Chapter Text
Levi is hungry. Levi is bleeding. Levi is being watched by someone peering down into the hole above his head. Only two of those three things are normal features of his everyday life.
He tries to ignore the prickle at the tops of his shoulders. The feeling of eyes on him, watching him like a creature in a trap as he cleans the oozing wound on his bicep, wrapping the last of his clean bandages around it and trying to tie it tight enough to staunch the blood. When a light dusting of dirt rains down atop his head, he grimaces and tries very hard not to look up.
There’s more dirt. Scuffing sounds. When he looks up, there’s no one there.
I must have imagined it. It’s too weird, he thinks, to think that someone else has found this spot. The one place in the city where the sun reaches, and it’s his. His to protect, to use so his legs don’t go useless and limp like so many others.
He normally can’t stand the feeling of drying blood on his hands, but that sun is warm for once, and he doesn’t want to miss out. It’s been cold on the surface lately, and the sun hasn’t been warm. He just wants to be–
“I’ve been watching you.”
He jerks out of a half-doze – stupid dangerous weak, the voice in his head that sounds like Kenny’s snarls – and lurches up, knife in hand. “Woah!” he hears a voice yelp, and when he blinks his eyes open and away from the sun’s half-light, he comes face-to-face with brown hair, wide eyes, glasses, and outstretched hands.
“Get the fuck away from me!” His tongue feels like lead in his mouth.
“I’m not gonna hurt you. I’ve been watching you,” the person repeats, “from up there.” They point to the sky. “You were bleeding, so I came down here to see if you were okay.”
“I’m fine,” he snaps. The knife is steady in his hand. They have a long neck. A strong jaw. He could easily find the artery and slice it clean through, leave them to bleed out–
“I won’t hurt you. If that’s what you’re worried about.” They look at the knife. The glasses on their face slip down and, when they move their hand to push them up their nose, Levi flinches forward. “I won’t hurt you,” they repeat.
When they inch closer, Levi gets a good enough look to determine that it’s a girl – or a girl-shaped person, anyway – and that the worry in their eyes is genuine, which kind of makes Levi want to stab her. He doesn’t like people looking at him.
“What?” Again, the glasses slip down a long, curved nose.
“Are you a girl?” It’s blunt and rough; Levi would’ve likely gotten backhanded by any number of madams for it. But she- they- whoever just grins and shoves the glasses up, fingers on frames, leaving smudges behind that make Levi cringe.
“I mean. Sure.” She – Levi thinks it must be alright to call her she – shrugs. “Nominally, anyway.”
“‘Nominally’?”
“It’s like…” She struggles for an explanation. “As far as other people see, I’m a girl.”
“Oh.” Levi’s so lost. His wound aches. His heart is racing, crawling up into his throat. She’s not armed and doesn’t seem fast enough to hurt him. But still…
“I won’t hurt you,” she says for the millionth time. “I can go away if you want me to. I just…you were hurt.” She juts her chin at his bandage. He tied it too loose and the cloth is slipping down over his elbow already. “Can I fix it?”
Exhaustion overtakes him, suddenly. He nods once, jerky, and chooses not to lower his blade even as she steps closer and around him, brushing the backs of her fingers over his skin once before unwrapping the cloth.
She winces, seemingly in sympathy. “Ouch.” Levi jumps at the sound of something tearing: the hem of her shirt, torn methodically and used to dab away the still-oozing blood.
“What’d you do that for?” Levi asks, unable to stop gaping at the ruined fabric.
But she only shrugs. “It was wrecked anyway. I tore it on a fence. This is a much better use anyway.”
Levi tries to ignore that it’s probably dirty, that it’s touching an open wound; he’s slightly less worried when she says, almost as if she can read his mind: “When you bleed, you’re flushing stuff out of your body. So even if my shirt is dirty, you’ll probably be okay.”
Good enough. Levi holds very still and lets her finish her work. She steps back, patting him on the arm as she goes, and brightly says, “All done!” and Levi isn’t quite sure what to do with that.
“Thanks.” It’s probably a good place to start. He thinks his mother would’ve preferred he had some manners.
“Sure.” She jams her hands in her pockets, shoulders now hunched up to her ears. “I mean… It wasn’t a problem.”
Levi studies her. Really studies her this time. She’s taller than him, with messy dark hair falling around her ears to her jaw. Her eyes are brown, but when she shifts to stand in the sunlight, they turn the color of the wine some of Kenny’s associates liked to drink. Her glasses are thick, and the fingers pushing them up are calloused. There’s a blooming bruise on her collarbone, just barely visible under her button-down shirt, and another, more faded mark on her left jaw.
And, Levi notices, scrapes on her palms. Probably from climbing down the stupid hole.
“You can’t get back up like that, you know.” He stares pointedly at her hands until she notices the small cuts. “You’ll have to pay. For the stairs.”
“Okay.” She blinks at him, clearly a little lost.
Levi huffs out a sigh. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
Levi is hungry. Levi isn’t bleeding any more. Levi isn’t wholly upset about the presence of a strange girl behind him.
Before Levi can properly interrogate why, his feet take him back to where he’s staying instead of to one of the stairways. The girl shadows him effortlessly through the Underground’s hectic streets, sidestepping stray dogs and dodging carts like it’s nothing, though her wide eyes and constant looking around leave a lot to be desired.
“You’ll get fucking mugged like that,” Levi mutters to her at one point, grabbing her elbow and tugging her away from a crowd of thugs at least twice both their ages.
“Sorry!” She yelps when Levi pushes her through his door and crosses her arms when he slams it shut behind both of them. “Where are we now?!”
“Where I live.” He turns on the lantern, bathing the small kitchen in yellow light. Furlan isn’t home, for once, and the place looks half-decent, just as it had when Levi left.
“Oh. …Why?” She’s still looking around, eyes wide and curious.
“Because your hands are fucked up. Come here.” He turns on the faucet and tests the water. It’s running clear today, and it’s warm. It’ll do.
She doesn’t protest when he scrubs her hands hard with soap and water and only winces a little bit when he roughly pats them dry. There’s too many of them to bandage, but they’re not deep, and she’s not leaking blood all over the place. Good enough.
“So you live here?” She asks it softly, curiously. When Levi stares up at her, her gaze wanders again. She’s clearly not judging. Just trying to understand. “Alone?”
“Yeah. And no.” This is all so dangerous. Dangerous to bring a stranger home, dangerous to tell her anything. “I live with someone.”
“Oh. Not your parents, though?”
“No.”
She nods slowly. “Should I say I’m sorry?”
Levi’s already tired of being confused by her. “What?”
“That your parents are gone,” she clarifies. “Some people don’t like their parents.”
Levi blinks and sees his mother, her cold and quiet body lying in the dark. He smells the stench of death and suddenly wants to scrub his skin raw. “Being sorry doesn’t change shit,” he says roughly, hoping she doesn’t say anything more.
She doesn’t, but she does shift a bit. Levi realizes he’s been holding her wrist this entire time and when he drops it, it’s raw and red, skin darkening from the force of his grip. He feels guilty for it, but she doesn’t seem to notice; she doesn’t even rub at it, just inspects the joint and bends it til it pops.
“Where are your parents?” he asks, because clearly she’s more cared for than he is, and the last thing he needs is any MPs coming around looking for a missing brat.
She gestures to the ceiling. “Up there. Tax season. Country farmers have to file them every year, so I came with my parents to do it.” Her hands drift up to touch her collarbone, clearly without her permission. “Lucky me.”
Levi ignores the rush of…something…that fills his gut. Protectiveness? Worry? No. Stupid. “You have to leave, though.”
She looks almost affronted. “I know that! But can’t you show me around first?”
“What?!”
“I’ve never been here before! I’ll probably never come back again! I want to see the city!”
Levi stares at her, incredulous. “The fuck are you on about, Four-Eyes? This isn’t where people go for vacation or some shit.”
Now she just looks indignant. “I know that. I don’t want to treat it like that. It’s your home. I just want to understand.”
“Understand what ?” His exasperation sharpens his tone like a knife. He fights the urge to throw her out of his house and make her find her own way home; she wouldn’t make it anyway, and there’s something about the intensity of her gaze and the passion in her voice that compels him to listen.
She heaves a sigh. “People talk about this place like it’s…I don’t know. Quarantined or something. A bad place that people shouldn’t go. But you all are just people, just like me. And I don’t think it’s fair what’s been done to you.”
Levi’s almost willing to let it go. And then she adds, softly, with a gentleness that scrapes over his bones and marrow: “No one should have to buy a permit to stand in the sun.”
In the face of that empathy, what is Levi to do?
Levi is hungry. Levi is curious. Levi doesn’t really know what to do about all the questions this girl asks.
He takes her to the street market, the one farthest away from the worst people. She has a bit of pocket money, as she calls it, and buys them both some food with it, even though Levi protests. She says it’s “payback for showing me around,” and he doesn’t want to argue against the hunger gnawing at his stomach.
When that goes away, he’ll begrudgingly admit that her presence isn’t…so bad. She’s not Furlan, who knows how to shut up, but she’s better than Kenny. She asks good questions and is kind to the people she meets, even the nosy old ladies who sit on the stoops and people-watch. Levi braces for her fury when one of them calls her a “homely little thing,” but all she does is laugh.
“Normally, when people talk shit down here, they get hit,” he tells her as they cross what passes for a street. “But I guess hitting an old woman isn’t the message you want to send.”
The girl just shrugs. “People say what they want. I don’t care.”
Levi’s about to say something else when a flash of grey-black catches his eye. A tall man in a wide-brimmed hat vanishes around a corner and though Levi knows damn well it’s not Kenny, his entire body freezes up like it is. It’s only for a second, just a moment of locked-up muscles and trembling hands, but it’s enough for his companion to notice.
“Hey?” she asks, carefully tugging at his uninjured arm. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Don’t touch me!” he snaps, jerking from his panic and from her grasp. “Come on, you need to go home.”
Levi is tired. Levi is annoyed. Levi wishes this girl would stop asking him so many questions.
There are a group of MPs at one of the stairways and the other one that’s easy to get to is closed and locked, so Levi – in the absence of anything better to do – drags the girl back toward where he found her.
It’s almost dark; the last vestiges of sunlight are trickling down too thinly to provide any real warmth, but Levi still holds onto what he can. She perches beside him, glasses glinting in the light, and blinks up as she asks, “D’you ever think about what you want to be when you grow up?”
“I am grown,” he says, scoffing. And, “Why are you asking?”
“I’m curious.” He looks to the side just in time to see her eyes go glassy the way a dreamer’s eyes do. “I want to be a Scout.”
“A what? ”
“A member of the Survey Corps.”
Seeing the MPs must have reminded her. Levi scoffs, an audible tch that makes her twitch. “So you have a death wish?”
“You think I do since I came down here and stuck around,” she retorts easily, grinning when Levi’s lips twitch up without his consent.
They sit in silence for a while. For long enough that the sky fades to black, and Levi feels his tiredness start to evaporate. Usually, this time of day is his time to work, plan, or hunt Furlan down and drag him out of whatever card game he’s gotten too entrenched in. But when the girl pulls him down to lay beside her and lifts a hand toward the sky, he goes along.
Why? That’s a problem for later.
“Look!”
Levi follows where her hand points, squinting up at the sliver of night sky visible in the break between Above and Below. There’s a tiny white streak falling over the inky black sky. “What’s that?”
“A falling star!”
“Where’s it falling?”
“Not down to us, don’t worry.” Levi hears a clink as her nail scratches her glasses frames and knows without looking that she’s pushing them up her nose. “It would burn up long before it lands on the ground.”
“Huh.” Levi doesn’t care much for the stars. He likes the moon. When he was a boy, still with Kenny, he would climb up here and watch it come out from behind clouds, large and silvery like a massive coin.
“People navigate by them. The stars.” Her voice is a little quieter now. Not reverent, maybe, but something similar, like she thinks she’ll ruin something if she speaks aloud. “If they’re lost, they could find their way. I’d like to know how to do that.”
“What, you can’t learn that stuff from a book?”
There’s the shh shh shh sound of her head and body against the ground as she shakes her head. “Well, you can, but it’s good to practice. That’s part of why I want to join the Scouts.”
“To…learn how to use the stars as a map?”
“Mmhmm.” There’s a smile in her voice. He can hear it. He doesn’t look at it. “And to see things. Discover things. I want to know what’s out there.”
She raises a hand, and he does look then, the motion spiking his nerves even though he knows he could cut her throat in four quick moves. But she’s just got her hand up, fingers splayed out, pinching and releasing. “The moon is so big, but I can make it look like it fits in my hand,” she says, almost to herself, and laughs a bit.
Levi hates how much he doesn’t hate the sound.
Levi is tired. Levi is weirdly exhilarated. Levi is ready to go home.
The girl shadows him toward the stairs, pausing when Levi does half a block away, clearly unwilling to leave without him. “I never asked your name,” she says, voice as soft as it was when they looked at the moon.
Levi scuffs his feet on the street. “No. You didn’t.” He chances a look at her, giving himself a second to look at her strong nose and wine-colored eyes. “What were you gonna call me?”
“Dunno.” She shrugs, stuffing her hands in her pockets. “Pretty Boy, probably.”
The words leaving her mouth startle a laugh out of Levi’s. “Pretty- what?”
She shrugs again. “You’re pretty.” Out of anyone else’s mouth, the words would ring like an insult. But out of her’s, they’re clearly a compliment. “What, don’t tell me you don’t know?”
“Never cared.” He doesn’t need to be pretty or handsome. He needs to be lethal, dangerous, feared. “And you never told me your name either, Four-Eyes.”
She laughs at that, the sound so different from the coquettish giggles he’s used to hearing from girls her age. Her laugh sounds like a child’s, loud and happy and honest. “I mean, you can keep calling me that.” They pass under a light, and the purple-green bruise under her jaw flexes as she says, “But my name’s Hange.”
“Hange.” He says it slowly. It’s a weird name. Weird name for a weird girl.
“Yeah. Hange Zoe.” Her voice lilts off the syllables, rising and falling like she’s not used to speaking her name aloud. Or maybe like she’s done it too often.
He thinks about asking. Just for a second, he thinks about asking her why is your jaw bruised up and why aren’t you scared of me even though you know I could hurt you or maybe even why do you give a shit about a total stranger. But his tongue is trapped on the roof of his mouth, and he can’t see a good reason to disengage it anyway. She'll forget about him and this in time. Everyone does.
He won't waste time trying to figure out why that's so important to him to remember.
They stop under another street lamp, this one at the corner between the stairs and the path to where Levi sleeps. Hange turns to face him, those wide eyes sparkling as she looks down into his. “So…see you around, I guess.” She winks at him and, before she can turn, before he can stop himself, he says:
“Levi.” He makes himself look at her. “It’s Levi.”
The smile that stretches over her mouth is blinding. He looks away even as she says, “Nice to meet you, Levi,” with a laugh caught in her throat, a laugh he’d slit someone’s throat for but also a laugh he wants to hear again.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t hold out his hand to shake. He doesn’t do anything. Just looks at her. She calls him pretty, but she’s not, not in the way he’s heard girls described: soft and dainty and sweet. She’s strong, all bright eyes and sharp angles, and she’s bright and loud.
Handsome. She’s handsome, handsome like boys like Furlan are, like men like Kenny apparently are to people who are blind or stupid.
Not that he’s going to tell her that… That she’s handsome. Not the other stuff.
“See you around, Four-Eyes,” he says instead, turning away from that still-present smile.