These characters are under copyright by Hajime Isayama and/or Kodansha Comics or others. This is a work of fanfiction, for no monetary gain.

A/N:
If you like this story, you might also like my original published work, the four book high fantasy series, Descent of Kings, by Maria Albert, available on Amazon and through the publisher, Dreamspinner.

Chapter 36 – I Must Be Dreaming

Erwin awoke in muddled confusion, staring at the ceiling. This wasn't his room. Or his bed, he realized belatedly as he stretched stiff muscles and looked at the back of a familiar sofa. Why was he asleep on his office sofa? Whenever he'd fallen asleep in his office before, it had always been in his chair, at his desk. Had he stumbled over to the sofa, half asleep?

Oh God. Levi. He'd dreamt that he'd found Levi, that he was still alive, injured, but alright. It had seemed so real, even though Levi had been in clothes he'd never wear, he was close friends with Scouts he barely even tolerated, he'd been naked on top of Ackerman, Yeager Titan had tried to kill him… Tea. He'd been drinking tea, with Levi. He'd told Levi he loved him and Levi had admitted the same, they'd kissed and… It had been so real, he swore he could actually still smell the fucking tea…

He closed his eyes and cried out, like a wounded animal, not a man, a pathetic sound somewhere between a scream and a whimper, releasing all the anguish in his shredded heart. He couldn't do this anymore.

His pistol was in his desk drawer. He needed to get up, walk the three meters to his desk, and end this. But he couldn't move, he could barely even breathe. He wished he could just make himself stop breathing.

He stiffened as he heard a sound, like footsteps, but not. The click of crutches?

Oh God. Was he even truly awake? Was he still dreaming, trapped in a wondrous, nightmare fantasy where Levi was alive? Or had he finally just gone completely mad?

"Erwin, wake up. You're having a nightmare," an impossible voice said, with tenderness and compassion that Erwin had only ever heard before from Levi directed at his dying men.

Wake up! You need to wake up before you're trapped here forever. Insane.

But Levi was here. Was that so bad? To be insane, but able to see Levi, to hear him, to touch him? His sanity was a small price to pay. But what if it got worse? What if Levi turned into a Titan and ate him? Or if he and Mikasa… A terrible keening started in his throat.

"Erwin! Wake up, damn it!" Levi's ghost commanded harshly, as a hand grabbed Erwin's shoulder and shook him.

Erwin yelped and lashed out in wild terror at the impossible touch, unable to surrender his sanity so easily, his hand slamming into something solid, not flesh, but something harder, as his eyes snapped open.

"Fuck! What the hell did that psycho bitch put in your tea? The shit you both drugged me with didn't make me fucking crazy," Levi snapped, glaring at him warily, clinging tightly to his left crutch, standing on his left leg, his right foot held up and off the floor. "You're lucky you hit my crutch and not my leg, you ass, or you wouldn't have been the only one screaming, and I guarantee I would have been loud enough that the whole base would have come running. So are you conscious and coherent enough for me to bend over to pick up my crutch? Because if you hit me again, I'm going to fucking take you out."

It couldn't be. He was asleep. But he wasn't. Was he? Was he truly insane?

"Erwin? Stop looking at me like that! I'm not a fucking Titan. Shit. Don't make me get a doctor. From what Pixis said, there's some sort of conspiracy to get you removed and replaced. You don't want to make that look justified. I didn't eat freaking crackers for dinner and sleep in your desk chair to have you carted off to some hospital."

Erwin hadn't been able to take his eyes off Levi, but now he looked around the room, desperately, for something to cling to, something to prove he was either awake or asleep, sane or insane. His eyes fell on the wall. "There's tea on the wall," Erwin said blankly. The relief at seeing it was too great. The tea on the wall was a dry stain, but the remnants of the puddle on the floor below it looked damp, and the shattered shards of the cup he'd thrown were blatantly visible. It had happened. It was real. The tea was real. Levi was real.

"You're the one who put it there," Levi reminded him.

"But you didn't clean it up," Erwin said numbly, still processing what he was seeing. Levi was real. The kiss was real.

"Tch. What am I, your maid? Clean it up yourself, or order someone to do it," Levi said, with a flip of his hand.

"But…you didn't clean it up. You slept here, with tea on the wall, and a broken cup on the floor," Erwin said, a sliver of doubt worming its way back inside his mind. Levi would never have done that. Would he?

Levi shuddered. "Don't remind me. But I'm covered in honey, so the crumbs and the tea didn't… Damn you," Levi muttered, snatching up his fallen crutch and heading for the Map Room. He emerged a few moments later with his mop clutched in his left hand, over the bar of his crutch, and the handle of the bucket in his right. From the way the bucket was swinging, and Levi was moving, Erwin could tell the detergent, disinfectant, scrub brushes, sponge, cloths and whatever else Levi thought was necessary to deal with the mess must all be inside. The only reason he kept any of those things in there was because Levi needed them to be there. His men openly joked that it was a Map Room, not a Mop Room.

Erwin hurried over to the struggling man, belatedly realizing he was barefoot, save for his bandages, for some bizarre reason. "Let me carry those. You're right, it's my mess. I'll clean it." The handle of the bucket and the mop both felt reassuringly real in Erwin's hands. This was too real, too detailed to be a dream, and if he was insane, he'd surely be imagining far more horrible things. And if this was truly real, he wouldn't order someone else to clean up his mess, because then he'd have to explain why a cup of tea was decorating his wall in the first place, and he didn't want to betray yet another loss of his temper to his men or let them know how close to insanity he'd truly come. But he certainly wasn't about to see Levi in pain, just because he'd thrown a juvenile tantrum.

Erwin emptied the contents of the bucket onto the floor near the broken cup and then brought the empty bucket into his private bathroom. He splashed some water onto his face. The water felt real. He reached for his towel to dry his face, but to his consternation, it was missing, so he wiped his face on his sleeves, then he filled the bucket half full with hot water. He headed back out into the room to the mess for the cleaning supplies, and added detergent and disinfectant to the water. He knelt down and began sweeping up the broken crockery, using the scrub brush as an impromptu broom, in tandem with the dustpan, since the floor was still damp, and he didn't want to get the straw of Levi's whisk broom wet with tea. Then he began scrubbing the wall and floor.

"Tch. I finally get you down on your hands and knees in your office, and you're cleaning. You know, that's not going to help stem my cleaning fetish at all, don't you? In fact, seeing you like that, bent over at my feet with your ass in those tight, white pants, and the heady smell of disinfectant in the air is inspiring a whole new series of fetishes."

Erwin dropped the scrub brush into the bucket, splashing himself and the wall. "Bastard. You know I'm not going to do anything while you're injured, and then you say something like that." The man was obviously trying to kill him.

Levi's smile was slow and predatory as he advanced on his superior, while Erwin watched him warily. Levi bent over to whisper in his ear. "Once your head and my leg aren't an issue anymore, I'm going to see to it that every time you smell disinfectant, you're going to get hard. We'll see which one of us the men think is stranger then," he purred silkily.

Holy hell. Erwin scrambled for a comeback that would diffuse the situation and put a damper on Levi's ardor. He refused to risk hurting him, and Levi was right about his head: with his current emotional instability, he would likely end up in tears if they made love now, and he had no desire to put either of them through something that traumatic. They had enough hurdles to overcome. "That would be confusing, since you once told me just looking at me makes you smell raw sewage."

Levi stiffened and crinkled his nose in distaste, sighing. "Bastard. You just had to say it, didn't you? At least I've got this memory to help override the other one now. This one and the couple of thousand in between. You're far more pleasantly odoriferous now, than when you were kneeling before me then." Pain flashed across Levi's face, and his gray eyes darkened as they grew bleak, haunted.

Shit. Isabel and Furlan. I should have let him torture me. Erwin got to his feet. "Levi."

"I'm going to take a shower. Get the smell out of my head and the memory with it. At least it won't have to be a cold shower, now. But don't blame me if I don't react quite as enthusiastically to you as I should, next time I see you like that," Levi teased, but it was a half hearted effort, and Erwin could hear the pain behind it.

Damn it. The man was definitely hurting, thanks to him, and it wasn't his leg. "Afterwards, why don't you meet with Yeager, Ackerman and Arlert, about your new Squa…damn it! I just meant…see your friends Levi. Talk to them. I'm sorry I hurt you. You know I usually think things through better than this," Erwin said, frustrated. He hated that the orderly progression of his thoughts had become so disrupted, that he was so off kilter.

"Tch, please, I'm not the one who's fragile right now. I honestly do need to shower, but I'm not leaving you here alone to wallow. I'd invite you to join me, but after all this time waiting, I don't think a mutual hand job would satisfy either of us, and I refuse to risk it while your head it still scrambled. How about you take a shower in your own quarters, so you can change for the day, and then I meet you for a late breakfast or early lunch? That way, the men get to see you up and about, and us together, to add fuel to their sordid little vicarious fantasies. Frankly, I'm surprised Hange or one of the others hasn't drilled a hole in one of the walls here, so they can peek."

His own brain might be a jumbled mess right now, but thankfully, Levi knew just what to say. Erwin headed for his socks and boots. He'd finish dealing with the mess later.

"Wait," Levi said, intercepting him.

Levi lifted his socks, his nose crinkling in distaste, and he shook them out, upside down, then turned them inside out and inspected them, then back right-side out again, before handing them to him. "OK. You can put them on now," Levi said, to Erwin's confusion.

Erwin obediently sat and started pulling his sock onto his right foot, when Levi picked his right boot off the floor and banged the heal against the floor a few times, then held it upside down and banged it against the arm of the sofa, before handing it to him, and then he did the same with the left, to Erwin's consternation. Erwin watched as Levi visibly seemed to relax. What the hell?

Levi glared at him, and he realized he'd apparently let his puzzlement show on his face.

"What? You may not mind sharing your boots with other living things, but if your feet are going to be on my bed anytime soon, you damned well better make sure there are no legs or antennae under your toenails."

A bug check. Levi was doing a bug check. Shit. Did this mean he was going to start washing the dishes and glasses in the cupboards again, before using them? And all the other strange little habits that used to make the other Scouts laugh at him, before they realized laughing at Levi was hazardous to their health? It had been years since he'd done any of that.

"I know you left out some things, in the report you told Pixis," Erwin warily broached the topic. "You glossed over pretty much the entire trip underground, the part in the corridor, but also, there was something major, when the Military Police first confronted you in the Underground. I could see from Yeager's and Arlert's reactions that something was missing. And you let Ackerman watch you fall asleep, at our camp. You never sleep when someone's watching. What happened, Levi?"

Levi sighed. "Nothing I haven't dealt with before. Except for the fish. You can't eat fish anymore, not if you're going to be kissing me with that mouth. And don't expect to see me in the Officer's Mess, if anyone else is eating it either. I need a shower. I was holding your dirty socks. I slept in my clothes. I slept in my boots. I need to go," Levi said, heading for the door, all but growling as he bent down and started struggling with Erwin's weapons chest, which had somehow become lodged against the door.

Erwin realized that must have been Levi's doing, likely for added security during the night, since his lock was obviously worthless. It wouldn't have kept a determined person out for long, but it screeching across the floor as the office was breeched would certainly have woken Levi in time to protect them. "Let me do that," Erwin chastised. Just because Levi had put it there didn't mean he had to move it again, not while he was still relying on those crutches.

"Will I still see you in the Officer's Mess?" Erwin asked Levi's retreating back from the doorway, as his subordinate swung away from the room, rapidly.

"I fucking ate crackers for dinner because of you, you ass. Of course I'll be there," Levi called over his shoulder. "What the fuck are you looking at?" he snapped, as he sped past Berner in the hallway, who had made the mistake of not getting out of his way fast enough.

Berner approached Erwin. "Sir! You look well. Hange was concerned when she saw your bed hadn't been slept in and…um…when it didn't appear you had been in anyone else's," he added, flicking his eyes towards Levi's already distant back.

"She wasn't actually suicidal enough to go into Levi's room again without his permission?" Erwin asked, half dreading the answer.

"No sir! Of course not! Not after the last time, although she still isn't sure how he knew she'd been there. Zacharius said he must have smelled her, but well, certainly he might have, but I don't think…but, um, sir…I was coming to look for you, to see you about Hange. The new officers…if you could help explain that when she cut Captain Stephanos's line, in her eyes, it was necessary, that she hadn't meant it personally, or as insubordination, or an attack or…or perhaps, Captain Levi, once he is um…in a better mood? But not if it would cause further strife between you two, of course. He, um…seemed to be a bit annoyed with you, when he passed me," Berner hedged.

"No. He's fine. He was just being Levi. He needs to shower and change, and then we're both going to head to the Officer's Mess, for breakfast or lunch. I need to shower and change myself. But you can assure Hange I had a good night's sleep. Apparently thanks to her, though her timing left more than a little to be desired. In fact, I need you to give her a message for me. Tell her if she drugs my tea again, without my consent, she won't need to worry about her fellow officers ever again, because she'll be busted back down to Scout and confined to latrine duty for the remainder of her very short life," Erwin said coolly.

"Um…yes sir. I'll um…get on that right now, sir," Berner said, saluting and making a hasty retreat. Then he turned and grinned. "It's good to have you back, sir!" Then he hurried down the corridor.

Feeling more like himself than he had in over a week, Erwin headed for his room.