These characters are under copyright by Hajime Isayama and/or Kodansha Comics or others. This is a work of fanfiction, for no monetary gain.
Chapter 10 – A Strange Kind of Hell
Levi inhaled deeply, completely relaxed and at peace, for one of the first times in his life. Something smelled amazing, like flowers and herbs and something else he couldn't place. Was he in a flower shop or a kitchen? No. He was lying down, he was naked and he felt wonderfully clean and surprisingly well rested and…wait. Something was seriously wrong.
Reality crashed down like a Titan, shattering the feeling of peace. He wasn't clean. He was filthy, bloody, wounded. Dehydrated, appallingly weak, and exhausted. Only he wasn't. His memory clashed stridently with his senses. What the hell is going on?
He opened his eyes to an unfamiliar log ceiling. Where the hell am I?
"You're awake!" a familiar cherubic blond-haired blue-eyed boy gushed, with what looked to be a wet sponge in his hand. "Just in time for your bath!"
Oh crap. He was dead, he was in hell, and Armin Arlert was there. It figured. He could think of another blond he wouldn't mind in the slightest giving him a sponge bath, but it certainly wasn't Arlert.
Although this didn't really seem like hell. So he was probably still feverish and delirious. Had he ever even made it out of that damned spiked pit? He wasn't sure.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," a somewhat familiar voice said. It sounded like Mikasa Ackerman, except her tone was gentle, almost teasing, so it must have been someone else. He turned his head and stared in shock. It was indeed Ackerman, but a slight smile softened her face, maybe more a smirk, but still, she had never looked at him with anything other than a scowl before. He was definitely dead or delirious.
"I'll go tell Eren you're awake. He's on Titan watch," Ackerman said, and suddenly the world snapped back into focus and he knew it was real, in spite of the scent of jasmine and lavender, his clean, naked skin on a soft bed between odd smelling but nicely fragranced sheets and…heart hammering he lifted the sheet. Two legs, still. He hadn't felt his wound and had thought for a terrifying moment his leg might truly be gone, that they'd sawed it off while he slept. He could easily picture Ackerman with a bloody saw in one hand, his leg in the other, and a look of manic glee on her face.
He must have looked at her retreating back suspiciously, because Arlert immediately began praising her. "Mikasa's been nursing you back to health. Well, I've been helping, but mostly giving you baths, to help bring your fever down. She's the one who's been making the poultices and bandaging you and brewing the tea and you were really cooperative the first few times you drank it but then you spit it up all over her, saying something about her poisoning you, and she got kind of mad until she realized you weren't really awake."
Honestly, how could he do that? Arlert hadn't paused for a single breath. Just listening to him was beginning to exhaust him. "I guess you must have found me then?" Levi ventured.
"Don't you remember? Eren found you. He actually smelled you."
Levi grimaced, vividly remembering how horrid he'd smelled.
"Oh! I mean, you know, scented you, and found you that way," Arlert explained, as if what he was saying made sense, as if Eren was that hulking mutant Zacharius. "In Titan form," Arlert added, apparently seeing the bewilderment on his face.
Ah. That actually did make sense, then. "I see. And is there a reason I am here, wherever here is, and not in the hospital, in the City? Not that I mind all that much. I hate hospitals. I love the smell of disinfectant, but knowing how many germs are there…." He shuddered, just thinking about it.
"You're awake!" Eren said eagerly, running into the room and rushing to the bed.
"Obviously. Or at least, so I've been told. Although this feels a bit surreal," Levi admitted. "Where are we?"
"Mikasa's old house, from before she was orphaned," Eren said.
Levi looked at him sharply.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring you here. I have no idea why my Titan form thought of this as home, in spite of what Mikasa said about it. But Mikasa said it was lucky that I did, so we could treat your injury right away. You were in pretty bad shape, when we found you."
"I know. I remember. I suppose I should thank all of you."
Arlert gave him a challenging look, one that was more like what he would have expected from Ackerman. "Yes, you should. Are you going to?"
Levi was surprised and a little bit impressed. He hadn't expected that kind of fire from Arlert. "Thank you Arlert. And thank you Eren. I will thank Ackerman personally, too, when she comes back inside and one of you is on watch instead."
"They did the most. Eren carried all of us the whole way, and Mikasa made the medicine and tea," Arlert explained.
"You did most of the sponge baths," Eren said, and Levi winced and hid a shudder at the reminder. Arlert was definitely not his type. And "most" implied that Eren or Ackerman had bathed him as well, which was just as unappealing.
Arlert added, "It's been almost two whole days since we brought you here. We're really glad you're completely awake, now. You need to eat something, to help get your strength back. Mikasa was able to catch some rabbits, and there are vegetables from the garden, and mushrooms, nuts and berries from the woods. She's been teaching us about what's safe to gather and eat."
Previously, Levi would have been concerned that there were apparently poisonous plants in the area, and Ackerman was the knowledgeable one of the three of them as to which they were. But instead of trying to kill him, for some reason, Ackerman had apparently been nursing him back to health. Wait. Two days?
"Two days? And you haven't had any way to signal to the Corps and let them know you're OK, have you? I mean, I'd expect to see one of the medics or even Hange or someone else with more official medical training here if you did. No offense meant to Ackerman. She apparently has talents we didn't know about." Levi was even more impressed than before. "I'm a little vague on the details of what happened before the pit I climbed out of," Levi admitted reluctantly. He actually couldn't remember a damned thing, but he wasn't about to admit it.
"So that's what happened to your leg. It was a spike from inside one of the pits! We were wondering how you got wounded like that. We thought maybe someone hit you with a sword, by mistake, while fighting. Well Armin thought that. I was afraid someone tried to kill you. What do you remember about our mission, and the ambush?" Eren asked.
"Kill me? Who, a Scout? Why? And an ambush? So we were we on a mission to seize new specimens for Hange to experiment on?" Levi hazarded.
He was surprised by the grim look on Eren's face. "No. We were on a mission to try to get to my old house, to get into the basement. But the Titans ambushed us. They launched a coordinated assault, from all four sides of the formation. We were completely surrounded. They were herding us, like we were damned goats. We would have been massacred even worse, if you didn't signal for everyone to head to the right flank, where you and your Squad were located. We thought that maybe whoever set us up tried to kill you for messing up their plans, that they used the cover of the battle to attack you and take you down. Do you remember now?"
"What do you mean massacred worse? What happened?" Levi swung his legs over the edge of the bed and shot to his feet without thinking, then gasped and fell back onto the bed as a knife of fire shot through his right leg. Shit that hurt!
"Hey, careful! You don't want to tear your stitches. Mikasa was finally able to sew your wound, once the infection subsided," Eren cautioned.
"Never mind my damned leg. What the hell happened to my Squad, to the Corps?" And why the hell couldn't he remember any of it?
Eren took a deep breath and exhaled heavily. "It might have been a little better, once we left. Stragglers were still coming into the forest. Our forces had pretty much scattered all across the right flank, from the left, forward and rear. But it was pretty bad this time."
Arlert added, "I heard Squad Leader Miller tell Berner that if it hadn't been for you, Captain, and for Eren, and those pits, we probably would have been wiped out. They attacked from all four fronts simultaneously, and there were dozens and dozens of them, maybe a hundred or more, altogether."
A hundred Titans? Holy shit. How the hell could any of us have survived that? "How many dead?" Levi asked, dreading the answer.
"Sixty-six percent casualties, dead, missing, or seriously injured, 99 of our 150 men. But like I said, some of the missing might have turned up after we left. Fourteen percent walking wounded and twenty percent uninjured. And we lost a lot of the horses and most of the wagons this time, too," Eren said grimly.
Even with all his dark thoughts and doubts earlier, after hearing the cold, hard numbers, suddenly waking to find himself alone in that hole and finding those seven bodies was a lot more terrifying. "My Squad?' he asked, sitting stiffly, bracing himself for what he was afraid he'd hear.
"I'm sorry. Yannis Gianapolis was confirmed dead, and Heinrich Bauer and Hans Morgan are both MIA, for now presumed KIA," Eren confessed.
A memory of screaming filled Levi's ears as a sudden image flashed across his mind: Morgan dying as he and Gianapolis watched, and then Gianapolis bitten in half a moment later. Levi felt the blood drain from his face and swallowed hard. "I…that I remember. Morgan is dead too. I…I'm not sure about Bauer. I don't know. Or don't remember. What about Commander Erwin and the other senior officers?"
Arlert looked at Eren and bit his lip.
No. No, they meant the other officers. Not Erwin. Erwin was his last surviving oldest friend, he was... Erwin couldn't be dead. He was indestructible he… don't be dead, don't be dead, don't be dead.
"Commander Erwin…" Arlert said, hesitating and Levi fell back on the bed, like a marionette whose strings had been cut, hyperventilating, a buzzing sound filling his ears.
"He's not dead!" Arlert cried, almost in a panic. "I mean, we don't think he is. He was still unconscious when we left but Hange said she was pretty sure it was a mild concussion and that he'd probably be fine, and I don't think she was just telling everyone that because Zacharius was unconscious too and Miller was the only other senior officer left, except for Hange," Arlert scrambled to explain. "I mean, except for you, of course, but everyone else was convinced you were dead too."
Alive. Still alive "What were the Commander's other injuries?" Levi asked, dreading the answer. Had he lost an arm or a leg? Or multiple limbs? He could barely breathe, picturing it.
Arlert said, "I'm not sure. I don't think there were any, except for bruises, although one or both of his arms might have been broken. He got hit by a Titan. Not bitten or squeezed, just smacked. Hange saw him get hit, and so did Mikasa. Hange…um…she went totally psycho on it. You know how Hange is kind of weird for Titans, like they're pets or children or maybe friends or something, but that one? She chopped it to pieces, even as it was steaming into nothing, after she killed it."
"I see. Thank you for filling me in. I actually don't remember the mission at all, other than a few flashes of images, when you were speaking about it. What's our deadline for reporting back? Were we supposed to head out as soon as I was conscious?"
Arlert looked at Eren again, but this time it didn't make any sense to Levi. What could they possibly be trying to hide now?
Eren spoke up, sounding unusually hesitant. "Um…we're not exactly here with you under orders."
"It's sort of more like we kind of ran away," Arlert added sheepishly.
Levi's brow creased in confusion. "What do you mean, ran away? You can't…wait. You mean you weren't sent out to look for survivors or even ordered to find and rescue me personally? Are you trying to tell me that you deserted, that you're AWOL? That you abandoned your posts in the field, after an actual battle with…wait. You didn't run away during the fighting?" Levi asked, horrified at the thought, even though it made little sense. But running away at all made no sense.
Eren said defensively. "All the Titans were either dead or had run off by then. We'd never have left the Corps in immediate danger. But Squad Leader Miller wouldn't let us look for you. He said you were dead. But we only found your horse, with his flank clawed by a Titan's nails, and we knew that didn't mean you had to be dead. We knew if Commander Erwin was awake that he'd want us to look for you. But Miller wouldn't let us go."
Arlert interjected, "So Eren sort of turned into a Titan right in front of everyone and grabbed me and Mikasa in his hands and ran off with us. He kind of glared at Squad Leader Miller, but he didn't hurt him or anything. And we went looking for you. And we found you. And if we hadn't come, you would have died."
"But abandoning your post on the battlefield, going against direct orders… that's deserting. That's treason, you idiots! You could be court-martialed and executed for that! What were you thinking?" Levi snapped, glaring at Eren.
"I was thinking it was my fault your real Squad got killed in those damned woods and that I'd rather be dead than see you die too because of me!" Eren yelled back. "Whether you realize it, whether you give a damn or not, you're my friend, and I guess I'm just a selfish prick, damn it, because I don't want to lose anyone else!"
Levi pulled back and blinked. Then he nodded. He understood, though he still didn't approve. But just because he understood didn't mean Erwin would. Erwin could be a real by-the-book hard ass sometimes. He might truly want to execute all three of them for this. Although Levi was pretty sure bringing him back alive would have a lot of influence on their level of punishment, as well as the need to keep Eren alive, for the sake of humanity's survival. But that only applied for as long as Erwin believed Eren could be kept safely controlled.
Regardless of what Erwin decided, he'd do what he could to intervene on their behalf. And if that didn't work, then he'd show them the way into the Underground. It was a tough, nasty life, but at least they'd still be alive.
When the hell had he started to care this much for these three idiots? How had they wormed their way into his cold, dead heart? Apparently that was Erwin's fault. His heart would have been completely shriveled up to nothing, if it hadn't been for him.
"We need to get back to the City as soon as we can," Levi said. "Is it safe for me to travel? I won't lose my leg or anything if I do? I can handle the pain and blood, but I won't be able to stay in the Corps if I lose it." He'd be dead in a heartbeat without the mobility. He hoped there wasn't any nerve damage as it was, but he'd work with whatever he had. At least he still had his leg. And his life. Thanks to these three brats. And why did the word "brat" suddenly make him want to smile, as if it was some kind of term of endearment or something? Just what the hell kind of tea was Ackerman brewing him, anyway?
"It's late, but we might be able to head out tomorrow. I'll check with Mikasa. It's supposed to be my watch anyway, and she'll probably want to examine you, now that you're awake," Eren said.
Examine me? She's not my type any more than Armin is, Levi thought with a smirk. Then he froze. Wait. Armin? The little blond was no longer Arlert to him? Eren, Armin and… Ackerman. Thank God. At least he wasn't losing his mind, even if Ackerman was.