A/N: oddly enough, no trigger warnings for this chapter. enjoy some short, non-problematic smut.
Erna's voice rings clear just as the hiss of gas cuts short, and Levi lets gravity manage his descent to the ground.
"Do it again," she says, loud and adamant, but also distracted because she's looking down at a letter from a stack placed in her hands moments ago by a nervous recruit. She's been severe about mail lately. It can't get into her hands fast enough. Her eyes dart back and forth, skimming for information she's been waiting on for a week and a half.
Levi narrows his eyes at her from a few yards away and he deadpans, "What do you mean again?" There's a collective intake of breath. Officers and cadets alike wince and look down at their boots or the ground. He sheaths his blades. "That was perfect."
The people around them shift nervously, tension and discomfort growing with every second of silence while he stares at her. She doesn't lift her eyes from the letter in her hand, finishes scanning it, folds it in half, moves it to the bottom of the stack, and opens another envelope, swiftly ripping it across the top with her fingernail. Fifteen strained and stressful seconds pass before she finally speaks, still looking down and reading, "Sorry, I thought I was hearing things because it sounded like you were questioning me."
"You weren't even looking," he challenges and holds a defiant stance. Nearby, Farlan cringes as if this exchange is causing him actual physical pain. Even Isabel looks mildly worried.
"Well," Erna sighs, folding the second letter and tearing open another, "good to know my hearing isn't failing me."
"Do the exercise again, trainee," the supervising officer growls.
Erna's eyes finally dart upward and she glares. "Shut the fuck up, Frey. If I wanted a mimic, I'd get a pet raven to do your job."
Officer Frey, who would be an imposing man in any other context, muscular, thick-necked, and with short, straight auburn hair, blanches white and shrinks from her, eyebrows creasing like a kicked dog. Now that her full attention has been engaged, Erna tucks her mail into her jacket pocket, meets Levi's eyes, and says, "You're right, Snowflake. I wasn't looking."
The agreeable tone she's using puts some onlookers a little more at ease, but Levi knows better, and he waits steady and expressionless for the follow-up. He's familiar with her rhythm.
She narrows her eyes slightly and her voice shifts to low and dark. "I don't need to look to know what too much wasted gas sounds like. The point is to maneuver efficiently, and you're not doing it."
"Bullshit."
Despite herself, the corners of her lips turn upward in a quick, almost imperceptible facial twitch. Her eyes brighten. "Goodness," she sighs with a sarcastic inflection of awe. She beckons with a curled finger, "Bring your wounded pride over here then, Snowflake."
If she didn't know better, she would think he was just fucking around, pushing to see what he could get away with now that he's been fucking her nightly for a couple weeks, but it's definitely not that. He's sincerely offended, not fucking around, but emboldened to talk back to her because he's been fucking her nightly for a couple of weeks. Last night, he made her ride his fingers for a maddeningly long time while she begged him to replace them with his cock, which, she'll grant, could blur the division of power and make it confusing as to what tone is acceptable to take with her in this situation.
As he stalks over, he growls at her, "I taught myself on stolen gear. I don't waste gas."
She tilts her head. She has, maybe, been riding him hard lately. She's been good about restraining herself and not inflicting unwarranted, insane, reactionary punishments on him. Instead, she's finally actually taken an interest in his training, which might be even worse, because her standards and expectations for him border on unreasonable, even for someone as talented as he is. She can't help it. She wants him to live through at least a few expeditions.
She'd been standing a good distance away, not fascinated or bored enough with the team's maneuver training to hover closely. The only person near her is the recruit who brought her the mail and is still waiting to be dismissed. She turns to him now and says with a sweet tongue, "You're going to want to fetch a medic," and he sprints off as Levi reaches her. Now, no one is close enough to hear her tell him, "You're pushing it."
He doesn't whisper back; he's too livid. "There's nothing to improve. This is pointless."
Erna's black brows furrow, and her eyes narrow. She raises her volume. "I'm not here to argue. I'm here to teach." With a sharp movement, she takes his handgrips from their holsters and twirls them in her fingers, then says calmly, "If you want to waste gas..." trailing off, smiling as if it's of no consequence to her, she presses and holds each trigger and waits as the gas hisses out of the tanks mounted on his blade sheaths. She keeps an eye on the meters. When the needle is a hair away from empty, she takes her fingers off the triggers.
"Do it," she orders in a deep husk, "again."
"Easy," he asserts, too cocky to turn down the challenge. He walks back to the trees that mark the steps of the maneuver exercise.
Erna calls after him, "Don't forget to tuck and roll when you fall," and she looks down again, takes a third unopened letter from her pocket, rips it open, and skims it. It's another reply to the correspondence she sent last week, asking her contacts for any information at all about her quickly approaching audit, mainly hunting for answers to the question "why now?" and urging some of the mildly more powerful people she's acquainted with to get a read on whether or not she should be very concerned, threatening to ruin them and take them down with her if she must.
She reads and listens for the punch of anchors, the slice of air, the hiss of expelled gas. He's still using too much. She sniffs, rolls her eyes to herself, folds another disappointingly uninformative letter, and looks up just as Levi's tank hits empty and he realizes that he isn't going to be able to reel himself in to the tree he's got his cables in.
There's routine, conventional use of the maneuver gear, and there are creative methods to make it work in unintended ways, and Levi is good at both. He maneuvers like it's second nature. That isn't her issue. Her issue, and what she's trying to show him, is that he's trigger happy, using more gas than is strictly necessary because his fingers aren't gentle enough. She doesn't care how creative he gets. Any movement, aside from braking suddenly and snapping his spine with the sudden whiplash, requires gas, so she hopes Levi remembers her comment about tucking and rolling as she watches gravity overwhelm him.
Without the compressed gas to reel the cables back in, Levi falls like a pendulum attached to a string in an arc down toward the large tree, gaining too much momentum. He is steady, not flailing or making any drastic movement at all as he seems to think. Erna already knows what he's just now realizing in the slow motion state that adrenaline causes whenever one is in danger. There are two options. He can let himself hit the tree, or he can cut the cables and hit the ground.
Eight meters is a long way to fall. In a rare occasion of empathy, Erna feels her stomach rising to her throat as she watches him plummet. Regret pierces her chest, and she wishes that she hadn't provoked him into this. She inhales and cringes but doesn't look away as it seems inevitable that he's going to hit the tree. Then, there's a flash of steel and, twirling his blades. He cuts the cables attached at his hips and lets himself fall from the lowest point of his arc, descending parallel to the tree trunk, down. He has time to twist in the air, and, when he hits the ground, his curved shoulder takes most of it, and he rolls.
Erna exhales. Her nose crinkles and her brows knit. She whispers angrily to herself, "Fuck."
When she gets to him, she has to lift Magnolia by her neck and stiff arm Church out of the way and sneer like she doesn't give a shit beyond gloating over him while she says, "Let him breathe."
She looks down and relief washes over her when she sees his eyes open.
She says, "Move your fingers." It takes him a second, but he obeys, flexing them out and curling them in. She says, "Move your toes," and sees the toe of his one boot move and then the other.
"Congratulations," she tells him as if she's indifferent, though she couldn't be more relieved. "Your spine isn't broken."
"I'm fine." He pushes up onto an elbow and grits his teeth.
Erna tenses and warns him, "If you can get up then you can do it again," hoping he'll take the hint and stay down.
He narrows his eyes at her and pushes himself up, brushing the dust off of his jacket, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and standing with an expression of pure insolence.
"Fine," she hisses through grinding teeth. The recruit from before comes running up with a medic in tow, and Erna shouts at him, "Get him a new set of maneuver gear," and the poor brat, crestfallen, without getting a second to catch his breath, sprints off again. The medic steps forward to check Levi, but she growls at them to fuck off, and they immediately retract their hand and step back dutifully.
She reaches, detaches one of his empty tanks, throws it at Officer Frey, who doesn't react quickly enough and takes the brunt of it in the chest. Then, while he's clasping his hands to hold it, he gets hit with the second one, and, in her quiet roar, Erna orders him, "Fill those and have him repeat the exercise until they're empty again."
"That will take hours," he says in quiet disbelief.
"It will," Erna affirms, her eyes still locked on Levi's, "and you can stay with him until he's finished." She turns on her heel and begins to walk away, tossing one last order over her shoulder, "The rest of your team can have the day off. Count your blessings, fuckwits."
She busies herself with other teams, lashing out with her vindictiveness, doling out physical and mental torment in equal measures among trainees who are all but nameless, faceless drones whom she enjoys watching suffer. She reacquaints herself forcefully with the side of herself that revels in a good devastation and tries to forget whatever she just felt when she watched Levi fall and her heart pounded at her ribs like a bird trying to escape a cage.
…..
Officer Frey yawns. He casts a glance up at the moon, a slightly brighter smudge blended with the dimming silver sky, and, when Levi lands next, he says, "I'm just saying, trainee, if your finger accidentally slipped on the trigger and discharged the rest of that gas, I wouldn't tell anyone."
Levi is either ignoring him or he genuinely didn't hear because, before his heels even fully touch the dirt, he's flying up again, repeating the tedious exercise that became muscle memory hours ago. Isabel and Farlan look on, seated on the ground and leaning on each other, waiting.
It's luck when, another hour later, he finds out that his tanks are empty because he can't get off the ground and not because he's falling to it. Frey takes them and pauses, his jaw tense and the corners of his eyes wrinkled like he wants to say something but isn't sure what. He starts, "Just…" and trails off. He sighs and tiredly he says, "You weren't wrong, but… just keep your mouth shut next time." He pauses, as if giving Levi a chance to answer, but when he only receives a cold, bored look from him, he gives up, slightly slumping his shoulders as he walks off in the direction of the barracks.
Farlan's voice pipes up behind him. "Stubborn ass."
Levi turns around with a slight smirk in his eyes. He looks past Farlan's playful smile for Isabel and spots her meters away, gesturing and talking excitedly with a group of three other trainees walking to dinner. He nods in her direction and asks Farlan, "What's she doing?"
"Making friends. I told her not to, but you know how that goes."
"Keep an eye on her. She talks too much."
He unfastens the tight strap over his chest and takes a deep breath, feeling like it's the first time his lungs have been able to fully expand in hours, and walks away, eager to take off the harness that's been digging into his flesh and change into some clothes that aren't soaked in sweat. Farlan jogs to catch up to him after wavering for a moment, and he asks hesitantly, "You're not going tonight, right?"
"You keeping tabs on me instead of sleeping?"
"That's…" Farlan falters, "not a no?"
"Mind your own business," Levi growls.
Farlan shakes his head. "I don't get it."
"You don't need to," Levi bites back, though he understands the confusion. He doesn't fully get it either. He just knows that, despite how much he wants to end Erna's life sometimes, he can't stop going back for more of her. She could literally stab him, and he'd take the knife handle and twist and still want to sink his teeth into her, taste her blood, choke the sweet breath out of her pretty mouth, hold her tight and tear and rip and make her his prey and his toy. It's fucked up. He gets that. But it's like their fractured minds just happen to be on the same wavelength, and his thought structure is all tangled with hers now, getting more and more twisted every time he sinks to her depths. It's beyond sense. It's something primal that makes him sneak out of his bunk in the middle of the night, something that he can't fucking stop.
He doesn't have to kick the door in anymore. He knows that broken bolt is still hanging by a thread on the other side. He catches sight of it every morning when he sneaks out, quiet so as not to disturb his exhausted, thoroughly satisfied instructor.
He catches himself just in reaching for the handle, and he decides to do things differently for once. He turns it silently and slips inside, closes the door carefully, and presses his back to the wall as his eyes adjust to the extravagant amount of light from over a dozen candles scattered around the room, not that he would ever complain about the enhanced visibility of her lithe body and the flickering shadows that dance in accompaniment to her madness and make him feel like he's being dragged into hell.
His pulse quickens despite his stillness, and his eyes focus on her scarred shoulders while she sits at her desk naked but for a strappy, skimpy, poor excuse for a nightgown made of midnight blue silk that he expressed a preference for sometime last week. It's hemmed with lace that falls just at the crease of her ass. The color is a confusion, almost black in some levels of light and definitely deep blue or violet when she turns a certain way. It complements the pale pastels of her multitude of scars that he asks her about every night when they're finally still and satiated, and she, without fail, changes the subject.
But she tells him a little more every night, about anything else, if and when he asks her to. He's always hungry for more detail now. He can't learn enough about her, curious as to how life shapes a person like that, and maybe apprehensive that he would be even more like her if only one or two things had turned out differently, wanting to ascertain just how lucky he is that they didn't, and he is where he is with his sanity relatively uninjured.
She leans over her desk, her back to the door, unaware and fidgeting over some paper, worrying a corner of it between the restless tips of her fingers. She writes, stops, bites the end of her pencil so hard that he can hear her teeth champ the wood from where he stands, and then presses the tip to paper again.
He's never had the chance to watch with her unaware. There's something smaller about her unguarded body language, and what he's doing feels more transgressive than he expected, catching her raw and metaphorically naked, but he figures he's earned some transgressions. He watches for a moment and enjoys her rare vulnerability before clearing his throat and making her suddenly sit up straight and whip her head around, her freshly-washed, wavy curls catch the light and her eyes widen before she catches herself and applies her composed mask.
She stands and almost runs to him, cooing, "Snowfla-"
"No," he reminds her as he clutches her waist and pulls her in.
She presses a kiss to his throat, and he can feel her wicked lips curl into a smile there before correcting herself. "Levi…" She clings to him, nuzzling like she wants to get under his skin, unreservedly eager to extract the violence he always claims her with, and she says soft and diffident, "I'm sorry."
He pushes her away to where he can see her face. "What are you playing?"
She looks up at him, wounded, or faking a wounded look, he thinks. She pouts. "I'm not."
"You're sorry," he says in suspicious disbelief.
"I'm so sorry," she affirms, and it sounds sincere, but he's wary. She snakes her hands under his arms and clutches his shoulders, pulling herself into him and resting her head on his chest.
He smirks at this ardently affectionate version of her, so different from the Erna he deals with during the day, and he plays into it, running his fingers through her hair and murmuring against the top of her head, "About what?"
"You could have been hurt," she says into the collar of his shirt, raising her lips and mouthing at his collarbone, softly kissing his skin while he waits for the teeth.
Only she doesn't nip him… or scratch him… or punch him in the gut… and he thinks she might actually be sincere. He can't help but smile, and he can't help but point out, "I did get hurt..."
"Yeah, but not seriously…"
"Also," he reaches down and squeezes her ass, "you threaten to kill me daily."
"But I don't mean it anymore."
"Then…" he teases her, "stop trying to?"
"It's a habit," she whines. "It's hard to break." Her fingers claw at his clean white shirt, and he feels her nails dig into the sides of his ribcage as she clings on tighter.
"I think I can break you of it," he promises in a low voice, and there's mischief in her eyes when she looks up at him with a demented little smile that he catches just a flash of before he turns her around and switches places with her, pushing her to the wall, his palm sliding up and pushing her hair out of the way so that he can sink his teeth into the back of her neck like he's wanted to since he walked in and caught her unaware at her desk.
The noise she makes is half moan, half snarl as her body undulates under his touch, moving to press against his hands everywhere they roam, begging them to apply more pressure and bruise her, making his teeth drag and scrape when her neck arches. He bites down harder until she yelps, then clamps his jaw down so that she screams for him, and only while she's howling does he let go and lean down to run his hand from the inside of her knee up her inner thigh to see how far her wetness has flowed already. Her howl subsides to a whimper, and she spreads her legs wider for him.
He doesn't rush. He slides his fingers over her slick thigh slowly and mouths against the back of her shoulder, "Let's see if you were listening."
He'd told her the night before that the pretty, expensive, hip-hugging panties, thongs, and all variation of silk, cotton, or lace separating him from her dripping sex were only a fucking annoyance. When she protested that she liked the feel of them, he stuffed the panties he'd just torn off of her into her mouth and pushed his fingers deep inside her. First, she appreciated it, then, after a few minutes, she was shaking and begging, aching to be fucked, and he made her promise to stop wearing lace barriers for him to take down every time he went to fuck her, because the half second it takes to rip them off is one more half second he could be inside her, and she nodded frantically, but it's probable that she was past the point of comprehension and was agreeing blindly to whatever would get him to finally fuck her.
"I am always," she sighs as he reaches up and finds her bare and dripping. She hisses into the back of her hand pressed against the wall, "attentive."
His finger slips between her lips and presses and twists, and he presses his forehead against the back of her shoulder while he reaches deep inside her warm cunt. He can feel his mouth fucking salivating at the thought of eating her right there, but he promised that if she was good he would fuck her up without making her wait. He has a thing for making her wait lately, seeing how wet he can get her, and feeling her muscles shake and spasm frantically with frustration. He grunts, annoyed with himself for promising anything, and, shortly after, when there's more slip and less drag, when she's arching her back and crying out in anticipation of the fucking he promised her, he adds another finger.
"You promised," she manages to whimper, and he knows what she's referring to. She isn't supposed to have to wait this time. She thinks he should be inside of her as of a minute ago.
"You're too fucking tight," he hisses, breath hot against her ear.
"You always say that." Her whining has the sound of an impending tantrum.
"Stop tensing up," he says, "and I won't have to." Every time he drags his fingers back, at the excruciatingly slow pace he's keeping, her liquid hot cunt contracts, and, when he goes to push forward again, he goes gently and by half centimeters, trying to coax her into relaxing and letting him in.
"I just…" she stops to moan as he has both fingers in to the third knuckle, "want…"
"Yeah?"
"Unhh," she whines when the fingers start to withdraw again, arching her spine and reaching back with her hips to follow them, rushing her plea out, "I just want you to fuck me," whining and drawing out the vowels of the last word, and he finds he can't wait anymore than she can. He takes his cock out quickly, strokes it perfunctorily while shifting position, and pushes between her legs, spearing inside her, not above hurting her and battering past her involuntary, habitual resistance. He gives one long thrust until he can't go any further, and he stops and savors the way she pulses and contracts around every thick inch of his cock.
Her noises are high-pitched and pained, and he briefly wonders why she does this to herself, begging him to fuck her every night before she's ready, never letting him prep her long enough before another contraction squeezes all around him, and the quick, spasmodic give and resistance triggers some undefinable animal thing in him and erases any care he has about her comfort. Endorphins buzz through him as he tangles his hand at the top of her hair and pulls her head back, pinning it to his shoulder. He turns his head and trails his tongue along her jawline, then forces it into her mouth, which is less like a kiss and more like a contest for dominance, even though she's already given that up willingly… He can never be too sure.
He can never feel reassured enough that she is his. Even just in this moment. Even when she cries his name like it's a vow.
He clamps down on the side of her neck. He sucks and bites and gnaws to give her a bruise that will grow dark and purple and make his claim on her starkly visible. She screams, and he bites down harder, but she doesn't pull away. She goads him on, reaching back and pulling him against her, leaning into the grip of his teeth and letting him maul her. She grinds herself back against him with her cunt pulsing and clenching around his deeply buried cock.
He loses himself, releases his hold on her neck so that he can put all his concentration into thrusting. She doesn't soften or let herself go, and it's like pushing into a tightly clenched fist. Her cries are turned into shallow, panting breaths and yelps. He gives in fully to the evil urges she inspires in him and thrusts harder, tugs sharply at her hair, and revels in the scream she lets out. She's in pain, and he loves it.
"You're fucking mine," he snarls at her.
And she can't help smirking to herself, arrogant and mischievous even when she's physically completely at his mercy. She mocks him, "So possessive…"
"You know it's true," he grunts, picking up a faster, more savage rhythm and finally feeling her relax for him, her cunt surrendering to the invasion and blooming like a fresh blossom, making his repeated thrusts feel less like a violation. His lips brush gentle gratitude over the bite mark.
"Yes, I'm fucking yours," she affirms, trying to sound aloof as if it's an unfortunate, annoying fact, but failing.
Her eyelashes flutter, and he can feel the tremors that always precede her orgasm, and he rushes to finish because he likes her best like this, alert and taut and insatiably hungry, the way she is before she comes. His grunts come out deep, husky and animalistic as his thrusts get erratic, and he fills every last place she needs him, pushing into her as deeply as he can, exhaling a groan from the depths of his lungs as his mind empties right along with his balls, leaving his head a complete void. She drips down his shaft like molten lead and her body melts in his arms so that he has to hold her up and keep her from sliding down the wall.
He picks her up. He's learned that if he doesn't she's apt to crumple to the floor and stay there in a daze until he does or until the afterglow wears off, whichever comes first. He puts her on the bed and takes his clothes off while she peels back the sheets and a thick blanket. He lies down, more rested and relieved of tension than he has ever felt in his life. She reminds him of a cat, ecstatically arching into his touch, curling over his lap, acting like it's the most comfortable place in the world, like she's home there, and she's his.
