RivaMika Week Day 4: Tired

Title: burning up
Rating: M (drug abuse)
Fandom: Shingeki no Kyojin, Attack on Titan
Characters: Levi, Mikasa Ackerman, RivaMika
Summary: If she touches him, his jagged, broken edges will shred her. Why does she still bother?
Notes: My Levi headcanons are showinggggg. This was hard to write, but it came out a lot better than expected... and by that I mean I'm actually super proud of this!

Mikasa curls up on the chair, keeping watch over the captain as he slumps over the huge monster of a desk that he uses.

"Permission to speak, sir?"

"Denied." He doesn't even move, and the words are muffled, as if he were too exhausted to even open his lips.

She remains quiet or a further two minutes.

"Sir, with all due respect…"

"Private, with no due respect, shut the fuck up." The words are spoken flatly, with none of his usual venom.

She pulls her knees closer to her chest and curls her feet further into the hard chair. Hanji had asked to her to watch the captain. If it were anyone else, she would have given up long ago and left Levi to stew in his own wretched misery.

"Squad Leader, would it not be better to let him grieve on his own?" she had questioned.

Hanji had looked at her with something that bordered on sympathy, but was somehow less patronising. "If it were anyone else… but not Levi. If we leave him alone for too long he'll have the hair shirt on before we know it." She had sighed and pushed her fringe away from her wan face. "I would do it myself, but…" Hanji had to grieve herself; she had lost many in this expedition too. The members of the Special Operations Squad were her friends as well, not just Levi's. "Mikasa, I trust you. Please?"

She remembered, back when she first came to live with the Jaegers, how Karla had stayed with her whenever it got bad, when it hit her sometimes that Kaachan and Papa were really properly gone, and that they would never ever ever come back. She usually tried to keep it to herself, but somehow Karla always noticed and made sure to stay with her. Even if all Eren's mother was doing was darning some item of clothing that her rambunctious son had unsurprisingly managed to tear, and even if she was on the other side of the room, it reassured her that there was someone there who would protect her. Soon after that, she began to call her Mama, but Doctor Jaeger remained Doctor Jaeger.

She had nodded, and Hanji had given her a weary smile. "It'll only be for a short while. I suspect we'll be summoned to HQ before long… from what Erwin said, we'll have much more to worry about then." The Squad Leader's face momentarily takes on an ominous cast before she claps Mikasa cheerlessly on the back and exits.

So Mikasa does her job, guards Levi, and shuts up.

The captain isn't great to look at right now. He looks a spectral, desiccated imitation of his usual self, the self that indulged regularly in fart jokes and managed to append the word 'fuck' onto most of sentences some way or another. His skin is haggard, and he clings onto the edge of his desk as if it were the only thing connecting him to life. His eyes are almost closed, and his hair is lank and greasy, which alarms her a lot more than anything else could. Grimy smudges of black mar his face and his uniform, but he doesn't seem to care.

This Levi is yet another Levi to add to her mental collection.

There is the man who brutalised her brother, stomped on him until blood bubbled past his lips, his face unfeeling as her brother's bones cracked underneath his boots.

(There is always an undercurrent of this Levi, a vein of hatred running through her, even if she knows why it had to be done; it still makes her see red.)

There is the no-nonsense commando who subjects his soldiers to punishing drills, who spews language as dirty as his blades are clean, who grapples and pushes and yells and kills with uncanny accuracy, the soldier who is the complete opposite of what his stupid cravat indicates.

(The raw, visceral man who smirks at her during training and leers at her abdomen and legs too, he's mixed in with that one, the one she dreams about at night who keeps her up with hot flushes and cold sweats.)

There is the father to his men, the guy who sits down the end of his table with a mug of coffee and watches his inferiors with this strange warmth in his eyes, the man who sneaks his horse tidbits and gives praise so sparingly yet so glowingly, it inflates your head for two days.

Finally, there is this broken creature; a listless hull, a sleepless shell who stares out from behind lifeless eyes and just looks.

She unfolds herself from the chair and pads over to the desk, and crouches down in front of it to put herself on eye level with Levi.

"Fuck off, Ackerman," he says without preamble.

"No, sir."

"Well, don't fucking squat there like you're taking a shit! Get a chair!"

"Captain, if you're going to make yourself uncomfortable, I shall too." She fixes him with a steely gaze. He acquiesces without comment, and Mikasa kneels down in front of the desk. She can barely see the top of Levi's head, but being able to hear him breathe puts her at ease.

She loses track of time, watching his back rise and fall with hushed breaths, but before long the room is dark. Neither of them makes any move to break the darkness, or, indeed, the silence.

Until Levi does.

"Why aren't you with Jaeger?" The words are ragged and said in a stilted fashion, as if his voice wasn't quite willing to perform.

"He's in the ward right now, and I wasn't helping him by hovering over him. Armin is with him now." She had spent the entire ride home lying down beside him in the cart, feeling every bump in the track and observing every flutter of Eren's chest, but her brother didn't need her right now. It hurt to say it, but it was true.

"You aren't helping me by staying here either." These words hurt too, but if her face shows that, Levi doesn't see it.

"I am not going to leave you until you go to sleep."

"Silly little girl… that would be worse, wouldn't it?" There's a galling sort of laughter in his voice as he speaks that makes her clench her hands into fists as she retorts.

"Sir, I-"

"I'll have nightmares," he confides to her, as he slowly sits back up. His head tips back as his spine straightens, and his gaze pierces the ceiling. His neck seems unnaturally long, and at this point Mikasa doesn't know whether she wants to wraps her hands around it and kill him, or kiss up his smooth white neck and fuck him. "I'll dream about puppet Gunther on a string and crumbled, shattered, smashed Erd… I'll see Petra, lovely in the white pallor of death; I'll see Auruo, the stupid moron, killed by his bravado." The poisonous words break out of him in gushes, voice lilting with twisted inflections. "I'm so tired, little girl, but I'm too terrified of sleep to sleep." His lips twist up in a hollow smile, but his eyes are warm with fervour.

Mikasa tries to speak, but no words are forthcoming.

"What?" His head snaps down and his eyes bore into her, making her shoulders push back and her chin jut up. "You think I'm insane? Let me tell you something… everyone here is insane. You just haven't noticed it yet." With that he collapses back onto the desk, but his eyes remain trained on her. His gaze is tormenting, and Mikasa has to struggle to keep her face even, but she can't hold back a shiver; Levi looks so hopeless, so hateful, and he's concentrating all that emotion solely on her.

But he notices her discomfort and his eyes soften imperceptibly, the strange zeal in his eyes fading. "I'm scaring you, aren't I?" He cradles his face in his large hands. "Mikasa, I'm… I'm very sorry." He seems to be on the brink of saying something else, but he swallows back the words.

Mikasa's body is screaming at her to run; flipping between such intense emotions isn't normal, and his apology only puts here more on edge. The way he's exposing his vulnerabilities to her is eerily riveting, but it appalls her as well. She stands up suddenly, but Levi takes no heed; he's rummaging in a drawer of his desk, hissing inaudibly beneath his breath. He yanks out an unlabeled bottle and begins to fumble with the cork, breathing becoming irregular, and she steps closer and reaches out her hand but retracts it immediately. Finally Levi gets the cork out, spilling some of the liquid onto the desk. With shaking hands he begins to raise the bottle to his lips, but-

Mikasa recognises the smell.

Her papa used to get horrible pains when she was small, but he rarely, if ever, asked Doctor Jaeger to treat him. Snatches of a half-remembered argument come back to her, of her kaachan begging him to get Doctor Jaeger to treat him and her papa stubbornly refusing.

"I don't want to get addicted to that stuff!" he'd say, voice full of loathing. But he must have submitted to Kaachan's demands sometimes, because she remembers him drinking the medicine. It smelled bitter, the alcohol mixed in with it doing nothing to deaden the noxious smell.

"What is it, Papa?" she'd ask, face turned up to him like a sunflower seeking the sun.

"Medicine," he'd reply, eyes half-lidded. "Laudanum."

"Can I have some?"

"No, sweetheart. This medicine is very bad for little girls… but I guess it's bad for big dads too."

She quietened for a few seconds, and then proclaimed "I hope you get better soon!" with a bow, just like her kaachan taught her. He chuckled sleepily and ruffled her hair, but then Kaachan asked her to help her to clean up, and she had to leave him to sleep.

Tincture of opium, she realises, as she plucks the bottle from his grip just as the first drop of the narcotic touches Levi's lips. She holds it up into the air far out of his grasp. "No, Captain!" She dodges backwards quickly as he grabs weakly at her.

"God fucking damn it - give it to me!" His voice cracks pathetically, and she realises with dawning dread that he's actually crying, tears forming in his eyes. "I want to sleep! I want to sleep and not have nightmares!" he cries incoherently, hands slamming against the desk and causing various papers to slide off.

"Sir, please, I don't want you to-"

He jumps onto his feet unsteadily and limps towards her. She tries to escape, but something about the desperation evident in every movement of his body and every twist of his face weighs her down with guilt, and soon he has her pinned to the wall. She keeps the bottle high above her head and out of his grasp, but Levi squeezes her arm painfully and forces the muscles of her arm to contract. Her hand drops and he snatches at the bottle, but just in time she hurls it away from her with all her vast strength, and the bottle of laudanum shatters against the wall.

The room is filled with the scent of astringent opium and saccharine alcohol, and Levi collapses, sliding to his knees at her feet, hands trailing down her legs. She tries to apologize, but it gets stuck in her throat, and all that comes out is a quiet keening noise. Instead she stays completely still, as does the man crumpled at her feet.

"Clean that up, Ackerman," he finally rasps, and her heart contracts viciously.

"Tomorrow, sir," she assures him, trying and failing to keep her voice neutral. "Now, you have to go to bed."

He obeys her without complaint, letting her pull him to his feet like a child. His body shifts against hers and she bites her lip as she manoeuvres him until he is arranged comfortably, leaning on her shoulder.

Together, they leave his office. Luckily, his bedroom is only a short distance away, so their awkward duo of injured, insensible Levi and too-tall Mikasa only has to struggle on for about four minutes before they arrive at their destination.

They stumble into the room, both trying to squish through the door simultaneously. Levi almost topples over but Mikasa steadies him, and drags him to his bed.

She stays there while he looks at her weirdly. "Get out," he slurs. "I need to change."

"I'm not leaving you alone, sir." Her boldness surprises her, but she does not blush.

He regards her suspiciously and sighs, flapping a hand at her. "Cover your eyes, then." His voice is thick from tiredness and hoarse from misuse, but Mikasa can't say it makes for an unattractive combination. She complies with his orders and turns around dutifully, observing the shapes Levi's stripping shadow makes and trying to ignore the sounds of fabric sliding over flesh and leather belts slowly unclasping.

When she turns around, he is seated on the bed clad only in his underclothes and is rubbing his hand against the back of his neck, fingers grazing over the black stubble there. The waxiness of his skin has subsided slightly, but his face sill looks alarmingly hollow. He clears his throat and his eyes settle on her neck. "I assume if you aren't going to leave me…" He trails off lamely, words hanging off in an ambiguous implication.

"I want to watch over you," she says guardedly, not letting any hint of timidity show through in her voice.

His gaze flickers away from her as he settles himself into bed. "Do whatever you want, then," he commands. She pulls up a chair and intends to sit at the bottom of his bed, but on impulse pulls it up beside him.

"What? Ackerman-"

"I was told to stay with you." she states in a tone that reeks of finality.

He grouses to himself, but he closes his eyes anyway and a few minutes later, when she thinks he is asleep, he speaks again.

"Thank you, Ackerman." She can't see his face, only the broad expanse of his back, and she wonders if he's smiling.

"My pleasure, captain," she replies, words slightly muffled by the sheets as she rests her head on the empty space beside him. "Sweet dreams."

He lets out a little 'tch!' and doesn't say another thing for the entire night.

Sleep claims both of them easily. Mikasa does not dream.

When Hanji enters the captain's quarters the next morning to tell him of the summons to Wall Sina, she finds Levi and Mikasa fast asleep, arms entangled on the sheets. Their noses are separated by a hand's width.

She decides to let them be. The bad news will keep for another hour.