Word Count: 2,779
A captain shorter than all but one of his squad, especially one holding a rather shaken and red-faced child, couldn't have possibly looked terrifyingly angry. However, the fact of the matter still stood: the obscenely small, clean captain known as the Levi Squad captain Captain Levi of the Survey Corps was holding his hardly older than one-year-old daughter Lillian Elizabeth Rivaille in one hand and an absurdly tall stack of paperwork beneath the other was in fact objectively petrifying to his six squad members despite one's first thought.
Not a single one dared actually look him straight in his fuming, silvery eyes for fear that they, in a single instant, would be reduced into nothing more than a wisp of a whisper of a memory. Instead, they stared straight ahead, at perfect, frozen attention, out the window behind their captain's desk, at the curtains that framed it, or, if the cadet were so unlucky, at the wall the held it.
His office was stone silent, save for the cold, rhythmic, repeated sound of his soles hitting the cold, stone floor as he tapped his foot on the floor, and for the (comparatively) loud and whiny breaths of Lillian's just drying tears from her trauma. It seemed as if the entire room was holding its breath, and it stayed so for what felt like an eternity.
A single drop of sweat ran down Connie's back. Unnerved, it made another one drip down his forehead. He did not flinch, did not move a muscle nor tear his eyes away from the single crack in the wall he had fixated upon since entering the room. Refusing to acknowledge his fear, the sweating soon stopped, but the tension did not. It was so thick that not even a knife would suffice to break it: only the Colossal Titan could at this point of time.
"At ease," Levi hissed.
Connie took his first deep breath of what felt like the hour, slid his left foot so that it was shoulder's width away from his right, and dropped his hands as blades to his sides, all in perfect sync with his teammates. However, none dared loosen up their muscles, stiff from having to stay still for so long after being so active.
Their captain's free hand came off the stack of paper, and Lillian was promptly switched over to that one. Levi began to walk ever so slowly before his subordinates, stopping at the end of the row, where the shortest of them stood: Connie Springer.
The boy almost imperceptibly gulped.
Oh, he tried to keep it as inconspicuous as he could; in all honesty, his instincts had kicked in, and he was playing 'possum just as much as a real opossum would in that situation. But his rusty muscles refused to play as he wished and moved visibly despite his wishes.
The captain's eyes almost imperceptibly narrowed. However, he said nothing and continued walking until he was behind his desk.
"You all know what you've done, correct?"
"Yes, sir," came weak, scattered mumblings.
"Sound off, cadets."
"Yes, sir!" they replied, using muscles they only used when they screamed as terrified. Though, granted, now seemed the time to be terrified.
Levi took a step backward, and his expression seemed to relax slightly. "Good," he said. He spent the next minute or so simply pacing in circles around his desk, scrutinizing his subordinates with a sharpened glare every so often.
He paused in front of Jean, who was on the other end of the line from Connie, before he made another loop. He slammed his free hand down on the mighty pile of paperwork on his desk, causing everyone to flinch from surprise.
"Your punishment will be…" He paused very grandly, and the whole room seemed to hold its breath, though Lillian didn't seem to get the memo and accidentally ruined the whole effect. "Filing your own taxes."
Levi squad exhaled all at the same time and were finally, truly, at ease. Was that really all?
"They're due, completed, in two weeks. Leave them on my desk, and Erwin and I will take care of the rest. If you need help, just track down Four-Eyes, and Moblit will probably be there to help you.
"Dismissed."
It was but an hour later when Connie discovered that neither he nor Sasha nor anyone, really, except Armin and Jean, really, were as literate as they liked to think they were. Even discovering that Jean was one of the more literate ones of their group had come as a surprise, but coming from a (albeit lower) middle-class family, it made sense.
Armin could only read and do math as well as he did because he tried; he, Eren, and Mikasa had stopped formal schooling after the fall of Wall Maria, and the military's schooling hardly focused on loftier topics like arithmetic or language.
Hence why when Connie opened up the instruction manual Moblit had given him and Sasha, he felt as if it were nothing but a pile of gibberish. The two of them had tried flipping through it together, holed up in the boys' dorm, but since Sasha had no formal schooling prior to joining the military… well.
While it was true, they could both read enough to get by, the sheer density of the information and foreignness of the language in tax manual
Suffice to say, they had a bit of a problem on their hands.
So, they barged into the Shiganshina trio's workspace in Sasha and Mikasa's room for help.
"Aaaarmin, what's a W-2?"
"Aaaarmin, what are all these schedules for?"
"Aaaarmin, what does 'gross income' mean?"
"Aaaarmin–"
"Okay, okay, I get it; you guys have no idea what's going on," the small blond irritably cut in. "Just sit down, we'll figure this out together."
"Say, where's Jean?" Eren asked.
Sasha shrugged. "Went off on his own, I think. Dunno how well he's doing, but he seems to understand the manual at the very least."
"I'm pretty sure we scared him off with how little we know," Connie pitched in.
"Damn rich kid," Eren joked as he kicked off his shoes and socks so that he could sit cross-legged on a bed. "Able to read well and pay his own taxes, like daaaamn that great education quality in the inner walls, amirite?"
Armin snorted and flipped back and forth between the same two pages, trying to process what it was trying to say. "I can only imagine what the schools teach all the way in Sina."
"Probably that ye olde kingy Fritz is a saint and we should all respect him for being 'progressive' and 'helping marginalized peoples'," Connie joked, and everyone laughed (even Mikasa let out a snort).
"Thank goodness we have good old Historia on the throne now." Sasha sighed with contentment and pulled a lump of bread out of her uniform pocket. She stared at the handbook before herself and Connie, but no matter how hard she tried, it was just too… wordy.
"Hey, Eren, do you think we could get away with checking the box that says 'married, filing separately'?" asked Mikasa, talking for the first time since Connie and Sasha had entered. "Apparently you get more tax deductions if you're married."
"I think the real question there is would Heichou let you two get away with it," Armin absently replied for him. "Though, I don't think it really matters right now if you get extra tax deductions or not. We're not paid in cash; we never see any of this money for ourselves, and we're pretty much provided for by the government. I mean, yeah, we technically we get paid– I think–"
Connie's mind wandered after that, having lost interest in the conversation.
"…You know, we might be able to get out of all this paperwork," Mikasa thoughtfully said. About half her forms were filled with numbers that made little to no sense, almost as though she guessed on all the little input boxes and attempted to do the math from there.
Now what she had just said brought him back to the real world with the words "get out of" and "paperwork". Even better that they were in the same sentence.
Everyone else seemed to perk up as well.
"Really? How?" Sasha asked, more excited than anyone else besides perhaps himself that they wouldn't have to do anything.
"Well, we pay taxes to the government."
"The tax collectors take a cut of it, though," Armin chimed in.
"Our main governmental body is the queen, Historia. So therefore, since we have connections, we can see if we can either visit her and pay taxes like that, or see if she can come here and we pay taxes like that."
"You know, that doesn't make much logical sense, but I'm still on board with this idea," Connie decided.
"Not much of what you and Sasha do makes any logical sense," Eren said.
"Fair point."
There was a significant pause between the five of them.
"Sooo, are we actually do this?" Armin prompted.
Connie grinned. "Abso-fucking-lutely."
Dear Historia,
Whassup girl, it's your buds from the 104th here (Armin, Eren, Mikasa, Sasha, and Connie, to be exact). We hope you've been doing well. It's been like a month since we've seen you. You should come visit.
Connie got his head stuck between some fence posts the other day. We're still not sure how, but it was hilarious. He still insists that Jean paid him to do it but none of us have seen the money to prove it, sooooo…
Anyway, you might be wondering why we're writing. It's been like a month since we've seen you and absolutely no word from us whatsoever. I hope you don't assume we don't care. We miss youuuu. Anyway, taxes are due in two weeks, and we have no idea what we're doing. Kindly get your educated royal heinie over here so that you can help us.
Sincerely,
Armin Arlert
Eren Jaeger
Mikasa Ackerman
Conny Springer
Susha Blouse
Historia looked up from the letter, absolutely flabbergasted.
She read it over again. All she could really do at this point was facepalm out of sheer speechlessness and exasperation.
She folded up the letter and sighed. She really had nothing to say to her friends, no way to respond to their… plea? Though she had to admit, the random paragraph about Connie getting his head stuck between fence posts was genuinely hilarious and honestly sounded exactly like something he would do.
Just thinking about it made her want to laugh, but she was in the presence of at least two chambermaids who had the uttermost fearful respect of her, and she didn't really want to ruin that kind of awe-filled image they had of her.
Still, some sniggers escaped her. "Why am I even friends with these idiots?" she mused.
She put the mask of tired calm back on before she got too carried away and tossed the letter onto a dresser, sighing. "Lynne?" she called.
"Yes, milady?" one of her maids quietly piped up.
"Could you fetch my old uniform and gear and then tack up old Junebug for me? I have some business in Rose– oh, but don't tell anyone. I don't want the kids to get too rowdy if they I'm gone for so long."
"So long, Your Highness?" Both maids looked quite alarmed.
Historia laughed lightly. "Don't worry; I'll only be a few days. Oh, but do make sure Lena doesn't forget to tuck them all in at night."
"All right, you dumb fucks, what's going on?"
Everyone settled into their places in the Mikasa and Sasha's room, whether that place be on one of the beds themselves, on the side table, or just straight-up on the floor.
"Actually, I think the better term for this situation would be 'illiterate fucks'," Armin corrected.
"Armin, only literate people say 'illiterate'," Mikasa pointed out.
"I don't even know what either of those words even mean," Connie absently said.
"Illiterate means you can't read, Connie," Armin explained.
Sasha suddenly barked with laughter. "That's us all right! Dumb, illiterate fucks."
"Soooo, refresh my memory," Historia said. "Why did you ask me to visit?"
Sasha leaned over and rested her head ever so lightly on the small girl's knee. "Because we looooooove you, Historia~"
The small blonde was not amused, pushing Sasha off her knee without batting an eye. "Of course, because friends who love their friends never send any letters," she dryly answered.
Eren sheepishly grinned. "It's been a busy month?" He tried to cover up the fact that they had somewhat forgotten about their small-but-powerful friend.
The rest of them nodded their heads solemnly in agreement.
"So. Taxes," Mikasa said, steering the conversation back to where it had ought to be. "How do we file them?"
"Do we just pay you, get you to sign a form so that Captain Levi lets it go, and be done with it?"
"Well, I think first we need to find out how much we pay her."
"Hang on, guys. I could have sworn that there had been a spike in the trasry about a month ago, and I'd been told it was taxes," Historia cut in, very confused all of a sudden. "I really thought you guys were just joing about the taxes thing in the letter, kind of like how you were talking about Connie getting his head stuck between fence posts."
Connie looked incredulously at Armin. "You told her WHAT?"
"Oh, was it a secret?"
"I NEVER GOT MY HEAD STUCK BETWEEN TWO FENCEPOSTS! ! !"
"Well, we needed some kind of filler so that it wouldn't look like we were just begging for help on taxes," Armin argued.
The whole letter made a lot more sense to Historia now. Of course Armin wrote it with little to no input from the others. Only he would ever start up a letter to the fucking queen up with "whassup girl".
"But wait, guys," Eren said. "If Historia got the taxes already, then what are we filing?"
Everyone paused at that. Was all this just a ploy by Levi to get them out of his hair for a while? No, it couldn't have been; he was too respectful of the rules to just give them a fake punishment.
Armin flipped through his heap of paperwork then suddenly paused. "Guys, you're not going to belieive this," he said as he pulled out his W-2. He showed it to all of them and pointed to one of the boxes.
Amount withheld by government.
Everyone turned to face Historia.
She threw her hands up in the air, though it was in neither surrender nor defeat. "Don't look at me," she said defensively. "I run an orphanage, not every aspect of the government."
"But you're queen," Connie pointed out.
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's every aspect of the government," said Sasha.
Historia opened her mouth to refute that, but the door behind her opened up first. Jean walked in, staring at his own tax work.
"Hey guys, do you know what order we're supposed to attach these forms? I can't– woAH!" He stumbled over the tiny Historia but caught himself just in time.
"You're done?" Eren yelled before Jean could apologize to the queen.
So instead, he threw a quizzical look at Eren. "Yeah?" he replied, but it sounded a lot more like a question than an answer. "I mean, we pretty much only had to plug in the numbers on the W-2 and have everything else left blank. Maybe fill out a schedule or two, depending on what happened over the year. After all, Captain Levi did say to just fill out the forms given and leave the rest on his desk for him and Commander Smith to do."
He turned to Historia. "Sorry for tripping over you. I must've missed you from how small you were."
"Things your future significant other will be saying about y–" She stopped herself.
"What?"
She sighed and waved him off. "It's nothing," she said. "But I can't believe these five called me out here for nothing."
"We looooove you, Historiaaa~" Sasha sang again.
"Oh, pooh; go file your taxes."
Author's Note idk anymore so I'll just make it the same as the chapter number sooo xxiii. whoops almost forgot i update this on sundays. You know, at first i was like "oh no this chapter's kinda filler-y i hope they don't mind i'd better apologize in the a/n! !" and then i realized. this entire fic is filler. there is no plot. they are raising lillian. that /is/ the plot.
how2filetaxes101 halp it's been like two years since i did mock taxes i'm not sure what happens with the schedules after schedule d. also headcanons, so many headcanons in this fic. like the literacy rate, oh boy. tfw you use band camp to help you with military commands haha. also sasha signed her name as susha because if you write your a's too fast they look kinda like u's, and it's not that hard to scribble braus so fast that it looks like blouse.
anyway, sorry for the long-ass hiatus, but this fic is back and kicking! ! whooooo-hooooo! ! ! i missed my beans. anyway feel free to follow or fave if you're enjoying this plotless slice of life, and leave your thoughts in the reviews, if that's what you're into! ! ! and as always, have a greaaaat daaaay~