Erwin,

Your schedule sounds horrible. Why are you doing so much paperwork even when you're off-base? Why aren't you sending armed assassins into the palace to blackmail the council? Why are you trying to cook meals for yourself when we both know you can't even make cereal without somehow burning it?

I just don't get why the council won't approve the formation. It's not like anything ever got done under Shadis, and now we have the added problem of Titans inside Wall Maria to deal with. Hell, the council should be begging you on their hands and knees to implement any strategy you can think of. What's their fucking problem?

Also, I've already started building a pen for the bunnies. Keep them safe and warm and for God's sake, don't feed them your leftover burnt potatoes. Give them fresh lettuce and carrots. I don't care if that means you're eating the stale leftovers—if those bunnies get anything but the very best, I swear I'll chew you up and spit you out before the Titans do.

Anyway, I'm not writing to talk about bunnies and your awful depressing schedule. As it turns out, I actually have a very important reason for this letter. I have to address the rumors just in case any of them get to you before I manage to find the Scouts responsible and bite their heads off.

So here it goes. Just for the record: No matter what you might hear, I am not (and let me repeat just once more for the sake of all that is good and holy in this world, not) fucking Mike Zacharias.

I know how the rumors started. It was a stupid fucking coincidence. Mike was mad at me again, which is obviously nothing new. (Side note: Mike needs to get his shit together, because he's pretty much mad at me every day starting at the split second he wakes up, which is ridiculous because at least half the time, I haven't even done anything yet. Well, okay, maybe I've done something. But it's not like he knows about it.)

Whatever. The point is that he was upset that I'd skipped training, which I'd only done because Ness exploded a vegetable casserole in the kitchen again and I stayed behind to clean because nobody else knows how to scrape gravy out of the cracks between the floor tiles. Mike and I had a fight about it, which was honestly pretty standard: I walked down the hall ignoring him as usual while he followed me, yapping on about duty this and insubordination that . I was tuning him out like I always do, but at some point, I guess he got fed up. That's when he grabbed me and shoved me up against the wall.

I would've had him on the ground in the next two seconds, but just as Mike grabs me , fucking Borg Wall decides to come around the corner. Mike dropped me right away, but it was too late…Borg was already backing away with this look of absolute terror on his face. I thought that would be the end of it—until later that afternoon, that is, when people started snickering when I walked by. They stopped laughing after I broke a few noses, but that didn't stop the whispering.

Maybe the rumors would've died there, except that Mike assigned me paperwork duty as a punishment because I didn't go to training, and he insisted on sitting there next to me to make sure I didn't draw little bunnies in all the margins again, and he assigned me a mountain of papers so that the whole thing took literally six hours, and…I'm getting off track again. The point is that apparently, someone saw us leaving the office together around midnight.

You can probably imagine how that affected the rumor situation.

Anyway, you know the drill. Everything escalated from there. We used to have a good old-fashioned rivalry and nobody questioned it. But now every time Mike snaps at me or I throw a punch at him, another idiot interprets it as evidence of our raging sexual tension. Honestly, I'm going to have to start beating up more of these dumbasses just so I can prove them wrong. If they're so sure that physical violence is a sign of pent-up sexual frustration, I wonder what they'll think when I start taking my frustration out on over half the Survey Corps.

So yeah. That's the situation. I'll keep you updated as it develops.

On another note, something weird happened to me the other day. My entire squad requested a leave of absence from the next day's training. At first I said no (that was the day when we were scheduled to practice stabbing out Titan eyes while hanging suspended from a tree limb by one foot, and God knows they could all use more practice with that), but they told me that one of their old friends from their cadet class had just died unexpectedly and they needed to go to his funeral.

I asked what their friend's name was. They said it was Bob Smith. I asked how he had died. They said he had been eaten by rabid squirrels. I tried to tell them that people die all the time and it's part of the cycle of life and they need to learn how to deal with it. But they all got really quiet, and Helga started sniffling, and Martell said please in this really quiet voice, and damn it, I must've blacked out or something because the next thing I knew, I'd given them permission to go to the funeral.

So the next day I was walking down the hallway past the kitchens with nothing to do except berate myself for being a soft fucking pushover—and suddenly I heard a noise in the kitchen. When I stopped and listened at the door, I could hear this big commotion of voices all shouting over each other. I threw the door open, and there was my whole squad, every last one of them dressed in an apron, running around the kitchen.

They were baking a pie. A fucking pie. They lied to me about their dead fucking friend all so that they could steal a month's worth of sugar rations and bake a goddamn apple pie.

They all froze. They stared at me. I stared at them. All the ingredients were lined up on the counter. Terre was still holding a measuring cup. His hand was frozen halfway to the bowl.

I stepped up to the counter. The kitchen was totally silent. I reached out and tapped the outside of the water jug.

"Is this water room temperature?" I asked.

I didn't know it was humanly possible to look even more terrified, but every one of them managed it. Eventually, Rushton nodded.

"Dumbasses," I said. "You need ice water for pie crust."

I've never seen those kids look that shocked. Hell, Andreas nearly fainted. They didn't need to act so surprised, though. I might be a stingy hardass, but I would never leave a apple pie to the mercy of a bunch of dumb kids with clumsy sausage fingers that would probably ruin any pastry they touched. Apple pie deserves better. Apple pie is sacred.

Anyway, I took over the kitchen. None of those kids moved a muscle unless I ordered them to. I gave the commands, and they followed them without question. Here's the strange thing, though…I'm pretty sure it was the first time any of them ever called me sir. To be honest, sometimes I even got the feeling that it was the first time any of them had really trusted me.

Once the pie came out of the oven, I tried to leave them to it—I said I had work to do—but they all made me stay and eat a slice. For a first attempt by a bunch of stupid kids, it wasn't too bad, I guess. A little too flaky, maybe—not quite enough cinnamon—

Oh, who am I kidding. It was the best goddamn thing I've ever put in my mouth.

Maybe those kids aren't so bad after all.

-Levi