Blackbird and Poppy

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.


Part One: Winding Road

It was a small house at the end of a winding road. Levi found it in his early military days. An accident.

He was drifting, looking for something he couldn't name. Recruits weren't allowed to wear their ODM gear outside of training, but he nicked his anyway, ran tests on his own. He'd never followed the official rules, not from the moment he drew a sword in his first training. In his mind, he could still hear Flagon's rebuke: "They're not meant to be held like that. Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

Flagon. Dead. How far had holding the swords facing forward gotten him?

So Levi held a blade backwards when he felt the instinct to. He pulled the trigger with his pinkie instead of his pointer finger. He shot his anchors low. He reeled in too fast. And he wore his ODM gear even on his days off, between trainings, between expeditions. Erwin never punished him for refilling his gas canisters three times as often as the other Scouts. No one else dared.

Partly, Levi wanted to know his own strength inside and out. Partly, each time he brought back the body of a comrade, he knew he still wasn't fast enough, wasn't practiced enough. Partly, when his feet spent too long on the ground, ghosts rose from his shadow, and too much company with ghosts would drive anyone mad.

Then there was something else. After so many years rotting in the stinking underbelly of a city, Levi's soul craved the fresh air that could only be found aboveground. The true air was outside Wall Maria, with open and boundless sky beyond anything he could have imagined until he saw it with his own eyes. But that air was also tainted by titans. There was no enjoyment during a life-and-death struggle. And whenever he looked at that eternal horizon, he remembered his first time seeing it, remembered the 23rd expedition with Isobel and Farlan at his side. There was no fresh air under the weight of that memory.

So he settled for the air within the walls. He propelled between forest trees, rested in branches, looked up at the sky half covered by a 50-meter-wall. Even though he didn't know what he was looking for, he would know when he found it.

One day, he thought. His instincts, honed by Kenny the Ripper, would tell him when.

He discovered the house just inside the southern curve of Wall Rose, in an area outside any city, where the land sloped upward into a sparse forest with only a thin, winding dirt road to mark anyone's passage through it. It wasn't the lonely house that truly captured his attention, but rather the girl mending the garden, a girl who spotted him with hawk-like eyes, gave a faint smile he couldn't read, and returned to her potato patch as if it were nothing uncommon to see a grown man flitting through the trees.

Levi revisited that spot within a week, unable to say why. Perhaps he was unnerved—he'd never before seen a person with eyes that didn't match. One green, one brown. Perhaps he was impressed—she tended her garden with a neatness and order that even he envied. Just as before, she saw him, and she smiled, but she gave no wave, said no words. Levi lived in a raucous world, first in the violence of Kenny's killings, then in the army where every soldier had nothing better to prove themselves with than hot air, which they filled to the brim with insults and braying. But the garden girl was a calm in the storm. Like fresh air in the treetops.

After his next expedition, he visited again, and though there was no blood on his uniform, he was sure her sharp eyes could see it all the same. Not the blood of titans, but the blood of humans, soldiers under his care who looked to him for protection and came home in pieces. How many fragments had he delivered? Severed hands or heads wrapped in linen and given to grieving parents like the sickest joke imaginable. After his first expedition, Levi had made the decision to never regret. Yet his stomach churned all the same, and sometimes when he couldn't sleep, he sat on the roof and looked up at the moon, willing time to stop. Let it be an eternal night where titans never moved and the next expedition would be the first one to bring every single Scout back home alive.

"You must be tired," the garden girl said. The first words he ever heard her speak. She had a gentle voice, one that didn't startle the air even in its abruptness.

Levi said nothing. The branches around him seemed to constrict, and his harness was tight against his chest, though he'd made no adjustment since strapping it on. The twin holsters of replacement blades felt heavy at his hips, dragging like an anchor.

The girl ducked inside her home. Levi faintly heard the curiosity inside ("Who you talking to, Poppy?" "Just a blackbird, Mama.") and his lips twitched. Between his dark cape and darker hair, he may as well have been a blackbird for all she could likely see of him perched up in the trees.

Poppy. He didn't know what name he'd expected her to have. Eye color and cleaning traits were not generally reflected in names. His own name had no meaning. Just a tradition. Just common. If there was intention in it, he would never know. The woman who'd given it had long ago been buried.

Poppy returned with clean hands and a steaming cup of tea, which she set gently atop a fencepost. She gave her smile, somehow finding him among the leaves as easily as ever.

"Take your time, blackbird," she said. She gathered her gardening tools into the shed and returned to the house, closing the door and shutters behind her.

But Levi didn't need time. Somehow in those sparse moments, for reasons he didn't care to understand, he'd remembered how to breathe. He returned to the barracks, and when the call came, he went outside the walls again. With each expedition, he lost comrades, and he killed titans. Though he could never even the body count, he fought as if he could. Soon enough, he'd killed more titans than any other soldier, and people took notice.

Humanity's strongest, they started to call him. As if he alone could rescue an entire race. As if they would ever trust him to if they knew he was the son of a prostitute, the adopted son of a serial killer, and a criminal before he was ever a Scout. But Levi walked with his head high, and he didn't look back as the shadows grew behind him, not as he lost people, not as he made mistakes that couldn't be undone. Erwin pointed the way, and Levi walked the path as straight as he could manage. There were those who cheered him for it and others who cursed the Scouts for wasting their lives and Captain Levi for leading them recklessly to it.

It was a reckless endeavor, the Survey Corps. It always had been. But Erwin Smith believed in something, and Levi believed in him. So he went outside the safety of the walls, and he brought recruits with him, and those he couldn't protect, he avenged.

And in his limited spare time, he found moments to follow that winding road. Sometimes Poppy spoke, sometimes she only smiled. Levi never lowered himself from the trees.

One day, he thought. But he wasn't sure what instincts would tell him when that day arrived.


Note: Full disclosure, I'm salty about the ending of AoT/SnK. I wanted to do my own headcanon to give Levi happiness. So this is just a simple AU, six chapters long, hopefully true to the characters/world but with major canon plot changes (read: goodbye, Marley). Don't expect major titan action, just dramafluff, just me doodling for my own enjoyment. (And maybe yours? I can hope.)