Strange Girl But Effective

by commissioner

AU: Sadistic Levi meets masochistic OC counterpart. Mostly very adult sub/dom dynamic stuff and lots of smut. There's some violence (but in a good way, I think), there's some action, there's some comic relief, there's friendship. Springles and Jearmin as well for people who like fluff.

21. Coordinated Tactical Insubordination

(A/N) Start off with a sort of nod to a Mikasa scene that got cut from the last chapter. Then I realized I don't know if I've actually written any yaoi smut into this yet. That seems unfair. So let's get that done. Like just jump right into it in the middle. No foreplay, I don't have time for it. But if I did, it would have been hot. Like you don't even know.

Sometimes I take little headcanons from snk-headcanons and textsfromtitanfood on tumblr. Nothing major. But I thought I should give credit where it is due and offer some awesome blog recs.

Disclaimer: I do not own Attack on Titan or any of its characters. I own this thing I've written. I own my OC. If you want to borrow her, you absolutely must ask permission and return her in better condition than you got her.

"Are you okay?" Eren's voice cut through the dark of his room. He turned on his side to face towards Mikasa's cot on the floor, even though he couldn't see her through the pitch black.

She hadn't said a word to him since they got back, but he hadn't really said anything to her either. They'd passed by each other a few times and he'd tried to catch her eyes, give her a smile, brush her hand, anything. But she'd been unresponsive every time, avoiding his glances with her mysterious eyes and not reacting any time he touched her, acting as if he was a ghost… or she was.

He could hear her turn. He couldn't tell if it was towards or away from him.

"Mikasa…"

There was a tense silence for what felt like minutes to Eren. Finally, she answered his question with another question, spoken softly, "Do I smother you guys?"

"Yeah. You always have."

Eren wasn't going to lie to her. He never had before. He was probably the only person in the military who wasn't even a little afraid of her and so he felt that left it to him to be unfailingly honest with her. Everyone else was always trying to tiptoe around her and say what they thought she wanted to hear. He personally felt that was bullshit. Mikasa wasn't anything to be afraid of… Well, maybe a little afraid, but still…

He heard her turn again. He assumed it was away from him this time.

"Mikasa, don't be upset." He didn't know what else to say. He wished he'd pushed her to talk to him earlier when there was still some daylight to see by.

"Come here." It was a soft command, his voice reassuring. He didn't hear her make a move. He pushed the covers away and got up, sitting on the edge of the mattress and prepared to find her in the dark if he had to.

"Mikasa, come on…"

After a beat of silence he heard her breathe a sigh out through her nose and get up. Her weight sunk down onto the bed next to him. He put an arm around her waist and pulled her close until she relaxed and rested her head on his shoulder.

"You can do whatever you want. Whatever makes you happy. If you want to stay on top of me all the time and try to make all of my decisions for me and that makes you happy, then you should do that." He felt her muscles go limp. He squeezed his arm tighter around her and brought his hand up to ruffle her short, black hair. "I'm just not going to listen to you most of the time."

"You never listen to me," Mikasa said quietly. He thought he could feel her smile against his shoulder.

"Because I'm not scared of you." Eren pulled his legs back up into bed and pulled Mikasa to lie down with him.

"You should be," Mikasa teased, reminding him with those three words of all the times she had easily thrown him around or beaten him up when they were kids and that she still could now. But she didn't resist when he gave her a gentle pull. She let herself stretch out on the edge of the bed, facing away from him.

He didn't try to pull her closer, content that she was close enough that he would be able to tell what she was thinking in the dark.

"Nah, you wouldn't hurt me too badly. I'd shift into titan form and squish you, you know?" He yawned and closed his eyes.

Mikasa had the last word, "You can't even shift into titan form when you're trying. That's why you don't have to sleep in the dungeon anymore. I'd like to see it. They'd put you back in the dungeon and I could have this room to myself."

Eren gave her a pinch at her waist. She reached back and shoved him hard against the wall that the bed was on so that she could have more room to stretch out.

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Jean grunted as he rocked his hips a little, easing his cock in and out of Armin's tight lubed hole. He hunched over him, sliding his hand over his pale, slender but toned waist and under the small of his back to lift and angle his hips a little higher, tilting his ass up and trying a harder thrust.

"Unhh Jean!" Armin mewled and closed his eyes. Jean drank in the sight of him, wanton and thoughtless, panting and melting into his touch, frantically moving against him when he slowed down and teased him. He wasn't in the mood for teasing so much now when he gave Armin a few more thrusts and looked down to watch a bead of precum leak out his perfect, milky-white-but-terribly-hard-and-turning-a-dark-shade-of-pink-around-the-tip cock and onto his stomach.

Jean lifted Armin's hips a little more, getting his knees under them to keep Armin's ass up. He pushed in further as he leaned over and claimed the blonde's mouth hungrily, tongue pushing past his lips and teasing his mouth open to let out the moans he was trying to quiet. Armin's fingers found Jean's hair and lightly tangled themselves into it, gripping and tugging gently, weakly.

Jean withdrew his tongue and smirked against Armin's lips. He husked out a whisper, his lips still touching Armin's, "Try to keep your eyes open."

Jean slid his tongue over Armin's lips before trailing down to his neck and nipping at his collarbone, smiling evilly the whole time at the way it made Armin shudder and babble incoherently. He loved making him like this. For how reserved, analytical, and together he was the rest of the time, it was a huge contrast the way he so easily turned into a mindless, lust-driven bundle of moans and sensitive nerve endings for Jean when they were alone.

He drew himself up and Armin's fingers slid from his hair. Jean straightened his back and held Armin's thighs, fucking him a little harder and deeper, starting to lose his own sense of ego as he noticed Armin's cock twitch and leak out another bead of clear fluid. Armin had managed to keep his eyes at least half-open at Jean's request but then he noticed Jean staring. He blushed and closed his eyes again, still mindful enough to be embarrassed that he was getting off so easily just from being penetrated.

Jean groaned. There was something he loved about Armin's blushing, even though he simultaneously hated for him to actually feel embarrassed. He tightened his grip on Armin's thigh, holding it tight against him as he reached down to very lightly fist his weeping cock. Armin automatically bucked up into Jean's hand frantically enough to alter the angle of his hips so that on the next stroke, Jean brushed against his prostate. Armin's body went tense and he had to clamp his hands over his mouth to muffle his cries.

Jean leaned over him again, keeping his cock bottomed out inside Armin, refusing to move it another inch until he got one thing clear. He pulled Armin's hands away from his mouth and pinned them above his head easily with one hand, the other hand gripped his cock a little tighter to further grab his attention and pull his focus off of his shame.

"I don't care who hears you," it came out as a growl from deep in his throat.

Armin worried his lip, scrunched his face trying to stifle the sounds he couldn't help making. Jean tore his eyes away from the blonde's face and turned his attention to his cock. He could feel it straining and twitching in his hand. He ran his thumb over the head slicked with precum and gave Armin a slow, light stroke, and that was all he needed to make him lose control. Armin let out a long, delicious moan and bucked his hips, rubbing desperately against Jean's hand and causing Jean's cock to hit close to that spot inside him again. Armin was making himself shiver.

"Fuck, Armin." Jean bit his lip. He closed his eyes for a second, collecting all of his self-restraint to keep himself from mercilessly stabbing at Armin's prostate with the head of his cock and forcing the cum out of him. "You're so beautiful." He thought he could feel Armin's temperature rise as his full body blush got brighter.

"Nnhh.. Jean.." Armin pleaded. He rolled his hips weakly.

"I'm not moving until you open your eyes and look at me."

Armin's teeth didn't leave his lower lip, but he did manage to flutter his eyelids open and stare wide-eyed up at Jean who rewarded him by dragging his cock out of him, letting him feel the emptiness for only a second before pushing back in fast. He stroked Armin's cock in sync with his renewed thrusting, using the frustrated blonde's precum as lube with great effect. Poor Armin arched his back which only caused Jean's cock to angle nearer to hitting his prostate more dead on and turn him into a twitching, moaning mess. His eyes started to roll back into his head and his eyelids fluttered closed again. Jean let go of his hip to slide two fingers over Armin's lips and into his mouth, hooking them to press against his wet tongue and tug him by his chin to tilt his head back up, making him remember to open his eyes again.

Something about Jean's fingers in his mouth made Armin feel immodest enough to forget about the embarrassment at the situation. He focused his languid, dilated pupils on Jean's face and hummed as he sucked on his digits, swirling his tongue around them and coating them in saliva.

Jean watched him whimper and pant at each body-shaking thrust of his hips with rapt attention. He couldn't hold back anymore with those big blue eyes looking up at him. He tightened up his grip on Armin and sped up, almost insistently milking the cum out of him. He shuddered as he watched Armin's eyes track downward, half-lidded and lazy, but still aware enough to blush redder at his own cum-covered abs. Jean lost it. He hooked his fingers in Armin's mouth almost as if to gain traction as he pushed further into the blonde and painted his inside with his own release, grunting and arching his back and ultimately withdrawing and falling to the mattress on his side.

Jean saw spots and fought to bring his heart down to a normal pace as his chest rose and fell with deep breaths. Armin stayed lying on his back, content to close his eyes and lazily play with Jean's hair. Jean draped an arm and a leg over Armin and playfully nipped at his jawline before whispering in his ear, "This bed is too small."

Armin cooed quietly, "Always complaining."

"When I'm a squad leader, I'll get an apartment, and we'll have a decent-sized bed in a room eight times the size of this closet," Jean promised. He nuzzled his face into Armin's hair and inhaled. The way Armin smelled was pure comfort and relaxation to him.

"And we can have people over," Armin added thoughtfully. Jean could hear the analytical, logical, reasonable tone coming back to his voice. Afterglow fading.

"Whatever you want," Jean mumbled into Armin's hair.

There was silence for a few seconds. Jean could feel him holding back. He pulled Armin in a little closer and nudged the side of his head with his nose. "What is it?"

"We should hang out with them more."

Jean wished he had just drifted off to sleep without asking. "Please tell me you weren't thinking about your friends while I had my dick inside you."

Armin laughed. "I promise I wasn't thinking about anything."

"Don't we see them enough? If you think about it, we basically live and work together," Jean grumbled.

Armin nuzzled his cheek against Jean's forehead. "But we never do anything social together. We should do something fun."

"Where? How? What are we going to do? It's not like we can have a dinner party." Jean mumbled. He could just picture that. With their friends it would quickly devolve into shouting and throwing food. The real question was who would be the one to flip the table before anyone else.

Armin's elbow nudged him in the ribs with an elbow and got up to go clean up when Jean untangled himself from him.

"I'll think of something."

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Erna didn't dream about anything. Her brain didn't have the energy to come up with sounds or images that weren't there. Sleep was a black nothingness that she was content to float in. And it did feel like floating. She started to wake up when she heard Levi get out of bed and pad out of the room, but it was a slow process. She couldn't open her eyes. Her breathing came only slowly and deeply as if there were a weight on her chest. She felt she didn't know which way was down or up, like she was sinking too deep in water and couldn't find the surface anymore.

She heard Levi come back in and then the sound of some rustling fabric being thrown into the hamper. When his weight returned to his side of the bed, she found the will to move her limbs even though they felt like lead. When her hand found him everything snapped into place, like he was an anchor point. She could feel gravity again and her bearings came back to her as she moved her arm around his chest and pulled herself into him, hooking a leg over his and nuzzling into his neck.

Her attempt at cuddling was violently cut short as Levi made a disgusted groaning sound and pushed her face away. "Tch. Your hair still smells like wine. You're going to make me puke."

Erna opened her eyes finally when he withdrew his palm from her face. His eyes were still closed tight, so he didn't acknowledge the scowl she directed at him. She pushed herself to sit up and pulled on a curl, stretching it to her nose to see if he was right. He was. Her hair had a distinct oaky red wine smell, which he probably would have loved if he weren't so hungover.

She stuck her tongue out at him, something she wouldn't have done if his eyes hadn't been closed. "I washed it as well as I could in the five minutes you gave me to shower," she sniped as she twirled the thick jet black curl around her finger, stretched it taut again and released it.

He didn't react at all to her snotty tone. Either he was already asleep again or he didn't want to start in with her in his hungover state. She felt a little bad for him even though he did it to himself. She made her voice soft in case he was asleep, "I'll go wash it again."

She turned and stretched her legs out to slide off the other side of the bed, but she was stopped by the all too familiar feeling of his hand clamped tightly around her wrist. She turned around. His eyes were still closed.

"Stay in bed. Just keep your hair away from my face." He lifted her arm roughly and pulled her back over to him, dragging her down until her face fell to his chest, far enough away from his nose to not be bothersome apparently.

The way he manhandled her and the way his hard, well defined muscles felt under her fingers as she ran them over his shoulders and down his arms to push herself up and adjust to get comfortable triggered that basic needing feeling in her. Very quickly, darting her tongue out to lick his collarbone and then trailing it downwards to his abs started to seem like the most urgent thing in the world.

Her only plan had been to taste his skin and feel those muscles against her tongue, she hadn't thought further ahead than that to what the most likely result of her actions would be. She wasn't in the habit of thinking things through, but it made sense that Levi would put his hands on her head to push her downwards while lifting his hips a little, signaling that he wanted her to suck his cock.

Erna pulled away, escaping the pressure from his hands on her head and drawing herself up. She looked regretfully at his hard cock and she whined at it, "I can't."

That, he felt, was worthy of finally opening his eyes, but he winced at the daylight and closed one, reducing the ache from the brightness by half. He regarded her with one eye open, looking out at her from beneath unkempt bed hair, and asked, "The fuck do you mean you can't?"

Erna brought her hand up and wiggled her jaw around in demonstration, "My jaw hurts. So does my throat." She unconsciously held her breath while she remembered being enveloped in dark silence and the dizziness that came from lack of oxygen while Levi fucked her and pushed her forward into choking on someone else's cock.

She thought he would be mad or at least surly about it, but instead his lips curled up and he laughed silently through his nose before conceding, "Fair enough," closing his one open eye and looking pleased with himself. "I'm not fucking you though. I can't move."

"But I'm all…" Erna searched for an appropriate phrase, "worked up now." He smirked at that, but didn't offer a solution.

That was okay. She had her own solution if he was going to be adamant about not moving. She didn't intend to just walk away from an easy morning quickie with a weakened, relatively helpless, but hard Levi. She straddled his hips and reached down behind her to hold his cock, but before she could cant her hips back and even rub herself against him, she suddenly found herself thrown onto her back on the mattress again with Levi's forearm across her chest pinning her down.

"Don't you dare even try to ride me. The room's already spinning with my eyes closed. You rock this bed and I am going to vomit all over you and everything, I promise." He took his arm away from her to crook his elbow, cover his eyes, and hiss in pain, "Shit."

Erna sat up and frowned. She wanted to scold him for drinking so much, but it would be useless. She doubted anything she could say would be more effective than the pain he was feeling anyway. Besides, scolding probably didn't work on him. It would probably only make him want to do the opposite of whatever she suggested because he was that immature sometimes, and there were still many more wine bottles out there in the living room.

"Well I'm not staying in bed then. I'm too awake now," she said over her shoulder as she turned away and bounced out of bed, on purpose, just to cause him more discomfort. She didn't feel that bad.

He groaned and turned on his side. "I don't care, just stop being such a shrill banshee, and pull the curtains, it's too goddamn bright."

Erna tiptoed to the window and did as instructed, pulling the dark, velvety curtains closed as she teased, "I could just blindfold you."

"No thanks. I wouldn't take to it as well as you do." He took his arm away from his eyes and let it lay limp on the bed. She wondered if that was true. If he really wouldn't enjoy the same things he did to her. She watched him lie there for a few seconds. Even when he was relaxing he had a tightly coiled way about him. She couldn't picture him being able to relax the way she did when physically restrained. She could only picture it making him paranoid. Too on edge. The opposite of the way it made her feel.

"I bet earplugs would help your headache," she mused as she crossed the room to close the curtains over the other window.

"We're not using those anymore. Apparently you can't cum without hearing me say humiliating things, petite salope soumise." (submissive little slut.) The corners of his lips twitched upwards as if he could see her shiver at that even with his eyes closed.

Even while sick and vulnerable, his sharp tongue could turn her legs weak. She gave up on teasing him; it was a battle she wasn't armed for as well as he was. She went over to the dresser and pulled clothes out, quickly getting dressed while Levi continued to sweat it out in bed. Just before she pulled a t-shirt over her head she noticed the random sheet and pillow case sitting on top of the clothes in the hamper. Her initial thought was that it was nothing. She started to turn around to go comb her hair, but she stopped. There was just the one pillow case in the hamper and there were always four pillows on the bed. Glancing at Levi one more time in her peripheral vision to check that his eyes were still closed, she snatched it from the hamper, turned on her heel and walked towards the bathroom.

She felt a little silly sneaking around, but she wanted to know the identity of the person whose cock had suffocated her the night before. Not even because she felt particularly concerned about it (mild curiosity was more like it), but only because Levi wouldn't tell and that drove her crazy. If he hadn't been snide about not telling her, she would have felt content to let it go, but now she wanted to prove that she could figure it out anyway and take away the pleasure he would get from holding it over her head.

She unwrinkled the fabric and turned it over and over, looking for hairs. She knew the size of the guy, roughly. Knew his thigh was something like twice the length of her forearm and well-muscled, but not tight and sharp like Levi. She whispered to herself, "Who are you, you big fucker…"

If she could get both size and hair color, that would narrow it down a lot. And, she thought, if could see everyone's cock that would end the inquiry quickly – that she had gotten a good feel for. He had been too big for her to wrap her fingers completely around and that couldn't be an overly common trait.

Her breath huffed out in frustration as she turned the pillowcase over again and inside out and still didn't find anything. She groaned and leaned her back against the wall, sliding down it a little and tilting her head back until she had another thought. She closed her eyes, lifted the pillowcase to her face, and inhaled deeply. Whoever it was, the guy wore at least a little cologne or something besides just sweat and soap - something that would be distinctly identifiable if she ran into it again.

But then her shoulders slumped. She couldn't go around smelling people as closely as she would require to be sure. She wasn't Mike.

The thought struck her like a titan and her whole body stiffened as the wave of anxiety rushed into her. She hit the back of her head against the wall. "Fuck… Mike…"

He was about the right height and the musculature was there. She groaned. If it was him, she didn't want to know. But she had to know now. Her curiosity was all itchy in her brain and she had to keep scratching at it. She neatly folded the pillowcase into a small flat square and tucked it under her shirt before finally going to the sink and brushing her teeth and hair.

Back in the bedroom again, she had no problem buckling the leather 3DMG straps in the darkness. She'd done it enough that it was second nature. She could do it upside down with her eyes closed if she had to. When Levi heard the clink of buckles, he turned in bed and opened his eyes. He propped himself up on an elbow and squinted at her through the dark, irritated. "The fuck are you doing in uniform? You have the day off."

She finished with the straps and got her 3DMG from near the window. She didn't bother hiding it anymore. Lately, she went with the strategy she'd learned from Eren. Act like you're not doing anything suspicious and no one will pay any attention to you. "3D Maneuver training. I don't want to get soft."

"You already are soft," he mumbled into the sheets.

She didn't dwell on which meaning he intended there. "I'm going to go down and get coffee. I'll bring you up tea and toast or whatever if you tell me who that was last night."

Levi was sitting up against the headboard now, eyes closed again and arm draped over his forehead, "You'll bring me tea because I fucking tell you to, mouthy little whore. If you didn't need to be blindfolded and sensory deprived for hours to get over your hang up about being fully used whatever way I want, you would know whose horse cock you were fucking choking on."

She squinted at him, tilted a hip, and regarded him in silence for a few moments. Then she quipped, "You're a little crankier when you're hungover, aren't you?"

He pointed at the door. "Tea."

"Fine." She finished putting her 3DMG together and turned to leave.

"And get dry toast… And bacon or whatever the fuck they have down there."

"Hai, Captain Levi," she said, her voice full of sarcasm. She added quietly under her breath, "I'll tell them it's for Humanity's Strongest Lush."

Not quietly enough. She heard the muffled thud of a pillow hitting the door hard just as she was closing it behind her.

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Mike was making his way down the corridor, about to pass Levi's room when Erna emerged from it. He stopped to nod and politely say good morning, the same way he would with anyone, so he was a little taken aback by the flustered expression and the blush quickly spreading over her face when she looked up at him and mumbled "Morning," back.

He was about to ask if anything was the matter, but before he could get the words out she took a deep breath, seemed to steel herself with resolve. She stepped into him, grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled hard, causing him to bend at the waist so quickly he almost lost his balance and fell onto her. He was too shocked at her strength and the utter strangeness of what was happening to resist as she stood up a little on her toes, pressed her face to his neck, and took a long whiff of him as she ran her fingers down his chest and pressed them over his abdominal muscles.

Apparently satisfied, she let go of his shirt and let him straighten back up. He didn't even know what to think of what just happened. But she looked calm again, her face going back to its usual casual coldness and the blush disappearing. She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes as if examining him, looking him up and down.

"You don't wear cologne, do you?"

He took a second to collect himself before processing the question and answering, "No." Even a tiny amount would be problematic with his sensitivity to smells. He didn't even use scented soap.

She seemed to sigh in relief and relax. Then, just when he thought the situation could not get any stranger, she pulled a folded square of fabric from under her shirt and held it out to him, asking "Can you smell this and tell me who it is?"

He was torn. On one hand, this was weird, which piqued his curiosity and made him want to see where it was going. On the other hand, he was sick of people treating him like some kind of hunting dog.

"Why?" he asked. He would only help her if he could get some satisfactory explanation of what was going on here, because he was sure it must be incredibly interesting. Even without getting closer he could smell Erwin's cologne all over the cloth she was holding.

Her eyes drifted downwards and she seemed to withdraw into herself, suddenly sounding uncharacteristically shy. "Just… reasons…"

Hardly satisfactory. He sidestepped around her and began to walk away. He needed to get away from all the competing smells coming off of her and from Levi's apartment. Caustic cleaning solutions, wine, sex, and pheromones. She grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pleaded. Without turning around, he sighed, starting to get annoyed.

"I'll tell you if you tell me why you need to know."

She sounded very conflicted. "I just… I can't…"

He turned his head, looked over his shoulder. She looked positively distraught. Very curious. "Sorry." He walked away, but now with a new course. What he had been on his way to do could wait. Now he was going to stop by Erwin's office instead.

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"Food's in the living room. I figured you wouldn't eat in bed." Erna informed Levi as she went to the closet and got her jacket. She grabbed her cloak too, because the clouds were getting a little dark. It was going to rain buckets at some point or the sky would threaten to rain all day and not do anything. It was only 7:30am and it was already the warm, muggy kind of summer day where either event was equally as likely to happen.

Levi got out of bed and stretched. Erna stopped to stare at him. She liked watching him wake up. She didn't normally get to, since she always woke up later than him. She liked watching his muscles flex as he cracked and popped bones in his neck and back. He winced as he tilted his head to the left and his neck made a particularly loud grinding cracking noise.

"Tch." He rolled his shoulders and tilted his head back, seeming to check that everything was still in place and unbroken.

Erna brought her hand up to her lips to cover her smile. He caught her and there was an evil flash in his eyes as he asked, "You like that?"

Since she was caught, she dropped her hand. No point in hiding her smirk. She teased him, "I think it's sexy how old and broken you are."

"Come here." His voice was dark and smooth and clearly full of evil intent.

Erna hesitated, worried something awful was about to happen to her because of her 'old and broken' comment. She dropped her shoulders, resigned to her fate. She exhaled and crossed over to stand in front of him, tossing her jacket and cloak onto the bed.

Levi turned her around to face away from him and pulled her shoulders back.

"Relax."

She tried to. She never felt very relaxed when trying to guess what he was going to do. First waiting until enough of the tension left her muscles, his arms hooked through hers and he brought his hands to the back of her neck.

"Lean back."

She didn't like this. It was difficult to trust him. "You're not going to break my neck, are you?"

"Not today." He paused and seemed to think about that, then he specified, "Not right now anyway."

Good enough. She leaned back against his chest and he adjusted her position slightly, manipulating her neck and shoulders a little. Then he pulled her suddenly and drastically, jerking her up and causing her vertebrae in her upper back to shift and make a loud pop. She yelped because it was surprising, but it didn't actually hurt.

He let her go. "Good?"

She rolled her shoulders back and forward again. "Oh my god…"

He stepped away to start getting dressed.

Erna rolled her head around, still surprised at how much better everything felt from that one pop. "It's like I can breathe better…"

"You're welcome."

"I feel taller. Am I taller?"

"No. Your spine is straighter. I can't make you taller."

She stretched a little, rolling up on the balls of her feet. "This feels better than sex."

"Good. Next time I'm busy and you're being a needy slut, I'll just do that. Takes much less time," he grumbled as he got clothes out and pulled them on.

She exhaled and inhaled deeply. Finally starting to get over the novelty of the chiropractic adjustment, she picked up her jacket and cloak and slipped them on and over. She sat on the edge of the bed and watched Levi. He'd put on grey slacks and was just pulling a white cotton v-neck tee over his head. It was the most casual she had ever seen him dress. She was under the impression that he didn't own any shirts that didn't have buttons and collars and cuffs.

He reached into the closet, took out a black blazer and put it on, buttoned it and then looked over his shoulder at her, raising an eyebrow as if to ask what the fuck she was staring at.

Erna smiled. "That's more like what I'm used to."

Sometimes she couldn't decide if she liked him better in or out of clothes. She liked how even when he didn't have to wear a uniform he was never dressed down. And she was grateful that he didn't extend that aesthetic preference to her. She liked him being dressed formally, but she disliked wearing anything that would make her look nice. She was uncomfortable with the attention that would come with it. She wanted to be ignored by most people. Especially lately when she needed to hide what she was doing with her days.

She stood up to leave and Levi let her get all the way to the door before he told her to wait and she turned around. He pointed at the hamper. "What did you do with the pillowcase that was there?"

Her shoulders slumped. She huffed and pouted. "Can't you ever just not notice things?" She took it out from under her shirt, balled it up, and threw it back into the hamper.

Levi smirked at her. "Did you try to get Mike to scent it for you like a dog?"

She crossed her arms. If she was so predictable then she didn't have to answer him. She turned on her heel and stalked out the door.

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Erwin pressed his forehead to the top of his desk. It was cool and eased the pounding in his head a bit. He heard footsteps approaching from the corridor and lifted his head and tried to look busy. When he saw it was just Mike, he relaxed and dropped the act.

He poured himself another glass of water from the pitcher on his desk as Mike sat in the chair across the desk from him, stretched his legs out and folded his hands behind his head. He waited for him to say something. The man had a smug grin on his face. Erwin was familiar with that look, whether it was on Mike's face or Hange's or Levi's, it always meant trouble for him. He could feel his authority fading away already.

Erwin stared at him and waited to see if he had anything to say, but Mike just kept grinning at him like the cat that ate the canary as he tilted the chair back and put his feet up on the desk. Erwin sighed and rubbed his temples. He finally asked, "What is it?"

"Odd thing just happened." Mike said, still grinning at Erwin with a twinkle in his eye.

Erwin put on his stoic, uninterested mask, sure that whatever the 'odd thing' was, it was going to be something that would test his patience and sanity because that's what it always was. "What's that?" He asked and then took a sip of water. He felt dehydrated from the wine and achey from the night of sleep on an uncomfortable couch and wasn't in the mood for his squad leaders' mischief.

Mike rocked back on the chair a little. "I ran into Erna."

Erwin's blood ran cold. He took another sip of water and acted as if this was completely unremarkable information. "Doesn't sound odd."

"She felt me up, smelled me, and then asked if I wear cologne." Mike was very amused.

"Well that is odd," Erwin said, trying to sound distracted and disinterested, but thinking that the look on Mike's face and the direction this conversation was going meant he was either already found out or he was going to be. He had hoped Erna would just be content to not know. He shouldn't have let her size him up… but her hands had felt good on his thighs. He shook his head. He needed to not think about it.

"You look sick." Mike sniffed. "You smell a little like wine."

"I'm fine," he responded tersely. He had showered when he got back to his apartment, but he hadn't cleaned himself as thoroughly as he would have had he known Mike would be trying to sniff out clues. Then he would have taken three showers. He opened a desk drawer. He could at least pretend to busy himself with funding applications or something until Mike left, which Erwin hoped he would do if he continued to get nothing but short, noncommittal answers. Then he could put his head on the desk again, wonder what life would have been like if he'd just become a teacher or something, and maybe try to quickly sleep off this hangover.

"It might just be me. When I saw her just now, Erna reeked of wine." Mike casually rocked on the chair a little more as he continued to toy with Erwin. "She also smelled like Levi… and sex… and you…"

Erwin's stoic mask cracked for a fraction of a second before he got it back together. "I'm sure you're mistaken somehow. Maybe you're getting a sinus infection."

"So the really odd thing -"

"That wasn't the odd part?"

"No. She just aggressively groped and smelled me. I don't see how that's odd."

Erwin stifled a groan. "I'm sorry. Of course you wouldn't. Please continue."

Mike explained, "She looked shaken. Seemed to be searching for someone in particular, but doesn't have anything to go on but the person's smell and the feel of their body."

"This is all very interesting, but I don't see why you're bringing it to me." Erwin laid a blank paper on the desk and took up a pen. He hoped against all reason that Mike really wasn't connecting it to him and was just giving him that smug grin because he found it interesting and was amused by the girl's behavior.

"I thought it involved you because she produced a piece of fabric and asked me to tell her who it smelled like."

Erwin froze. He tried to sound calm and only mildly curious. "Did you?"

Mike's grin grew wider. "If I did, she would be here right now instead of me."

Erwin folded his arms on the desk and laid his head on them in defeat. He groaned. He was too sick for this. "Mike, what do you want?"

Mike removed his feet from the desk, setting the chair straight and leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees. "Details."

Erwin kept his head down, but pointed at the door and grumbled, "Out."

"What do you think she'll do if I tell her? Have you thought about a replacement in case she kills you? I'd like to humbly nominate myself," Mike said with a wolfish grin on his face. Erwin knew he was in trouble when Mike started speaking in more full sentences. He rarely did that unless he was in a position to toy with people. A sick sense of humor was the only thing that made him more verbose.

Erwin lifted his head, gave Mike the most serious, Commander-ly look he could muster, and repeated himself, "Get out."

Mike was undeterred. "Fine. No details. Just tell me if it was good or not."

"I'm not doing this." Erwin wondered if it was too late to retire. Then Levi walked in the open door with Hange in tow. He thought that if he retired and moved to some small cabin in the middle of nowhere, they would still find him and make his life hell. No. He'd probably died on the last expedition and this was his purgatory. They were his punishment.

He attempted to take back some of the respect and authority he'd lost in the past five minutes. He looked past Mike to Levi. "Do you have that report?"

"Oh, yeah, no, wait," Levi said as he seemed to look for it, patting his pockets. "I've got it somewhere." He reached inside his blazer and brought out his raised middle finger.

Erwin just stared at him, straight faced and silent for a minute. Then he asked, "Did you come here solely to do that?"

Hange put her hands on Erwin's desk and leaned over bringing her face closer to his, as invasive of personal space as ever, "Levi said you'd be hungover and easier to negotiate with now. I have demands. Also grievances; how dare you two drink without us."

Mike looked at Levi, "Where did you get wine?"

"None of your business. I'm not sharing. It would be wasted on you two. You have no taste. Neither does Commander Eyebrows, but I needed to bribe him."

Erwin wondered how Levi was even standing. He'd drunk more than enough to kill a man his size. Nothing about Levi's size made sense. Nothing was in proportion with it. His strength was much greater than one would think, his attitude was that of someone much larger, and he could drink Erwin under the table without seeming to be in any pain the next day. The man was an anomaly.

Hange clucked her tongue, "Selfish."

Mike sniffed and responded, "I have excellent taste."

"My office isn't a forum for your bickering." Erwin tried to get them back on task, because he knew where this would go if he let it continue. Levi would say something extraordinarily rude, Mike would make a comment about Levi's height, Hange would play devil's advocate for either side and say anything that would egg them on because she was a fan of explosions.

They all stopped as if they couldn't remember why they were there if not for annoying Erwin. Then Hange remembered, "Oh yeah! So for my research, I want at least half of Mike's squad. I definitely need Armin at the very least if we're going to experiment on Eren, but I need a bigger research team in general since we're planning to have multiple titan subjects and as much as I would like to do everything by myself it just doesn't seem practical."

Levi added, "I say just dissolve the whole fucking team, give Hange who she wants and leave Mike free to help run shit, especially if she's going to be working with Eren. I'm going to be babysitting a lot and we need him to keep shit in order." Mike didn't seem to need to think about it, nodding in agreement readily. Erwin processed this. It wasn't an unreasonable demand, which was surprising. He had been expecting them to come at him with something ridiculous and irrational. He was almost suspicious at how well thought out this was.

"And do it sooner rather than later. You can't just throw those kids into the deep end with Hange suddenly. Let them adjust to her here at headquarters where they're relatively safe first."

Hange ignored Levi's implication that she was a danger to anyone but herself and cheerfully pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket and dropped it under his nose on the desk, "Here's my list!"

"And promote Kirschtein to team leader. We have more than enough people and he'd be at least halfway useful," Levi went on.

Erwin felt his head spinning. Anything to get them out of there. "Yes, okay? Yes to everything. Make the changes, get out of my office."

Hange looked back over her shoulder to Levi, retracted her list and put it back in her pocket. "You were right, that was easier than usual."

Those words made Erwin wake up and regain some of his composure again. She was right, he was making it easier for them than usual and he shouldn't be. He needed to be strong in the face of their eccentricities or they would run amok. "Wait, no." He sighed, tired and exasperated. "Where exactly do you want to put everyone?"

"You could just put them all into my research team." Hange always started negotiations by asking for much more than she knew he would be willing to give. That way, she seemed to think, the things she really wanted would seem more reasonable. It didn't work as well as she thought.

"Except Erna," Mike pointed out.

Erwin ran his fingers through his hair. He didn't know what to do with that girl and given the circumstances at the moment, he didn't want to think about it. He looked at Levi who shrugged and said, "If you put her back in my squad, she's only ever going to be good at one thing."

He was right. She was already a good soldier. And Levi was an excellent soldier. Humanity's strongest… but he couldn't train her to be anything more than that, and Erwin appreciated that it was probably hard for him to admit. "Mike?" he asked. Hoping the strategist had some brilliant idea he was just keeping quiet about until asked.

"She hasn't made much progress." Mike frowned.

"Because you can't let her fucking train herself. She's practicing 3D maneuvers now. The last fucking thing she needs to work on." This was the only way Erwin could tell Levi was feeling how much he'd drunk the night before. He might not appear as sick as he should, but his sudden snippiness was very likely to have a lot more to do with his physical state than any actual dissent with Mike's decision. He was always very respectful of the other squad leaders' decisions on what to do with the teams under them, especially so with Mike.

"She still has an inability to contradict authority. She even listened to Hange yesterday." Mike ignored Hange's offended gasp. "If you tell her what to do directly, she'll never get over that. You need to force her to make her own decisions. If she makes bad ones that's even better. People learn from making mistakes." Mike didn't offer options. He only stated the pertinent facts that should be taken into consideration when making a decision.

Erwin didn't know what to do in this case. It was highly unusual… even for the Survey Corps where everything was always highly unusual. He thought Erna had potential and he was greedy. If she could grasp tactics and strategy, then he wanted her to be a strategist and an elite soldier at the same time. There was no excuse for not using her as a squad leader by now except for her own stubborn resistance to it. "Move the rest of the squad to Hange. Erna will be Mike's only project until you three leave for Ralsog. If she isn't improved by then, we'll fold her into the new team."

Levi, who had been scowling, raised an eyebrow. "Under Kirschtein?" Erwin nodded. Levi seemed to perk up. "Oh that's good. She would hate that." He turned to Mike and told him, "You should threaten her with that. She responds well to threats."

"She has some intellectual curiosity at least. She did borrow some books and ask me about titans." Hange was murmuring to herself, only paying attention to about half of what they were saying. She took out her list and grabbed the pen from Erwin's desk, scribbling on it. "I wouldn't mind if you added her to my team too."

Hange was dangerous enough with the few competent people Erwin let her have and those people were chosen partially for their ability to rein the woman in and keep her relatively under control. He didn't want to imagine the chaos that could unfold if he gave her someone who would blindly follow her bidding with precision.

"That's a non-starter," he told her.

Hange made a disappointed sound and tossed the pen back to him. Erwin eyed each of them carefully.

"Is there anything else?"

Levi pushed for one more thing. "We need to go into the city. We need more shit if we're going to be out there in the middle of nowhere for months. Not just the shit we get in supply shipments. Important shit."

Mike crossed his arms, looked down at Levi and pulled his lips into a smug grin again, "Like tea?"

"Exactly like fucking tea," he snapped.

Erwin sighed. It was a self-serving idea on Levi's part, but it would be good to let the people who were slated to go with the research team into the city and get whatever personal amenities they might need. His motivations were selfish too. If they did it this way, then he wouldn't have to use Survey Corps funding to get anything that could be a necessity.

Mike felt suddenly very invested in this, "I'm going."

Levi looked to Erwin, "Don't let him go, he just wants to whore it up and get his dick wet."

Mike disputed the terminology, but not the intent. "I have devoted fans, not whores."

Levi couldn't resist picking at the man. He added, "Besides, he just came back from a vacation in the city."

"My bones were crushed. I was in a coma." Mike reminded him.

"Don't be dramatic. You were sleeping."

Hange piped up, siding with Levi and teasing Mike. "We should all be so lucky."

Erwin put his head in his hands and attempted to explain calmly, "Someone would need to stay here. I need to go inspire more favor in the higher ups. We don't even technically have approval for Hange's research proposal yet." He gave Levi a meaningful look. "So unless you think you can do that…"

Levi didn't even need to answer that. If he said that he could, he would be lying. But he wasn't going to let it go, "I'm not staying here."

Hange's eyes lit up and Erwin could almost see the maniacal gears in her head start turning at a dangerous speed, "I can stay here! I'll hold down the fort for you!"

Erwin was sure he would come back to nothing but a pile of rubble and ashes, but he couldn't care anymore. The pounding in his head was being aggravated by the hassle. "Good enough. Everyone's dismissed." Which meant Please take pity on me and leave…

Hange kept chattering excitedly, "I just need you to take this new vine brew I made and let Pixis try it, then record the results. I've been holding onto it until I could see him again since you won't let me test on Survey Corps soldiers anymore."

Mike remembered the incident that led up to that ultimatum. "You almost killed my nose."

Hange huffed and rolled her eyes. "I didn't ask you to smell it, I asked you to drink it. You have no one to blame but yourself."

Erwin's fingernails dug into his palms. "Hange, I said no more vine brews at all. Not just that you couldn't use Survey Corps soldiers as test subjects."

"Well that's not what I got out of our conversation." She crossed her arms, giving him an accusing look, like it was his fault for not being clearer about it. "Anyway, it should be harmless."

"Hange…" Erwin spoke slowly and clearly. "No experiments while you're here on your own."

"Right, right," Hange confirmed noncommittally, waving him off.

"I mean it."

"Yeah, I got it. No experiments while you guys are on your field trip." Her gears started turning again. He could see the manic gleam in her eyes that meant she was planning something. "How long are you going to be gone anyway?" She tried to affect a tone to her voice that was nonchalant and innocent. It didn't work.

Erwin thought carefully. "I'm not leaving you alone for more than two days." Her face fell at that. So did Mike's. Crass as Levi was about his phrasing, he wasn't incorrect about Mike's motivation for requesting R&R time in the city. "There's a military ball in Stohess in two weeks. I have to go anyway. If I requested permission to go ahead with your project via message, it would be soundly rejected. It's better to go in person and persuade people."

"No one can reject Commander Handsome in person. Ooh and in a tux and everything! I'm rescinding my offer to stay here. Make Levi stay, he hates parties. I can go with you and explain to everyone how important my research is!" Hange hopped back and forth on her feet, flushed with excitement.

Levi rolled his eyes at her outburst and then at Erwin, "If I go, will I be forced to attend the aristocratic pig party?"

Finally something Erwin could torture him with. "Yes, under my order. And you'll have to be sociable and keep your vocabulary under control."

Levi grabbed Hange's arm, stopping her dancing, turning her to look at him so he could lock eyes with her. He paused and when she calmed down, he said very seriously, "Bring tea back. As much as you can."

Before Hange could get too excited again, Erwin had to crush her hopes. "Levi, you're going. Hange is staying here. As off-putting as your personality is, her unbridled enthusiasm tends to scare people more than your scowling."

"I can be scarier," Levi offered.

Erwin smiled. "I don't doubt that, but it's an order."

Levi bristled at that, but he went silent. Erwin had no doubt that he would go along as long as he made it an order. He wasn't just being cruel, it really was better if Levi and Mike went. People knew of them and were impressed by them, as much as Levi tried to reject any fame and recognition. While Hange may be much quicker and smarter than either of them, the people who he needed to persuade were generally uncomfortable with her obsessive and awkwardly enthusiastic tendencies. Even though she was the all-important key to unlocking Eren's control over his power and reclaiming wall Maria, it was better if she stayed uninvolved in the social politics of sucking up to the people who could enable that research to happen, as unfair as that was. That was the burden of being a genius.

As if she could read his thoughts, Hange got a very persecuted look on her face and sulked. Erwin wanted to keep her in a good mood, so he gave her something she wanted, "As compensation for taking temporary command here, Hange, I'll give Pixis your new experimental concoction and lift the ban on future vine brewing experiments and tests on Survey Corps soldiers."

Hange all but jumped for joy, cheering her signature 'yahoo.' When she calmed down, Erwin went on, "But you have to get a person's consent before experimenting on them. No slipping drugs into anyone's tea when they're not looking."

Hange pouted. She didn't miss the reference he was making to something that had happened about a year before. "I was trying to cure him of his OCD. I had to do a blind study to control for placebo effect."

"Don't do me any favors, Shit-Glasses." Levi crossed his arms. He hated it particularly when Hange pointed out his neuroses. Probably because she treated them with such scientific fascination where everyone else tread lightly around them, keeping things clean as a guard against risking his displeasure and never speaking of it blatantly to his face.

Hange changed course entirely, not wanting to dredge up any more mistakes she had made in experimenting on people lest Erwin change his mind about the leeway he'd just given her. "You should take Erna to the ball with you. She makes you more approachable. You two are all cute and angry. It would be adorable." She reached to ruffle his hair, but he slapped her hand away.

Levi didn't even consider it. "Bad idea. She's not civilized. She might bite someone. You'd need to vaccinate her first."

"She sniffed me this morning." Mike was telling Levi now, seeing if he could offer some kind of explanation where Erwin refused to.

"See? If she's acting like Mike, it's proof that she's not fit to be in public." Levi turned to see Mike sneer at him, then asked, "How did you sleep last night anyway? I found a better gag for the succubus, but I don't know how often I can use it since it stretched her jaw out too much." He gave Erwin a sidelong glance.

Erwin choked on the water he had been drinking. He pointed at the door and as he coughed, he told them all to get out. He'd had more than enough.

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By the time Erna pulled herself most of the way up the wall her arms were shaking with the strain, but she forced herself to endure it. She was stubborn about not using the gas to make it easier. Especially since she didn't know what excuse she was going to use the next time her tanks were empty.

They were a nice failsafe though when her foot slipped on the rain-slicked wall and she started to fall. She fought against the instinct to grab the cable tighter and try to save herself with her hands. That would only burn the skin of her palms off, possibly destroy her fingers beyond recognition. She shot a leg out to kick away from the wall, crossed her arm to the trigger on her chest and shot the other hook up and into the top of the wall. Her jaw clenched in frustration at her weakness as she propelled her body up with the gas.

When she cleared the wall, she instantly had the wind knocked out of her as her body collided with Eren's. She wheezed and sucked air back into her lungs as she kicked and untangled her legs from his. He sat up, face pinched in pain as he rubbed the back of his head where it hit the wall.

Erna exploded. It was raining, she was annoyed with herself, and Eren presented a target for her to vent her frustration. She didn't allow herself to fully catch her breath again before she started yelling, "Fuck, Eren! Do you know what that does to my heart?! You're going to kill me if you keep doing that! Fucking stand away from the cables or something!"

Eren snapped right back at her, also not in a great mood since he was out here in the rain and she'd just knocked him flat on his ass. "I'm not going to kill you! Some titan is if you keep up this suicidal shit! I was hoping you wouldn't be dumb enough to go out there again and coming up here to look for you would be a waste of time, but here we are."

Unlike most people, being yelled at had a sobering effect on Erna. It made her check herself and melted her temper away. It was when everyone was calm or rational that she felt like yelling the most. That mechanism in her was the same reason that she had the impulse to go out on her own in the first place. She felt calm when everything was unsafe and precarious. Inversely, when things were calm she felt on edge and agitated. She took his hand and helped him up, disarming his anger as she told him for the umpteenth time not to worry about her.

"I'm fine. See?" She looked up at him when he stood. She held her arms out at her sides and spun around as proof. No blood, no bruises.

Eren was still pissed off, but he was less shouty. "You're fine now. What happens if you run into more titans than you can handle at once?"

Erna just shrugged. She had an answer to that, but it was a grim one and it probably wouldn't make him happy. So she kept it to herself.

He looked down the wall and motioned for her to follow him, which she was more than eager to do as the rain wasn't letting up. She was already cold and soaked to the bone. She'd been a couple of miles away when it had started raining large, heavy raindrops that stung as they pummeled her. Eren must not have been out there long because he was still pretty dry under his green cloak. Which made her wonder, "Why'd you come out here anyway?"

She asked him before they fell. He answered when they landed. "We were looking for you. Armin's planned something. You weren't in any of the usual places, so I figured you were outside the wall. Don't worry, I didn't tell anyone."

She was silent for a minute as they walked back. Then she had to ask, "When you say 'Armin's planned something'…?"

"He said we need to do something social – all of us together. We don't get to hang out as much since the roster change. Since we can't exactly have a party… Pretty much we're going to raid the squad leaders' offices for contraband and meet up somewhere we can hide. We've done it before."

Erna was hesitant. "And it's gone well in the past?"

"Oh hell no." Eren answered quickly. He didn't offer to elaborate.

"I don't think you can accuse me of having a death wish..." Erna mumbled under her breath. "This sounds more suicidal than fighting titans alone in the open."

"It's not. We're not hitting Levi's office this time," Eren said as if that settled it and meant that this was a perfectly sane plan. "I told them I would find you and we would sneak into Hange's office, since you and I have been in there the most."

Erna felt she was being pulled along by the tide. Better to drift with it than exhaust herself trying to fight it. "Mike keeps a bottle of whiskey in his desk."

"Jean's on that. Sasha and Connie are stealing food. Mikasa is hitting Erwin's office. Then we go to the basement."

"You mean the dungeon?"

Eren winced. "I don't like to call it that."

"Sorry." Erna was sincere. She'd forgotten that used to be his bedroom. It was easy to forget since he'd been sleeping above ground since before she met him. She could understand that the word 'dungeon' held too many negative connotations. It had been used as an actual dungeon once probably over a century ago, but for the Survey Corps it was mainly storage now. No one ever really went down there, which she guessed is what made it a good spot for secret parties.

"I just have to unload this stuff and put on dry clothes."

Eren started walking even faster and she had to jog to keep up. He said over his shoulder, "You're going to have to hurry. It's time sensitive. The squad leaders are in the dining hall now and we probably only have ten more minutes before Hange goes back to her office."

Erna was about to say that Hange shouldn't be in her office at all, it was an off day. But she remembered that it was Hange and of course she would be in there because she actually loved her work and she was probably in there or in her lab ninety percent of the time. "Well what if you just go get stuff from Hange's office and I'll go change?"

"That won't work. I need you to be a lookout or to distract her if she's already back in there by now, which she probably is."

Erna didn't like the sound of that one bit. "What do you mean distract her?"

"You know. Ask her about titans or something."

Erna stopped in her tracks, grabbed his cloak and turned him around, holding him there in the rain while she got one thing very clear, "I am not sacrificing myself to the 'Hange talking about titans' torture. I'd rather die. If anyone is going to be the distraction, it's you. I organized that office. I know where everything is."

Eren didn't want to admit that she was right. He didn't want to have to be subjected to Hange's endless talk either. "You can just tell me where everything is."

She glared at him, unmoving, her lips pressed into a thin line. He made a desperate attempt at pulling rank on her. "I have seniority here!"

"Well I have orders from Levi that I'm not allowed to talk to her anymore and he outranks you." She stuck her tongue out as punctuation on that sentence.

Eren pulled away from her and kept walking. "You know he probably wasn't being serious."

"No. I don't know. How the hell can anyone ever tell when he's joking?"

She had a point there, Eren conceded. In the end, when they got inside, it came down to rock, paper, scissors. Eren lost. Erna changed, dried off, and raided Hange's office while Eren martyred himself and distracted Hange by letting her talk at him.

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The "basement" was really more like a dungeon, Erna thought. It was dark and cold and she could see why no one would ever go down there. She felt a twinge of sympathy for Eren as she navigated by keeping her hand on the wall until she saw lamplight and heard voices.

"We're not starting without them." It was Mikasa.

When Erna rounded the corner and saw everyone sitting around a couple of lanterns, on boxes and on the floor, she was immediately accosted by Mikasa asking her where Eren was.

"I'm happy to see you too." Erna answered sarcastically. She tried to channel Erwin's voice, "He had to sacrifice himself for the success of the mission and the good of humanity." Then she clarified before Mikasa could run off, "He's talking to Hange. We had to get her out of her office."

"What did you get?" Connie asked as he simultaneously slapped Sasha's hand away from reaching for a piece of bread in a pile of food that was set on a wooden crate being used as a makeshift table.

Erna opened her bag. This was the part she was nervous about. "Well… I got liquids in bottles…" She chewed her lip. "They're only labeled with numbers, but… they're probably alcohol? Maybe?" She took out three clear glass bottles filled to varying levels with liquids of different colors.

Armin gently took them from her and set them off to the side, being extremely careful with them as if they might be explosive. "We'll just save those for last. Hopefully we have enough that we won't need to open them."

"What do we have?" Erna asked.

"Not enough." Sasha answered as she tried to reach past Connie to grab some food. He told her to calm down and wait for Eren, but he couldn't hold her back. She grabbed a potato and started to devour it.

Jean rolled his eyes. "We have whiskey." He held up the bottle from Mike's desk and waved it. It was only a bit more than half full. He set it down on the table.

Mikasa added another bottle. "Erwin had a bottle of scotch." It was mostly full; exactly what they would expect from their straight laced commander. "Some cigars." She tossed those onto their crate-table. "And…" she reached inside her loose cardigan sweater and pulled out some folders, fanning them out in her hand. "I got everyone's files."

Erna was much more excited about that than about the booze. She reached for the folders, but Mikasa held them up out of her reach and grabbed her hand, telling them all very seriously, in her stern scary voice, "We're not doing anything until Eren gets here."

They had to wait about half an hour. Half an hour that was spent largely complaining and begging Mikasa to let them at least drink a warm-up shot while they waited. When Eren appeared he looked frazzled and angry, before anyone could even express their relief that he was finally there, he shouted, "What in the actual fuck, Erna?!"

Erna moved herself and stepped behind Krista, hoping that he would be distracted by the blonde girl's cuteness and forget about being angry.

"What happened?" Mikasa put her hands on his shoulders and looked him up and down for signs of injury.

"Why didn't you come save me?" He ignored Mikasa to yell at Erna who was holding Krista in front of her like a shield of adorableness.

"I thought you could handle her! I'm sorry! I didn't know how to get you out of there! She just kept talking!" Erna cowered behind Krista and hugged her knees. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the memory of the pain of listening to Hange talk about titans.

Mikasa shook Eren to make him focus on her. "Eren, it's over! It's okay now!" She held him close until he calmed down.

He looked around at everyone and at the stash they'd amassed. "Was it at least worth it? Was there anything good in there?"

"We're not sure," Armin answered. He was carefully turning one of the mystery bottles around and examining it in the light.

Krista turned around and smoothed her hand over Erna's hair. She said soothing things and coaxed Erna to her feet again.

"Do you know what these numbers on these bottles mean?" Armin asked Eren, since he occasionally spent time with Hange in her office. Maybe she'd mentioned it.

"Nope, but I need a shot of something."

"Way ahead of you," Connie was pouring whiskey into stolen water glasses. Erna could tell he was concentrating on getting the same amount into each one. She could guess that any disparity could easily kickstart more yelling and that Connie knew this from experience. He had enough whiskey to fill four glasses and he filled the remainder with scotch.

Armin put the bottle of maybe alcohol/maybe explosive substance down as Connie passed glasses around. He took his and raised it. "Anyway, Jean has good news, so we actually have something to celebrate other than the suspension of boredom this time."

Erna snapped out of her Hange flashback to be snarky. No trauma would ever be bad enough to tone down her snarkiness when it came to Jean. "Did Erwin find the necessary funding to fix your face? What did he have to cut from the budget?"

Jean was in too good a mood for once to say something sarcastic or curse her out. "No, but he did promote me to team leader."

"I'm not drinking to that." Eren grumbled.

"That's unfortunate about your face," Erna said sympathetically.

"Did any of us get moved to your team?" Mikasa asked.

"No."

"I'll drink to not having to listen to Jean." Eren raised his glass as did everyone else, even Jean, although he did mumble something about them being a bunch of immature assholes.

As Erna downed a large gulp from her glass, she winced. She recognized it as the stuff from the bottle in Mike's desk. It burned her throat and she thought that meant it was either very good or very bad as far as whiskey went. She gave her head a shake and whined at Mikasa "Can we have the files now?" She desperately wanted to see what the others' files said. She wanted some insight, because the fact that she didn't go through the training with them made her feel left out sometimes. She wanted to feel more on their level and less like an adopted baby sister.

Instead of giving everyone their own file, Mikasa handed them out at random. Everyone quickly flipped them open and started reading. After a few seconds of tense silence, Connie laughed and snorted, "You guys, guess who I got. The first note says: Possesses absolutely no self-control. Hard headed and impulsive."

"That doesn't sound like anyone I know," Mikasa said, in a rare display of sarcasm as she turned and looked directly at Eren who frowned, not having a very good sense of humor about himself.

Jean spoke up. "Listen to what Shadis wrote about Connie: Skilled at making sharp turns, but his mind is nowhere near sharp."

"Tch." Connie took another drink. He had no comment.

Mikasa read from hers, "Sasha is unfit for organized activity."

Eren passed Mikasa's file to her and rolled his eyes, "Yours is boring. It's just a bunch of notes about what a perfect, genius prodigy you are." Mikasa's lips formed a very slight smile.

Armin passed Krista's file down, "Krista's is mostly about how beautiful she is. It's kind of creepy considering our trainers and superiors write the notes."

Sasha had Armin's file, "Yours is predictable. Weak, but smart, blah blah blah…" She took some more food. Connie took the file from her and gave it to Armin who started scanning it quickly and blushed every time he hit something complimentary about his intelligence.

Erna squinted at the file in her hands. "This can't be right. It says Jean's 3D control skills are top notch. That's an error, right?" Jean glared at her, but before he could open his mouth to say anything, Erna put the file down and looked around, eyes stopping on Krista next to her. She leaned to look over her shoulder, "That means you have mine! What's it say?"

Krista's hands snapped the file closed. She smiled sweetly, but her voice betrayed her nervousness. "Only good things! Definitely nothing about you being like a cold, unfeeling machine."

Erna gave Krista a grim look and snatched for the file, ripping it from the girl's hands after a short struggle. She flipped past the stats to the notes section. Every note was like a backhanded compliment, starting with things like 'socially indifferent, cold, mechanical,' and ending with comments about what an excellent soldier she was.

She paused at one note. "'Strange girl but effective'? What the fuck even is that? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

She scanned down to the most recent notes. The one Erwin had made was unsurprising; Mike had alluded to it before. But she didn't know Levi had made a note in her file while she was on his team. She read it aloud, "Deep survivor's guilt and adrenaline-seeking behavior - significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress comorbid with masochistic personality disorder."

She slowly dropped her hands and the file into her lap and looked up at Armin, because he was the smart one. "What does any of that mean?"

Armin stammered and blushed, searching for the most polite but accurate words for his explanation. Jean nudged him. "Just tell us how fucked up she is. Like on a scale from one to serial killer."

Armin prepared himself by knocking back a little more whiskey and explained, "Well… it means that you've experienced trauma, which effects your brain and the way it responds to stress. That can result in a lower level of monoamine oxidase enzymes which regulate dopamine and low levels of that can be indicated by impulsive behavior to seek immediate rewards without regard for consequences – also known as adrenaline seeking behavior."

There was silence until Jean spoke up, "So does that mean she's like a nine on the scale of fucked up?"

Erna ignored him and stayed focused on Armin. "What about the last part?"

Armin repeated the last part of the note to stall for time. "Masochistic personality disorder?" He stammered, "I… um… I d-don't think I know…"

"Bullshit. Spit it out." Erna hissed threateningly.

Armin's face turned red. He said it quickly like doing so pained him. "It means you derive sexal gratification from physical or emotional pain or humiliation. 'Comorbid' means it's unrelated to the other things."

Armin squirmed, afraid of what her reaction would be, until she sighed in relief. "I was worried it was something bad."

Sasha finished eating and rolled her eyes at Erna. "It is bad. It's completely weird."

Erna closed the file in her lap and snapped. "Who made you the sex police? I'm so sure everything you two do is completely normal." She pointed at Sasha and Connie, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

Armin made an attempt to diffuse the argument with logic before it got anywhere. He cleared his throat and said quietly and calmly, "It actually makes a lot of sense from a biological standpoint. The brain holds unused loads of endorphins that it releases to lessen pain so that it won't go into shock immediately in crisis situations. If there's a certain level of sustained pain over a period of time it will continue to release bursts of endorphins and adrenaline, resulting in a euphoric feeling. Over time if the body continues to get flooded with endorphins, a person can lapse into a drugged-like state of lowered inhibitions, ecstasy, and docility."

Again awkward silence. Then Erna nodded and confirmed, "Yeah, it's like that." She squinted at Armin, feeling very curious about how he had that knowledge so ready at hand. He was smart, but…

"You're like a kinky encyclopedia." Her observation made Armin blush bright red and the way she was staring at him like a cat with a mouse made Jean feel the need to put an arm around him.

"Just because Armin can put big fancy words to it doesn't make it not weird." Sasha decided. "Anyway, less talking. We should play a game."

Connie got excited. "Oh, let's play truth or dare again." He was met with a resounding and near-unanimous No.

"What's that?" Erna inquired.

"It's a disaster." Mikasa answered.

Connie was disappointed. "It wasn't that bad."

Mikasa reminded him, "Jean almost died."

Eren bristled with defensiveness, obviously feeling blamed for Jean's near-death experience. "He shouldn't have taken the dare if he couldn't do it!"

"I could have done it if I wasn't drunk!" Jean yelled.

Krista leaned over and quietly explained to Erna, while they yelled back and forth, that Jean had tried to do an impossible 3D maneuver - a quadruple backflip, only using gas to reverse in midair and flip back, in between the roofs of two of the stables on a dare from Eren. He'd gotten hung up in the wires just before coming really close to falling into the ground at an angle that probably would have snapped his neck. Levi had to come out and cut him from the cables in the middle of the night. It hadn't gone over well to say the least.

Krista explained that every time they tried to play, everyone except for her and Armin, took dares and tried to one-up each other and it ended disastrously every time without exception. Things tended to escalate pretty quickly. Especially if alcohol was involved, which if they were bothering to play, it was always definitely involved.

Erna could imagine how bad it could get with people who were this proud and hard-headed, herself being one of them. "That doesn't sound like any fun at all."

Sasha heard her and teased, "Really? I would think you'd be into it. It involves a lot of pain and humiliation."

Connie raised his voice over Jean and Eren's arguing, "We have enough booze here to play a drinking game."

That made them stop arguing. Erna was now suspicious of this whole group and their judgement, so she had to ask before being convinced to do it, "What is a drinking game?"

"Where did you come from?" Sasha said, frustrated with Erna's naivete on such things. "It's any game where you try to punish your friends with alcohol poisoning. There are no winners. Only losers."

Erna's eyebrows lowered. She was unenthused. "What happens to the losers?"

"They usually pass out and we draw or write things on their face." Connie said matter of factly.

Erna just stared at them for a few seconds before breaking her silence. "Where do you guys get off calling me weird? I'm curious."

Connie ignored her and grabbed the bottle of scotch, leaning forward and topping everyone off as he suggested "We can play 'I've Never.'" No one objected to that, so he explained the rules to Erna. "You go around the circle, taking turns, naming things you've never done and everyone who has done that thing has to take a drink. The person who empties their glass first loses."

Erna eyed him suspiciously. "That's it?"

"Simple," Connie grinned.

Eren moaned, "I hate this."

Connie explained, "Eren always loses. He's an easy target."

Armin interrupted with something Connie forgot, "The only other rule is that if you come up with something that makes everyone but you drink, you get another turn."

Sasha dismissed that, "It never happens."

Erna considered this new information. She only had one question. "How do you decide who goes first?"

"Fight about it, usually," Jean answered honestly. "Then Mikasa picks someone."

Everyone looked to Mikasa so that she could just pick now and cut out the part where they all argue about it. "Let Erna go first. She's at a disadvantage."

Eren complained, "I'm at a disadvantage!"

Armin reminded him, "You never get hangovers. That's your advantage."

That set Eren off grumbling. Erna started before it could turn into a big thing. "I've never played this."

Everyone looked at her, not doing anything, apparently unsure if she was just saying that conversationally or if this was her starting the game. She nodded and told them to drink.

She felt something new. It was a power trip. She liked it. She tilted her head and thought. Since they all came out of the same trainee division, they probably had a lot of common experiences that she didn't share. She tried to remember which number their division was and place them in time. Her eyes drifted upward, trying to think of things that would be specific to all of them.

Jean thought she was taking a little too much time. "No thinking."

Erna huffed, "You didn't say there was a time limit. Fine." She thought for one more second. "I've never seen titans inside Trost."

"Disadvantage my ass!" Eren complained as everyone but Erna was made to drink again.

Erna smiled evilly. "I like this game. I'm sorry I didn't trust you guys. You were right. This is fun."

Mikasa warned her, "Don't gloat. It gets you in trouble."

Erna thought she could probably end the game without even ending her turn. She went again. "I've never seen Eren in titan form."

But that was a miscalculation. Eren didn't drink. He'd technically never seen himself in titan form either. Erna slapped her palm to her forehead and muttered curse words to herself.

It was Krista's turn, her voice tinkled like a bell. She said she'd never met her father. She was close, but Jean was exempt from that one. Erna drank some whiskey from her glass and as it burned down her throat, she decided she didn't like this game as much as she thought.

Sasha looked at Erna with mischief in her eyes. "You need to catch up," she decided, nodding at how much whiskey she still had left compared to the rest of them. "I've never…" She seemed to think about it, but she really didn't need to because it was easy. "I've never kissed Levi."

"Oh fuck you." Erna spat before she took her drink. She hadn't thought about how dirty this game could be played.

Connie took up Sasha's lead. "I've never seen Levi's bedroom."

Erna drank again and made a face. "Is this how it's going to be?"

Connie answered, "Yeah, this is pretty much the game. Pick on the weakest link until you take them out. Usually we go for Eren with all his titan shifty stuff, but you might be an even easier target than him."

Jean was next. Erna cringed in anticipation of needing to drink again, but he went a different route, "I've never killed anyone."

Mikasa and Eren clinked glasses before drinking. Eren wiped a stray drop of whiskey from his mouth and said, "Worth it."

Erna looked at them in shock. She didn't ask for details about their homicide. She was sure she didn't want to know, even though she didn't have any strong feelings about the morality of taking human life in certain circumstances, she had a strong feeling that she didn't particularly like to think about it. "This game is fucking dark."

Armin was next and he was pragmatic about it. He said something specific to Erna because she was the most likely to lose, but he did so sweetly and apologetically, "I've never engaged in sadomasochism."

Erna drank readily, not complaining anymore. She looked him up and down and licked her lips. "I could fix that for you," she said in a seductive husk of her voice, eyes flashing with sadistic satisfaction at his sudden blush and his uncomfortable shifting in his seat.

Mikasa had the least left in her glass, so it was in her best interest to keep up the attack on Erna. "I've never had sex in Levi's office."

If it were anyone else, Erna probably would have punched them. She hesitated before taking another drink. "Lucky guess." She cringed, not at the taste anymore because at this point the taste didn't bother her, but because she could imagine the hangover she was going to have the next day and it wasn't pretty.

Eren preemptively apologized to Erna before saying, "I've never had a wet dream about Levi burning me with candle wax."

Erna groaned. "I told you that in confidence, you whore."

Jean sneered at Eren, "Are you sure you haven't? You fanboy over him pretty hard."

Eren started to stand up, but Mikasa pulled him down and held him. Erna drank and tried to think of something. She needed to prevent anyone else from having a turn. Her mind grasped at straws, clouded with too much whiskey to be very much use analytically. "Fuck… fuck… okay… let me think," she begged.

"No thinking!" Sasha repeated Jean's rule.

Erna growled in frustration. "You guys are the worst and I hate you and I wish we weren't friends."

"We're the best and you looove us and you know it," Sasha teased her.

Erna had been dead set on coming up with something that would hit everyone and get her a bonus turn, but she gave up on that. She focused on Sasha. "I've never had sex in the kitchen pantry."

Sasha stared back at her, blank face betraying nothing. After a beat of silence, Erna pointed at her and Connie and with her voice full of malice and very thinly veiled disgust, she said "I fucking heard you two. The night before the recon. I was traumatized."

"Ah shit," Connie sighed. Sasha's face fell and she dropped the naïve act. They both took a drink while everyone debated whether there was a penalty for trying to bluff. Eventually they settled on a small penalty sip for getting caught bluffing. They continued playing and everyone said things specific to Erna because it was easy and she had a lower tolerance for alcohol than Eren, so it was more fun to watch her get drunk. Most things said were vague along the never fucked the Captain lines, but then some things were very specific lucky guesses like when Jean said he'd never been blindfolded or gagged by a cravat.

The profanity that came out of Erna's mouth at every other person's turn at ganging up on her got more creative and more vitriolic as she got more drunk. They'd started the game with about twelve ounces of alcohol each and she was down to just about a finger when they got to Eren again. She was just about uselessly drunk and at the point where she didn't care if she had to drink more. She would gladly drink the whole remainder of Erwin's scotch because she was no longer rational or cognizant of exactly how drunk she was. But she still hated losing. No amount of booze could change that. If anything, alcohol only intensified that personality trait. So when it came to Eren's turn, she leaned into him and clumsily grabbed at the sleeve of his sweater. She tried being cute – something she never would have done sober. Being perceived as cute was something she was afraid of normally, but as much as she despised it, she knew that it could be a helpful tool to disarm people. She pouted and begged him to please not take her out of the game without giving her a shot at saving herself as she pressed her forehead against his arm pitifully.

Eren's eyes widened in conflict. He looked at her regretfully like he didn't enjoy what he had to do, but it would be a mercy killing to make her drink that last shot and end the game. He opened his mouth, but seemed to suddenly change his mind at the last hundredth of a second and instead of whatever he had planned, he said, "I've never… taken a dare to do a 3D maneuver that I don't have the skill to pull off."

"Fuck you, I can fucking do it!" Jean yelled and stood up, pointedly refusing to take a drink for that.

"Prove it!" Eren yelled back and his arm slid from Erna's fingers as he stood up to get in Jean's face. She sighed in relief and used the time to think as Mikasa and Armin broke up the fight and convinced Eren and Jean that now was not the time to go outside and try the stunt again.

Thinking was hard. She tried, but Jean and Eren's fighting didn't buy her enough time to come up with something that the group would have in common without her. Anything she could think of would only be a guess and that wasn't good enough for her.

When Jean and Eren were finally settled, everyone looked at her. She sighed in defeat and looked upwards as she tried to pull something from her brain.

"I never helped a bunkmate get off in my training camp barracks." It was a shot in the dark and an educated guess at the same time. Same sex experimentation was all but blatantly encouraged in the Trainee Corps. It only made sense when you had hundreds of horny teenagers all in one place who lacked the self-control to practice effective contraception. Put them in barracks, make them share beds, and subtly, tacitly approve of clumsy secretive handjobs. Everyone in Erna's barracks had done it but her. She hadn't felt any curiosity or urges. She'd gotten by feeling pretty much nothing at all.

There was a collective tensing of muscles. It was an awkward topic. Jean was the first to say fuck it and take a drink in admission. Then everyone else did and Erna got excited about getting another turn and delaying her inevitable loss until she saw that Sasha didn't take a drink. Her immediate reaction was to stand up, point, and accuse her of trying to bluff again while Sasha smugly and persistently denied it.

Jean squinted at Armin and then at Eren, as he put two and two together. "Wait.. wait.. you two were bunkmates." Armin and Eren both blushed. Eren looked away. Armin started stammering.

Mikasa spoke up when Erna started trying to physically force Sasha's whiskey to her lips and down her throat. "Erna, she's not lying. Sit down."

"Like fuck she isn't!" Erna growled, still reaching for Sasha who was now holding her away with an extended leg.

"I was her bunkmate." Mikasa said as proof of evidence.

Erna made a deep groan that turned into an exasperated scream as she sat back down. Connie pointed across the circle at Mikasa, trying to understand. "Wait, but you drank."

"I helped her out once. She was taking too long and was keeping me up. She fell asleep immediately after she finished." Mikasa said it like it was nothing. She didn't even blush. She treated it like it was purely an issue of mechanics – Sasha was keeping her up with her masturbation session, so she made her come, problem solved.

Krista made a short gasp and turned to Sasha. "You didn't reciprocate?"

Erna was unsurprised. Now that Mikasa explained it, it made perfect sense. She looked past Sasha at Connie. His mouth was hanging open and he looked like he was about to start drooling. She got his attention with a wave. When he snapped out of it and looked at her, she told him, "Connie… Your nose is bleeding."

Connie didn't say anything as he wiped away the trickle of blood with his sleeve. He took another drink, even though he didn't have to. He was just drinking for the sake of it now.

Eren said, "That's fucked up, Sasha." There was a chorus of agreement. It was bad manners at the very least. Sasha hid her face in her hands in shame.

Erna tilted her head back and moaned. "Let's just get this over with. Finish me, Krista."

Krista opened her mouth, about to take her turn, but suddenly Erna's hand was covering the lower half of her face, silencing her while she brought a finger to her own lips to shush everyone.

Jean didn't follow her directive. "Stop trying to stall, Erna. You lost, accept it."

"You guys, shut up." She hissed. She listened hard for a beat. Her eyes went wide. She leaned in and stage-whispered "Armin, how do we get out of here without going back the way we came?"

Armin whispered too, just because she was. "We can't. Why?"

Because Erna was an expert when it came to hearing and identifying Levi's footfalls. She shot up, eyes darting around to search for an escape like a wild animal for a second, ready to run. Then just as suddenly she sat back down and deflated in hopelessness, muttering, "It doesn't matter. We're already dead."

No one knew what she was talking about or what prompted this strange behavior until Levi stepped into the lamplight.

"Oi, brats, what are you doing?"

Everyone stiffened, cursed to themselves. No one tried to offer excuses or explanations. It was like they'd been through this before and knew that it was pointless to try. Erna thought that was probably exactly the case since they all seemed quite overfamiliar with the situation.

Levi didn't need an answer. He bent and picked up the files that they'd dropped into a pile on the ground. "Who broke into Erwin's office?"

Mikasa raised her hand. Levi looked impressed. He took the cigars from their crate table and put them in his pocket. As he looked around, his eyes stopped on the glass bottles they'd taken from Hange's office and he pointed at them, a slight tinge of concern and apprehension laced through his voice. "Tell me you didn't drink any of that."

Connie hiccupped. "We didn't get around to it."

Armin asked, because even impending doom couldn't quell his curiosity, "What are they?"

"Hange's vine brews." Levi took one bottle and held it up to the light to see the number on the label. "Number 9 was her attempt at a titan tranquilizer. Probably would have killed you. Didn't do shit to titans, but knocked a horse out for a day, Moblit for four."

He took the bottle of amber-colored liquid. "I'm not sure what this one was supposed to do, but Mike drank some of it thinking it was a cold remedy and had audial and visual hallucinations for a week. It was the most fun he's ever been."

Armin picked up the last one and Levi held back a laugh. "That one was supposed to increase physical endurance. Instead it enhances libido and diminishes inhibitions while also increasing physical endurance. If you drank that one I'd have been interrupting an orgy."

Armin quickly and carefully set it back down as if the liquid could sweat out through the bottle and get absorbed through his skin.

Erna whined. She couldn't take the suspense. "Are you going to kill us now?"

"That depends," Levi answered thoughtfully. He looked around. "What the fuck was the exit strategy here?"

Everyone looked at Armin who looked at the floor and answered sheepishly, "I didn't have one."

Levi was surprised. "I thought you were the only one with something besides empty space between your ears, Arlert."

"Sir… I didn't think it necessary to coordinate an escape plan… No one ever comes down here…" He was speaking softly and sounding very disappointed in himself. He seemed to be running over every possible flaw in his plan and getting very into his head about it, until he hit upon something that made him stop and wonder, "Do you mind if I ask how you knew we were here?"

"I didn't. I came down to look for something specific. You brats just happen to be that unlucky." He kicked over a small, empty crate to upend it and he started putting the files and bottles into it. "No matter how safe you think you are, always have a plan to retreat," he advised Armin.

While Armin chewed his lip in self-doubt, looking just as upset as if he had made a grave life-or-death error, Erna was distracted by something else about what Levi said.

"What were you looking for?"

Levi brought the heel of his palm to his forehead. "Oh right." He looked to Eren and asked, "Eren, when you had to sleep down here they cuffed you, right?"

Eren tried to hide the discomfort and anxiety that came with the memory, answering simply and quietly, "Yeah."

"Wrists and ankles? Or just wrists?" Levi asked as he took the bottle they'd gotten from Mike's desk. Seeing that it was empty, he dropped it into the box of their loot.

"Both." Eren made a good effort at sounding like it didn't bother him. Like he wasn't at all self-conscious or ashamed about being chained up like a monster.

"There anything left in that?" Levi asked Connie, pointing to Erwin's scotch near his feet. Connie picked it up and handed it over. Levi took it and turned to Armin again, holding up the bottle. "How did you think you were going to get away with this? You can't be dumb enough to think they wouldn't notice this shit missing and you know you're the first suspects."

Erna shouted, "You guys knew we'd get caught?!"

Armin squirmed a little and shrugged. "We assessed the odds of getting caught and decided the objective to get drunk and have fun was worth the risk."

"Was it?" Levi asked. He looked at Jean. "If I go to Erwin with this for disciplinary action it could risk your promotion."

Jean put his head in his hands and let out a long, drawn out "Fuuuuck…"

Erna grumbled, "Not worth it at all. This has been the worst ever. I'm never listening to you guys again."

Sasha snapped at her, "Don't be a sore loser."

"I didn't even lose yet!" Erna held out her glass with a shot of whiskey still left in it as proof. "And I could have come back and won if you weren't too lazy and selfish to take care of Mikasa after she helped you cum!"

Levi's perpetually half-closed eyelids rose a little in slight surprise. "What… the fuck… are you playing…?"

"'I've never'… I'm losing… They're picking on me." Erna pouted.

Levi did not feel the least bit of sympathy. "Don't be so easy to pick on." He turned to the group. "Whose turn is it? Finish her off, drink up, and you can all go run laps in the rain."

"Unnhhhhh how many?" Sasha's body slumped in despair.

"However many it takes until you vomit up everything you just drank. But finish your game first. I don't believe in ending games before they're done." Everyone groaned, but it was a much lighter punishment than they could have gotten had he left it to Erwin.

Erna raised her glass to her lips, ready to knock it back. The last bit of it wouldn't make a difference to the way she felt anyway. "Okay, Krista, go ahead. Kill me."

But Krista froze, now way too nervous to play. "I.. um.. I can't think of anything."

"Oh for fucks sake." Levi hissed in annoyance. "I'll take your turn for you." He seemed to think for a moment, then he smiled at Erna. The same slight smile and look in his eyes that he got whenever he had a wicked idea. Erna wasn't worried by it. The stuff brought up during the game had already been more humiliating than she could have imagined and she doubted anything he could say would be much worse.

"Je n'ai jamais aspiré la bitte de Commandant." He said it slowly and clearly so that she would understand even in her drunk state.

Erna held the glass still, pressed against her bottom lip. It was easy to work out the translation in her head, I've never sucked the Commander's cock, but when she got it her brain rebelled and shut down momentarily. Her mouth hung half-open and her hand stayed frozen. She waited for him to say he was just fucking with her.

He wasn't. "You can drink that," he told her after a long enough pause.

Erna took her glass away from her lips, "I… wait… no… what?" It was too much for her to process right away. But as each second ticked by it became more real.

Levi grinned at her crisis. "I wanted to tell you before you figured it out on your own. Now seemed as good a time as any."

Erna put a hand on her forehead and closed her eyes tight, tried to stop pieces of memories from clicking together. Tried to keep Erwin's face from being coupled with the feeling of having a cock filling her throat while getting fucked. It was an impossible thing to control. Now her brain pictured him connected to the muscles she'd felt and the hand on the back of her head. She shook her head in her hand and said 'No no no'over and over.

Mikasa looked worried and asked Jean, because he was the only one of them who spoke some French, "What did he say?" She sounded like she was ready to kill depending on the answer. She had an instinctively violent reaction to what she perceived as the short evil man hurting her friends.

Jean's mouth had been hanging open. He'd understood, but he was still completely confused by what he'd heard and by Erna's reaction to it. Without even thinking, he started to answer, "He said –" but before he could get anything else out, the breath rushed out of him as Erna flew from her seat, grabbed his collar, lifted him and threw him a few steps back to slam against the wall. Her teeth were bared like a snarling animal. She pressed one forearm across his chest to pin him there and covered his mouth with her other hand, her chin tilted up to lock her deadly cold grey eyes on his.

"Keep your mouth shut if you want to live to see tomorrow." She was growling. She brought her hand to his neck and pushed upward against his jaw, applying enough pressure to be dangerously close to separating his skull from his neck just to let him know she wasn't fucking around. Sufficiently frightened, he kept his mouth shut without making any snide or sarcastic comments when she let go and he slid down the wall, feet on the floor again.

Levi remained unconcerned. "You shitheads better get running. And while you're out there, think of ways to be smarter about stealing. Have an exit strategy next time. How you fucking survived this long without becoming titan food is beyond unbelievable."

Erna left Jean alone and turned around, walking back to Levi and saying bitterly, "Give me that," as she snatched the scotch from his hand.

She uncapped it and quickly brought it to her lips and tipped her head back. She gulped it down until it burned too much and she felt her stomach start to unsettle. The dizziness came immediately. She let her hand fall to her side, fingers just loosely holding the neck of the bottle, and she poked him in the chest as she let loose, speaking French too quickly for Jean to understand, "Je vais jeter tout le savon quand je serai de retour à l'appartement! Connard sadique! Je vais casser le reste des bouteilles de vin et tu pouvais le nettoyer avec tes larmes!" ("I'm throwing out all of the soap when I get back to the apartment! Sadistic asshole! I'm going to smash the rest of those wine bottles and you can clean up the mess with your tears!")

Everyone was standing now, but no one made to leave. They didn't want to miss any of this. Jean was rubbing his neck and Armin nudged him with an elbow, hoping for a translation. Jean shrugged and whispered to him, "Something about cleaning? I don't know…"

Levi smirked at her as if her anger wasn't something to be taken seriously, as if it were cute. He gently cupped her face with one hand. When she tried to turn away, he tightened his grip, holding his thumb to her chin and keeping her face tilted up to look at him. "Ne vous plaignez pas, vous l'avez aimé. N'at il pas se sentir bien? Qu'importe qui il était?" ("Don't complain, you loved it. Didn't it feel good? What does it matter who it was?")

Erna blushed and her brows knit together in defiant anger. He brushed his thumb over her lower lip, still holding her head in place, he lowered his voice, "Et j'ai aimé vous regarder." ("And I loved watching you.")

He was teasing her, trying to humiliate her further, trying to make her get wet and blush and lose her composure. He was showing her how easy it was for him to toy with her – that he could make her melt anywhere at any time he wanted even if she was infuriated with him. He was self-assured that he could turn that anger into lust with a few words and a look, at most a brush of his fingers.

It worked. It would always work. He made her breath hitch and her legs go weak. The way he held her still and smirked at her like she wasn't a dangerous thing to be afraid of made her feel small and vulnerable and that was a rush. He was the only one who looked at her like she wasn't something deadly and worthy of caution. Anyone else would be scared of her and what she could do. The way his voice sounded dark and smoky and the way his tongue – the only soft part of him – curled around French words made it easy to forget that anyone else was there. If not for her pride she would have fallen to her knees without hesitation. Instead she said in quiet resistance,"Chien sale arrogante." ("Arrogant bastard.")

She bit his thumb hard and as he recoiled his hand and shook it out, she warned him, "Tu ferais mieux de dormir avec un œil ouvert!" ("You'd better sleep with one eye open.")

The corner of his lip twitched slightly. "Nous allons parler quand tu sera rentré. Aller courir maintenant." ("We'll talk when you get back. Go run now.")

Erna remembered the bottle in her hand and without thinking about the consequences, brought it to her lips and drank all that was left. She swayed unsteadily on her feet. Somewhere in the back of her mind she hoped that was enough for a blackout of this whole night. She let the empty bottle fall into the box near their feet and she picked up one of the lanterns on the floor, gracelessly turning and heading for the stairs. The show appearing to be over, everyone followed her as she carefully held the wall and tried to take the steps as fast as she could.

"Erna, what did he say?" someone asked.

"Fuck you!" was her answer. Near the top step, she added, "I can't believe you didn't tell me that we had no way of not being caught!"

"I thought it was fairly obvious," Armin said quietly under his breath.

"Jean, what were they saying?" Connie asked.

"I'll kill you." Erna was warning both Connie and Jean. She would kill anyone who convinced Jean to talk and then she would kill Jean.

She opened the door out of the basement and started running. When she got outside, she made it less than one full lap before she tasted the bile in her mouth and fell to her knees as her body rejected all of the abuse she had put it through. She rolled onto her back, one arm over her eyes to protect them from the rain and she breathed deeply as every cell in her body pounded in an awful thudding rhythm and made her wish she could take back everything in the past hour.

She felt the world spinning too fast. When Sasha stopped next to her and said, "Don't fall asleep. If you do we get to write on you in semi-permanent ink and you can't complain," she couldn't tell where her voice was coming from. Her center of gravity and sense of balance couldn't keep up with the shift when Sasha pulled her up. It took her a few seconds to regain the ability to stand on her own. When she was stable enough, Sasha let her go, patted her on the head the way that she hated, and started running again before Erna could hit her.

She turned to go back in. She discovered herself in the apartment – she couldn't remember the walk there or much else. She stood unsteady on her feet for a few moments, trying to remember something recent, but quickly she lost the urge to remember anything. She was barely aware of what was happening or where she was when Levi's voice snapped her out of it.

"What?"

"I said go shower and brush your teeth, your breath smells like a still in a sewer."

When she woke up the next morning, she wished that she hadn't, but she couldn't fall back to sleep. Her internal clock was set too well and was too strict. Besides she was too physically uncomfortable to sleep.

Levi was gone already, but there was a pitcher of cold water set on the table next to her side of the bed. It was either a sign that Levi felt bad and wanted to make up for last night, or it was purely his practicality and desire for her to not die from dehydration and kidney failure. She sat up and held the pitcher against her forehead instead of pouring it into the accompanying glass. The cool porcelain eased her pounding headache, but only for as long as she held it there. The throbbing returned as soon as she shakily returned the pitcher to the table. She didn't try to drink it. She felt like she wouldn't be able to keep water down anyway.

She kept one hand on the wall all the way to the dining hall where she fell into a chair, barely keeping it and herself upright. She was obviously much sicker than any of her friends. She couldn't even blame the others for the hangover. If she had stopped drinking when the game was over, she wouldn't have been experiencing half the dizziness and dehydration that she was. She wondered if she could blame Levi for the hangover, then she decided that she couldn't. All he'd done was give her the information she'd been seeking out. Just the timing could have been better.

And then there he was. But he only appeared at their table to inform them that they'd be on cleaning duty for the rest of the week; Jean wouldn't take command of his new team until headquarters was spotless. Erna didn't lift her face from the table and he didn't acknowledge her presence, which was actually comforting to her. She wanted to be treated like anyone else. That was the deal. She didn't want her life as a soldier to change. Needed the routine and the certainty of it.

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Erna leaned on her mop handle. Her mind wandered. She didn't understand what Levi got out of cleaning. She didn't mind tedious and boring tasks, but cleaning was such a thankless chore that was never really done. Nothing would ever be clean to his high standards for more than a day or so. Dust would always settle. She rested her cheek on her hand over top of the handle and closed her eyes. She dozed off standing up.

That didn't last long. Jean woke her up with a hand on her shoulder. She startled and spun around, hands instinctively gripping the mop handle as though it were a weapon.

Jean put his hands up and his lips turned up into a smug sneer. "Easy there, killer."

Erna turned around and dropped the mop back into the bucket, the pricking in her wrists that came with panic started to subside. She leaned on it and held her forehead. "Is this how it usually goes?" Her voice was quiet, tired again, absent of the startled panic of a moment before.

"How what goes?"

"When you guys have been caught in the past… You just have to clean for a week or so?"

"Yeah, mostly…"

"Doesn't that seem like a light sentence to you? I mean, comparatively? I've gotten worse punishment for smaller things."

Jean stood and thought about that while Erna drew her mop from the bucket and started weakly pushing it around again.

"I don't think Erwin and the others can get too mad at us when we do childish shit, because we're risking our lives every day. It's probably better to suffer the occasional act of insubordination than have to deal with us losing our minds with paranoia and depression."

Erna only replied with a hum. Thinking that was probably what was happening to her. Slowly.

Jean's tone turned from contemplative to teasing. "Or we're getting off light this time because you sucked Erw—"

Erna stopped him from finishing his sentence with a quick jab below the sternum with the broom handle. He doubled over in pain, trying to catch his breath. She went back to cleaning as if nothing happened. She said matter of factly over her shoulder, loud enough for him to hear her over his wheezing, "I can't confirm or deny. I was blindfolded. But I can tell you that if you mention it again, I'll kill you slowly and torture everyone you love… probably not in that order. It would be more fun to do horrible things to Armin if I could make you watch."

She didn't let on whether or not she was exaggerating for effect. She wasn't really sure herself. Sometimes she felt like she had a monster inside her with the potential for much cruelty and she was just trying to keep it tamped down.

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Mike came to get her towards the end of the day, making her follow him to his office after accepting everyone's half hearted apologies for the breaking and entering with a silent nod.

She was tired and cranky and suspicious of everything. She felt sure she couldn't have been dragged there for anything good, but how the hell could she know. Mike was impossible to read and always so calm. It irritated her.

"Am I in more trouble? Or did you want to kick my ass at chess again?" She lashed out at him and immediately felt like shit about it, but his calm expression didn't change. Sometimes it seemed like he was her emotional punching bag. He never reacted to her outbursts and it made her feel a little better to get the vitriol out of her system without hurting anyone.

"You're not in more trouble…"

She ran her fingers through her hair, dragged her nails over her scalp. It killed her a little to do it, but she said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

If he didn't want an apology, she didn't understand why she was there. She wanted to ask, but she held her tongue because she was sure it would come out bratty or worse.

He looked at her in a subtle searching way that she was used to. The way most people used to look at her when her face was very much less expressive and they were trying to read her for emotions that she didn't have. He had to know by now that she couldn't hide emotions when she had them, so he had to be looking for something else.

After some silence, he asked, "Did you want to get caught?"

His voice was free of inflection. He wasn't being sarcastic or attempting to mock her, which just annoyed her further because it was a stupid question.

"Of course not." She crossed her arms, unable to hide her impatience. She hated when she was being questioned without knowing the point of the questions.

"Do you think it was a good plan?"

"I didn't think about it." She started tapping her foot. She couldn't hold still.

"If you didn't want to get caught, why didn't you think about your plan of action?"

Her nails dug into her upper arms. "I just figured it was taken care of. I assumed it must be a good idea."

Mike leaned back a bit in the chair behind his desk. He tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling. He didn't seem like he was relaxed, just composed and contemplative. He asked, "Because it was someone else's idea?"

Erna mumbled, "I guess."

"Did you have a better idea?"

Erna pressed her lips tight together. She wouldn't answer that. There weren't many things she was uncomfortable talking about, but that question made her viscerally uncomfortable. She wanted to sink into the floor. She would settle for stubbornly remaining silent until he dismissed her.

When he realized she wasn't answering, he turned his gaze from the ceiling back to her. She felt challenged by the eye contact and looked down at the floor.

"I'll rephrase. Did you have an idea?"

Her nails dug further into her skin and she couldn't stop her foot nervously tapping against the leg of the chair. She wondered how long he would patiently wait for her to break her tense silence before letting her go. Probably longer than she could stand to keep it up. She took a few deep breaths and then said quietly, "Break into the offices, steal less than half from whatever bottles we find, water down the rest, then drink and do whatever in an empty stall at the end of the second stable. The stables have one person on watch overnight, so you can bribe them to look the other way or even act as a lookout and being at the end of the building, near the door, makes it easy to leave quickly and scatter."

Her face burned. She was ashamed to say it out loud. She was afraid it was wrong, that there were obvious things she didn't think of. She knew there had to be.

"Why didn't you suggest that?" Mike's voice was still free of any inflection. He betrayed no judgment or opinions if he had any.

"I thought it was a bad idea…"

"What makes it a bad idea?"

Erna twisted the toe of her boot into the floor and kept her eyes pointed down, focused on it. "I don't know."

Mike sighed. The first sign of any emotion at all from him. She kept her chin tilted down, but looked at him from under her eyelashes. He was leaned back in his chair, hands folded behind his head. Looking at the ceiling again. He looked like he was thinking. And like he was troubled. Like she was a difficult problem to be solved.

"Can you think of anything that would make that a bad idea?"

Erna's nose and eyes started to feel itchy. She hated this. She felt like he was dissecting her flaws and pinning them onto a tray to show to her just how fucked she was. She felt powerless and frustrated. She wanted to leave.

"I don't know… I can't think of anything…" Her voice was small and quiet and pitiable.

"There isn't anything to think of. It's not a bad idea."

"I just assumed that if it was a good idea then someone else would have thought of it."

"So it was a bad idea because you thought of it…" He said it like he almost thought it was funny.

"Don't fucking patronize me." Her voice still sounded small and weak.

"It's funny because you're so certain that you don't have good ideas, but you don't have any evidence to back that certainty up."

She rubbed her eyes. The itchiness behind them wouldn't go away. Her heart beat faster.

"So what's the point?" She wanted to get this over with. Whatever she was supposed to be learning or volunteering, she wanted to get it done or at least tell him whatever he wanted to hear so that she could leave.

"Just trying to understand." He tipped his chair back and put his feet up on the desk. Erna's jaw clenched and her breath came a little harder. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor because looking around or looking at him made her feel more trapped and more frantic. Looking at the walls and the objects around the room made her think of escape and made her frustrated that she wouldn't let herself just walk out of there until he gave her permission to leave. She heard a new sound and realized it was her teeth grinding against each other. She wanted to bite down on her hand to keep them still and to have something else to think about – some pain to concentrate on – but she didn't want to make her discomfort so obvious. Her arms uncrossed and her hands reached down and curled around the seat of the wooden chair on each side of her, fingers hooking under it and digging into the wood.

"You look like you're about to cry or hit something." His voice was free of sympathy. He said it as if he was only stating a fact. He waited for her to respond, but she didn't. She felt she had nothing to say about that. If she wanted to cry or hit something or keep all of her anxiety wrapped up tightly inside until it destroyed her then that was her business and she didn't feel obligated to acknowledge it to anyone. Her nails dug and scratched into the chair. It felt good to tear the wood grain bit by bit, like picking away at dead skin.

"You didn't show nearly this level of conflict when you made the decision to train by yourself outside the walls." It was the first time he'd mentioned it outright since they'd first talked about it. He gave her a moment to clench and unclench her jaw. He seemed to be pausing between sentences so that the silence in between would force her to think about what he was saying even with how much she wanted to shut everything out and retreat inside herself.

"Is it because that plan is perfect?"

"No." That she could answer easily. Nothing she came up with was ever perfect by any stretch of the word.

"But you're not anxious about it." He was leading her somewhere. She could tell. She hated it and she wanted to stand up and throw her chair through the window behind him before she would let herself be led around her own fucking head.

She took a deep breath in and it shuddered a little when it came out. Her nails dug deeper into the chair, pain blossomed underneath them. "It's different. That decision only affects me. It's okay if it's flawed."

There was silence. She waited, but he didn't say anything. When the silence got to be too much, she finally looked up and away from the floor. He wasn't leaning back in his chair anymore, his feet were on the floor again and he'd been watching her. He finally spoke when she made eye contact, as if that was what he was waiting for.

"I see."

"Tch." No two words could have been more infuriating to her. They twisted inside her and made her feel like an insignificant speck of a human being. Like she was some kind of experimental specimen and he'd just cut her open and found something interesting. She sniffed hard, flaring her nostrils. The itchiness was overwhelming.

"You can go."

The bindings inside her that had been keeping her together broke apart. They snapped like steel cables, causing collateral damage as they whipped around. All her control disappeared. She stood up, nails still dug into the underside of the chair dragged out and set it in motion to topple over. She kicked it before it ever touched the ground and sent it flying into the wall as she yelled, "You don't get to do that!"

His face didn't change in the slightest even as she slammed her fists onto his desktop. She screamed without thinking about or knowing what she was saying. Adrenaline took over and her actions weren't kept in check anymore.

"You don't get to drag me around the edges of the darkest parts of my head, make me pick up all the filth, and just leave me there confused and dirty without knowing what the point of any of this is or what the fuck you think you've just learned!"

"Pick up that chair and sit down."

She blinked. She looked behind her where the chair should have been. It was gone and she didn't remember how it got across the room. She was suddenly aware of the painful tightness in her hands. She looked down at her white-knuckled fists on the desk and brought them up slowly, uncurling her fingers, stretching them out and looking at her hands as if it were the first time she was seeing them.

"I won't talk to you until you calm down."

It took her a second to get collected again. She felt like she'd just left her body and was coming back into it. She remembered the chair and crossed the room to pick it up and set it back where it should be. She sat in it contritely and looked at the floor again.

"Look at me."

Her eyes ticked upwards, but she avoided direct eye contact. She cheated by focusing on his nose. After she held herself still and quiet for a moment, he spoke again.

"What I learned is that your unwillingness to take responsibility is disturbing to say the least. You have an incredibly narcissistic certainty that you can't have good ideas or help anyone even though any reasonable person couldn't pick out a flaw in the plan you just told me. Against all logic, you think that inherently, just because an idea came out of your head, it's not worth anything."

Erna's vision went cloudy. She hadn't blinked in a while. She kept her eyes pointed at Mike's face, but he was blurry now. Her eyes went in and out of focus.

"And the fact that you're only okay with making decisions for yourself, not for others, when you're so certain that your ideas are bad, means that you're at best apathetic about what happens to you, but I don't think it's apathy. I think you wouldn't mind destroying yourself. And you obviously don't mind holding yourself back from offering a suggestion or alternative plan that could save people. You'll die following someone else's misguided ideas before you'll risk being responsible for anyone else."

Erna regretted asking for this. Wanted to tell him to stop, but couldn't bring herself to admit that she couldn't take the truth. Even while he told her exactly what her weaknesses were, she couldn't let herself show her vulnerability openly and honestly.

"And I get to do this because you gave up the right to decide what you would and wouldn't be comfortable with when you joined the military. With most people we have to break them down until they get comfortable with following orders. That's the point of the Trainee Corps. With you we'd have to break you down until you're comfortable with giving orders."

He sighed, folded his hands behind his head and looked up towards the ceiling again. "I don't think I know how to do that. When I told you to leave it was so that I could sit here and think about it. But then you had to have a fit."

She couldn't keep looking at him. She'd never felt so thoroughly ashamed and impossibly broken. Worthless and toxic. Her mind started to shut down, refused to think about what he was saying anymore. She pushed it all into the back of her head, locked it away, and let her mind go blank. The itchiness behind her eyes and nose started to fade away.

"Do you feel like you're here right now?"

"More or less." She answered in the cold monotone that used to be her baseline. Her classic coping mechanism of not feeling anything kicked in and denied her any chance for dealing with reality or emotional catharsis.

"Which is it? More or less?"

"Less." She felt far away. Not completely there.

"Do you remember kicking the chair?"

She looked around, confused. "No."

"You black out sometimes."

"Oh…"

"Do you think you could hurt anyone?"

She looked up again. Searched his face. Tried to see what he thought and whether he thought she could hurt anyone, because she didn't know herself. She couldn't tell from looking at him. Anything written on his face was only subtle. He looked slightly troubled, disappointed underneath the stoic mask.

"I suppose anything is possible…" she answered.

He watched her closely for a while. She was still and quiet, not tensed up like when they began. She wasn't quite there anymore. She felt like she'd sunk deep underwater.

After a minute he said, "Grab the chess board. I have time to kick your ass a few games."

She sighed heavily. "That's why I don't ask you to play anymore. I hate losing." She got up to get the chess board from its place on the bookshelf and put it on the desk, then pulled her chair in closer.

"I know, but I can't let you leave like this. You need to decompress." He finished setting up the pieces. "And I'm not going to let you win."

She examined the black pieces on her side of the board as he made the first move. Her voice went quiet again, worried. "Am I a monster?"

"No…" He put his elbows on the desk. His pointer fingers made a steeple against his chin as he thought. About what, she couldn't tell.

She moved a pawn. "You would have noticed…"

He raised his eyebrows. She'd interrupted whatever train of thought he'd been on. "Noticed what?"

"The watered down whiskey. You would have noticed. That was the only flaw I thought of."

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When Mike finally deemed Erna mentally stable enough to be released, it was late. She ate something standing in the empty kitchen and headed back to the apartment in a daze. Exhausted and fuzzy, but not emotionally shut down the way she had been through the first three or four games of chess.

When she got back to the apartment, Levi and Hange were set up in the living room, working at the coffee table. Papers were scattered around, but they seemed to have a system of organization that worked well enough, otherwise Levi would have stopped everything to straighten things. Hange acknowledged her with a smile and a nod. Levi didn't at all.

"What are you working on so late?"

"Plans of bribery, espionage, insubordination, and top secret research." Hange smiled at her in such a way where Erna wasn't sure if all of that was true, but she felt safe assuming that it was. As she took off her boots, Hange assured her, "Nothing you need to worry about."

Erna nodded. Sure it was nothing she wanted to be involved in either way, she was content to not ask questions. Levi kept his eyes on a stack of papers, but as she walked by the couch, he reached out and brushed her passing fingertips with his and told her, "Don't fall asleep. I need to talk to you."

Normally she would have been happy to follow anything that even sounded like an order, but that one was impossible. "I can't promise anything. I'm going to take a shower and the second I hit that bed, I'm probably going to be out. Maybe even before that." She felt like she could fall asleep mid-sentence just standing there.

"Then don't go to bed. Come back out here when you're done."

Erna looked over his shoulder, scanned the papers he was looking at, then over the others spread over the coffee table until she found the word she was looking for. She leaned over the couch and put her finger on it and asked, "What's that word in French?"

Levi turned to see what she was pointing at. "It's the same. Titan."

She straightened back up and looked down at him. He went right back to concentrating on whatever he was reading.

"Quand est la dame titan folle laissant?" (When is the crazy titan lady leaving?)

"Elle aura disparu au moment où tu avais terminé." (She'll be gone by the time you're finished.)

"When you speak French, I can only assume you're talking about me." Hange interrupted them in a sing-songy tone.

Erna walked away as Levi told Hange, "Get this pile of shit cleaned up and out of here in less than fifteen minutes. If I have to read one more word, I'm going to have an aneurysm."

As promised, Hange was gone when Erna came back out, which was lucky because she didn't have the energy or inclination to put clothes on again after showering and was only wrapped in a big, fluffy towel. Levi was sprawled out on the couch, an arm hooked over the back. His eyes were closed and he rubbed his fingertips over his temples like he had a headache. She walked around to the couch and was about to sit on the floor, but Levi reached out, took her hand and turned her around. He pulled her down onto the couch to lay between his legs, facing away. He wrapped her in his arms and rested his chin on her head.

Conventional displays of affection felt strange and would normally make her uncomfortable, but just then she felt okay with it. More than okay, she felt comforted and warm and it felt right. But okay was about the most that she would admit to feeling. She put her hands on his arms and pulled them to hold her tighter.

He whispered into her hair, "Je suis navré."

She didn't know that one. She started to open her mouth to ask, but before the words came out, he said, "I shouldn't have told you about Erwin when you were in such a bad place. It was a shitty, impulsive thing to do."

She didn't say anything. She didn't know what she could say to that. She couldn't tell him that he was wrong, that it was okay. He was right, it was a shitty, impulsive thing to do. But she had reacted to it impulsively too. It was a mess.

She pushed back, molded herself into him. She thought of something she could say with reasonable accuracy, "I'm okay now."

She could feel him smile against her hair. He pressed his cheek against the side of her head.

"Sometimes I forget how fragile you are."

He was teasing her, but it was skirting around the edges of truth. "I am not." She acted highly offended and lightly pressed her teeth into his arm wrapped tight around her shoulders. They were both quiet for a while, then she asked, "What's 'navré'?"

"Tch. I didn't intend for you to catch that."

"Well I did. I pay very close attention. What is it?"

He pulled her closer into his chest and let out a deep breath. "It means I'm terribly sorry…"

Her heart sunk. She didn't want him to be sorry. She wanted to tell him he didn't have to be perfect, she didn't want or need him to be. That not everything had to be clean and organized and that it was okay if sometimes they were a mess together because it made them both more human. Her breath stopped as the center of her chest felt tight like it was twisting around into a ball of knots. She consciously took a deep breath and tried to get her heart to slow down and not feel so much. Her hand found his over her shoulder and she pulled his fingertips to her lips and grazed them with her teeth, because that was stronger and harder than kissing. He squeezed his thighs, trapped her between his legs. She chastised him through smiling lips, "Cheater. Trying to get away with saying it in a way I wouldn't understand."

She wiggled up and back until she was more level with him. She dropped her head, neck curled over his shoulder so she could trace soft kisses over his jawline. He tilted his head back, gave her better access to his neck and throat, which she gladly took advantage of. She could feel his vocal chords vibrate under her lips as he hummed. She bit at his throat, made slight indentations in his neck marking where her teeth had been. She smiled against his skin because he genuinely seemed to not know that she was only doing all of this to tease him. When he started to move his hands and tighten his legs around her, she tilted back a little to whisper in his ear. "Hey Levi?"

"Hm?" His eyes were closed and he was lax. Melted. Perfect.

She inhaled, and then whined as loudly and shrilly as possible in his ear, "Why Erwin thooough? That's so fucked up!" His head tilted swiftly away from her, tried to escape the assault on his eardrums.

He put his hands firmly on her shoulders and pushed her back down, wrapped an arm around her and put a hand over her mouth so that she couldn't whine for now. He rested his chin on her head again.

"Another impulse," he explained. "Not a shitty one though. Perfectly sound reasoning: He's easily got to be the most horny, pent up sexually frustrated prick in the Survey Corps. I'm surprised he didn't pump you so full of built up cum that it came out your nose."

Erna's face scrunched up in revulsion. Her cry of "You're disgusting!" was muffled by his hand over her mouth.

"More importantly, he wouldn't get attached. I let Eren lick you for five minutes and for a week you could practically see his heart beating out of his chest every time you were even in the same room." He removed his hand from her mouth, but was ready to replace it if she whined again.

She highly doubted that. "If so, I'm sure that had more to do with his fear of you than anything else."

Assured that she wasn't going to pierce his eardrums again, he moved his hand from hovering over her mouth to caress her cheek. He murmured against the back of her head, "Because you think I'm the only one who can see that you're beautiful." He sighed. "I'm not going to disabuse you of that notion. It benefits me."

She didn't think she was beautiful inside or out. She didn't understand what he thought he saw. "I think you have unusual taste."

He mussed her hair, teased her, "And they think you're so smart."

She batted his hand away. "I am smart," she informed him, feigning haughtiness. "I finally beat Mike at chess. I'm one for thirty-five now."

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(A/N) Soooo long!

I would like to point out that my French translations suck. I am probably the only one who cares, but just so you know, most of the French in here that is more than a few words long is probably riddled with confused verbs and inappropriate prepositions.

Um, what else? Sorry for no ErnaxLevi smut. I feel like realistically they just can't be fucking all the time because they live in a nightmare world and it is probably really hard to even keep it all psychologically together and not lose their minds, much less also find the urge to fuck constantly. But, ya know, you can always go back and read the previous smut-tastic chapter.

Thank you for being into this. I love you.