Knock, knock.
He'd been dreading this ever since the return from Orvud. On some level, Levi knew it was only a matter of time until this call came, that he should expect it the minute he touched down in his office and all the business with the Provisional Government was squared away. Erwin's the one man he's almost incapable of hiding anything from, so totally had he and Levi come to anticipate each other's movements and stirrings. Only stands to reason that this should be no different, especially given he'd unilaterally spared his psychopath surrogate father figure from his just desserts and, with no oversight, offered him, a street-thug at best, a place on the most important military unit the human race had.
Things like that tend to send up flares. And right now, going by the Scout Regiment's color grading, there are red flares all about. Danger, keep away. Titans and terror this a-way.
KNOCK, KNOCK.
"Solid walls, Erwin," he grunts from his chair. "Just come in already."
In his experience, it takes a lot to really piss Erwin off. It's easy enough to get the man determined, to goad his face into twisting heroically and snarling with righteous fury. If ever there was a face ideal for war propaganda, it's his. They ought to've written Peaure and Roy at the Stohess paper; the Scouts would be off to retake Wall Maria soon, and the number of warm bodies they'd probably have to funnel into that project is off the charts. Only portraits of the Scouts' very own Commander would pump the numbers up, after all.
But unequivocally, Erwin is not a man to lose his temper easily. He holds it tightly together the same way he does everything else. Which is why it's more than a little bit concerning when he strides into Levi's office, dress oranges swirling, and slams a shaking hand down on the desk hard enough to make Levi's ink splash free from its well and darken the wood.
"Where is he ?" Erwin's face is severe. Clamped down like a stone fist over a heart even as his voice hisses with anger.
"Thought you'd still be at the coronation. Must've been a great carnival act, trying to get that crown to stay put on Historia's head." The deadly look in the Commander's eyes doesn't abate. He barely blinks at all and Levi sighs, sitting back in his busted chair and feeling the back-left leg wobble on its nails. That'll teach him to work himself to sleep in it half of his nights. "Trust me when I say that this is something I've got well in hand, Erwin."
"That is," the other man says. "In no way what I asked. Where did you put your stowaway, Levi?" He put down the quill, sliding its tip back into the pool of darkness inside its well. The recruitment letter to the mayor of Trost would have to wait. Not that it would matter, persay; Dimo Reeves may have injected a fresh financial drug into the battered city, but even he couldn't make fresh human beings spring from nothing. Their population just couldn't sustain another bleed. Besides, it's not like those meager recruits would make up for losing Levi if Erwin were to relieve him from duty with the Scouts, right here and now.
"I brought him home. Though, I doubt he's got the warm and fuzzies for me after I dragged him back to his old stomping grounds. He's here. In the same cell we put Eren in right after the battle in Trost," the Captain sighs. "Ten men on him day and night, with orders not to breathe a word of it to any one of our comrades, much less to anyone on the goddamn street. I said I have it in hand, Erwin. "
"Why? Why not just cut him down where he stood and be done with it? Do you have any idea the incident you're on the verge of creating? The plan you are jeopardizing?" He meets the huge man's gaze pound for pound. Normally, it's how Erwin prefers to be confronted, but in this tense place they've raced into, that's a fact that's up for debate. Only now does any tiny sense of shame dawn on Levi. Kenny's a murderer. A remorseless, gleeful killer who likely laughed his ass off as he slit the throat of a defenseless old man who couldn't fight back. Grinned like a motherfucker when he blew out Nifa's brains. Tipped his hat and walked away from a street-fight, a thousand years ago.
She's dead.
And you? Are you alive ?
I think I finished your boy off alright . . .
"Do enlighten me," he bites out, angry for no reason. With Erwin. With himself. At the very walls around him. Levi pinches the bridge of his nose, and Erwin does the same. They're a jolly little ticked-off mirror of each other.
"Do you understand at all how this will look if word gets out?" Erwin says at last, once that steely sheen of outraged disbelief at last leaves his face. "The military comes to power, crowns its own monarch, and within hours of doing so, not only do we pardon one of the most ruthless serial killers in history, but we welcome him into our ranks with open arms. And all that to say nothing of how it will affect our relationship with Historia. Or yours, with subordinates directly beneath you. As you yourself described it to me, he cut the throat of the queen's mother in front of her when she was barely a child."
"As said mother cursed Historia's ever being born in the first place," he replies. "Do you really think that sounds like a woman worth mourning?" The fire's back in Erwin's eyes.
"None of them will see it that way, damnit," he growls, hand in a shuddering ball at his side. A prominent vein running through Erwin's thick neck throbs. "And Levi, you know that. If the public were to find out, on the eve of our expedition to reclaim Wall Maria, when we need every fresh face these walls can throw at us, they will be running headlines in Stohess and Orvud about the menaces to society we take under our wing. When we've only repaired civilians' trust in us in the last few days. They've been telling each other horror stories of Kenny the Ripper for fifteen years now. They know who this man is."
"I'll take care of it before it ever comes to that," Levi shoots back. That anger that'd come from nowhere starts to bubble more fiercely now, and he stands up, bum chair shrieking backwards. Their faces are inches apart; is he really getting even this close to beating Erwin's ass for, as he himself had put it, a washed-up rat of a man from the biggest shithole in the world?
We need you for your strength in battle.
Are you alive ?
"Is it really as simple as all that, Captain? Or is there something else at work you're withholding from me?"
"Not sure you're implying here, Commander." A sneer across Erwin's tight features.
"I'm implying that you are willing to gamble the Scout Regiment's future based on an asinine personal connection, the kind that I didn't think you let impair you this way." He's deathly-close now, so much so that his breath froths over Levi's face and he can see the reddened pores at Erwin's jaw, where he'd recently shaved. But it's the hard glare that really holds his attention, the way it makes the shame gurgle a little more fervently in his gut. "Tell me that this is the last we'll speak of this. That you'll make an end of it." Levi's about to open his mouth to reply when a chilling sound splits the air of the Mitras Command Bureau, shrill and evil and definitely getting closer by the second.
"Oh booooooooys!"
And then she bursts into the room. Decorum : gone. Hair : atrocious. Shoulder : healed (already?). Eyes : crazed and manic in a way that even the sun reflecting off of her glasses can't hide. Hange saunters in without a care in the world, hangs off of Erwin's shoulder, adjusts her spectacles with a smile on her lips. It's simultaneously good to see her and the most aggravating thing ever, which is how things with her usually are, but it's doubly-infuriating now because as thrilled Levi is to see that she's recovered from her injury he's kind of working some shit out at the moment.
"Look at you two," Hange teases. "Lover's quarrel, huh? And to think this is the first you've seen each other in weeks! The parents coming to town will do that sometimes . . ."
"My stowaway," he hisses. The venom in it's directed more at Erwin than Hange probably realizes. But, then again, she's always been a bit cleverer than she lets on, even to the closest colleagues she has. "Is not my father, thank you very much. What do you say we leave it at guardian, hmm?" And then, like Wall Sina's just collapsed on top of him, the meaning in her words pins him to the ground.
"Wait . . . nobody talked to Kenny but me after the fight in the cavern. No one saw him. How the hell did you know?"
"I think I have some idea." The color has been sapped from Erwin's face in an instant. He's even lighter than Levi now, the lifeless shade of snow, and all the anger seems to have twisted itself into abject shock across his features.
"Besides the fact that you just outed yourself, you mean?" Hange plants a hand on her hip. "It's the dead eyes and black-hearted humor, of course. You have to've gotten it from somewhere!"
"No, that I cultivated all on my own–"
"Enough," Erwin's voice cuts. Seemingly having regained his composure, he puts his only remaining hand flat on the desk far more gently than he had several minutes ago. He breathes in deep, then lets it leave him slowly and smoothly. When Erwin's eyes open again, they stare at nothing, into nowhere, through some weird space in the stone-brick floor. "Who opened their mouth?" Hange's own mouth, so often overly-splayed out and moving as ravenously as her Titan buddies, hardens into a thin, severe line. Her lips press tightly together, straining any irrelevance from what she says next, to Levi's absolute chagrin.
Fuck.
"It's one of our newer soldiers," she admits. "A Mr. Hoel. He had the pleasure of standing guard while Levi had words with our friend in the black hat. It so happens that he wasn't feeling very comfortable with keeping the Captain's secret and he went straight to the Premier with it."
Levi remembered that day, plugging his way across the golden grasses, an icky feeling rising in his stomach at the thought of what he was about to do and a gnawing oh , shit panic in his chest. Should've gone alone. Should've gone totally alone. Should've let Kenny fucking bleed out in that very same grass and rot in the middle of nowhere. Because Erwin's right. Now they're screwed six ways to Sunday.
Erwin's already halfway out the door. He shuffles his dress oranges around his shoulders, untangling them from the wide, broad rounds of his body and trying to make them comfortable in a moment that must have been anything but. "I need you with me, Hange. We need to go to Zackly at once, before this can get any bigger or uglier than it is now." His eyes are shifty as they meet Levi's.
"Tell me what you want."
"I want you to stay here and speak with no on–"
"That's just the thing, Commander. Queen Historia's called a session of the Military's joint chiefs. It . . . well, it can't really get any bigger or any uglier. They're deciding what to do with their newest state-owned Ackerman weapon. That's why I came down, Erwin; it's about to start."
With the stunned silence that he and Erwin shared, they could've heard a fly fart all the way in Shiganshina.
Danger, keep away. Titans and terror this a-way.
