge, Levi narrowed his eyes until they were shut, losing himself in the abyss of darkness behind closed lids. He had to free himself of this pain, not just the grief in his heart, but the disgusting sexual frustration that soaked his body in an agonizing mix of lust and contempt. Petra was a parasite in his mind, her imaginary hands roaming his heated skin, shedding him from the uniform he was less and less valiant to dress in with each passing morning. Invisible lips connected to his neck, a ghostly sensation caressing the length of his dick.

Levi couldn't. He let out a low groan of affliction, letting the tears fall as he pumped the shaft. His thumb mimicked Petra's as he teased his own slit as the precum leaked out. He was doing what she would never be able to do again, and that angelic face was burning in his cortex and he wanted to drive his skull into a wall and beat himself until he could feel the stickiness of blood and the tingling of an oncoming blackout. Levi was in so much pain, but he continued to let his hand mimic the pressure of the pussy he would never be able to ravish ever again. He was an animal, incapable of controlling his actions. He was so ashamed because he took pride in his self-control, but here he was, touching himself like a disgusting pervert. Levi couldn't even mourn without whipping it out.

But it felt so good because the friction of his hand rubbing his cock fed into the flames that were roaring in his stomach. Eyes roaming the room, he caught sight of a certain photograph on the corner of his desk, pinned to a manila folder he had just got done reviewing.

Golden hair turned into strands of onyx. Levi felt something wedge in the narrow opening of his throat. Brightly hazel eyes dimmed into a cloudy gray. A petite body elongated into lithe protraction of limber muscle. He felt sick, in the most wanton of ways.

The capacity of his lungs couldn't handle the panting Levi was forcing out. The sound waves of his breath echoed within the stone walls of his room. Grunts of desperate reparations overwhelmed the silence and he could not endure the disgusting noises of his vocalized pleasure.

In the retaining images flooding his head, this mysteriously gorgeous girl was naked. Skin was not golden like he was accustomed to, but instead a milky ivory that he just needed to snake his hands over. She was not shivering the way Petra did. Petra was emotional, wearing it all on her sleeve. Levi knew what she liked, knew when she liked, and he did exactly that. But this girl in his head, she was not one to go down without a fight.

Imagination deluged his senses and Levi swore to the almighty heavens that he could feel this girl in his bones. She was the sight comparable to the handicrafts of the gods, uniquely created with such an oriental fairness that was Levi drunk with stupor. He could practically smell her scent, the soothing essence of lavender. He wasn't exactly certain of it being lavender, but he took it for what it was worth. The taste of her tangy sweet skin was on the tip of his tongue, gliding effortlessly over the taut profusion of her stomach.

In his unholy mind, he relished the thought of dipping below the hipbones of a young Mikasa Ackerman. She would taste sweet, with a hint of bitterness that only appealed to Levi even more. Lapping her clit like an animal dying of thirst, he would feel the virginal tightness around the joints of a single finger. She would try her hardest to contain a moan because Captain Levi, the Captain Levi celebrated by the masses, would be finger-fucking her wet pussy, lips puckering around her clit with moderate passion. But he saw that stagnant gaze in her photo, one that he thought he was the only one of producing.

He saw so much of himself in this girl that it angered him that the universe decided two of a Captain Levi would suffice. He could barely tolerate his own existence, but here was a girl whose statistics rivaled his own, emotional detachment prevalent in her facade that Levi related to so horrifically well. If she was anything like him, then she saw a hell completely separate from the battle field.

Levi felt it in the pit of his own heart, he felt so surely that this girl was not going to let an angry, perverted man a decade older than her see her come. If she was anything like he anticipated, she would not expose her vulnerability to someone as worthless as him. And that thought turned him on so much that he could feel it careen his insides. He would make her come, he would prove his worth at something. He was utterly worthless in the aspect of leadership, but he'd be damned if he couldn't pleasure Mikasa Ackerman, imaginary or not.

He would force her to come all over his mouth, make her scream his name until it was the only word she knew. And he would keep going because he knew there would be sensory overload throughout her virgin body, and he would torture her in a way that she didn't even fully understand.

Hand still fondling the thickness of his cock, he indulged in the thoughts of all things not Petra.

The iteration of her name made his teeth grit, the bones of his skull threatening to crack under the pressure of his jaw. He was failing the woman he loved, lecherous to the very core.

"I—I am so sorry," He choked on his own words, suffocating on the worthless apology he spewed out to no one. In his mind, his dick was deep within Mikasa Ackerman and Petra Ral had no value to him, because it just hurt so fucking much if she did. He had to demean her to nothing, because he was a selfish piece of shit that would go to any measure to stop the pain that was wrecking his body from the inside out.

"M—Mika—" Levi couldn't say her name. He wouldn't. It was one thing to think about a girl, and it was another to have her name cascading from his trembling lips. His heart was bleeding, leaking out of every crack in his demeanor.

It hurt so bad but it felt so good.

Petra was dead, a thing of the past.

Her memory was useless to him.

He needed something real, something more.

"Mi—Mikasa!" He panted, a voice so small that he could barely hear it for himself. "Oh god you feel so fucking good, your virgin pussy," Heaving breaths of shame and lust, he clamped his hideously narrow eyes shut. "Let me love you, Mikasa. Let me fuck you. God, you are so perfect. I—I—Oh, Mikasa, I'm gonna—"

And he came, ribbons of white coating his usually pristine hands. The heat of his cum seared his hand and he was reduced to nothing more than a limp dick and wretched sobs.


The heart will break, but broken live on.

Lord Byron