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They let the soldiers go as soon as they return: to the barracks, to homes, to hospital, to the mortuaries where their bodies wait for the pyre. To baths, beds, and alcohol. Erwin, though, always starts writing up a report the moment his ass hits his chair, horrible detailed things side-by-side with a notebook where he jots down ideas for the next expedition as they occur to him.
Levi, though, Levi goes quietly home and destroys the first thing that comes to hand.
Erwin didn’t know about it until they shared the same billet, and when Levi lived in the barracks the scope of his destructive tendencies was limited anyway. Later, in one of the most covert investigations of his military career, Erwin discovered that prior to their cohabitation Levi’d smashed six plates, kicked over a wood pile twice his size, and flattened the shrubbery that grew at the back barracks door.
Still, Levi always cleaned up and he never hurt anyone and his fits of destruction were surprisingly silent, no howling at the sky or florid cursing or other wretched dramatics. So Erwin was genuinely surprised when he came home, held back late into the night by an endless tide of paperwork and incident reports, and found Levi systematically tearing the pages of a poetry anthology into quarters and setting them on fire.
“Sorry,” Levi muttered, addressing his apology rather to the page he was currently tearing delicately into halves and sounding profoundly not sorry.
“Levi?” Erwin had ventured, his hand still poised to hang his key on the hook by the door. He didn’t necessarily believe that if he moved, he’d attract Levi’s predatory attention and conclude his short, sorry life torn to bits and roasted in the anthology’s place. Nor did he really believe that if he asked Levi what the hell he was doing to his book that Levi would be overcome with remorse and topple himself over into the fire in a fit of delicate emotions. He did believe that if he tried to ask Levi what he was feeling, or reassure him that the day’s deaths hadn’t been in vain, Levi might throw the book at him just to shut him up, but even Levi could only do so much damage with a half-empty volume of mid-century poetry.
No—unlike most people (and things), Erwin wasn’t afraid of Levi. Something else kept him still and watchful on his own threshold. Something like compassion, although it was at that point a largely unfamiliar feeling and one he couldn’t quite yet name. “Levi,” he said again.
“I keep accidentally reading it as I go,” Levi mused, ripping a fresh page free and folding it carefully along the middle before slowly tearing along the seam. “What a fucking bunch of pompous drivel.”
“My aunt gave that to me,” Erwin ventured, neutrally, and dared to close the door. Levi flicked a look his way and went back to his work.
“Sorry,” he said, flatly, and before Erwin could reassure him that it didn’t really matter he continued, “she must have been a fucking bore.”
“I don’t think the time I spent with her was quite the waste of breath that you’re implying, but,” and here Erwin bravely toed off his boots to pad across the carpet in socks and blisters and sat himself down at Levi’s side, “she was pretty dreadful.”
“Families are shitty,” Levi agreed, abstracted, and although Erwin still had absolutely no idea what kind of family if any Levi had or ever had, he nodded and didn’t pursue it.
“May I?” he said instead, and when Levi shrugged he tore a page from the book and folded it up neatly before he ripped it, certain as he was certain of nothing else that if he went about it haphazardly his tearing privileges would be categorically revoked. He hadn’t seen Levi ruin anything like this before, but he knew a ritual when he saw one.
They took turns tearing out pages for what felt like a long time, until their proximity to the fire began to make Erwin’s eyes itch. He paused to blink and rub the corners of his eyes, and when he looked up again he found Levi frozen in place, glaring narrowly at a lonely quarter of a page. “Who writes this shit,” he said, and didn’t move to burn it.
Erwin took the scrap carefully and scanned it. “Heyerdahl,” he offered, and handed it back to Levi so that he could snort with proper contempt, announce “Toadying windbag,” and consign Heyerdahl to the fire. As he watched it burn, Erwin realised that though people like Heyedahl existed in his cultural consciousness, he didn’t actually know any poets. He wasn’t even sure they still existed, and watching Levi scornfully mouth wings on every wind and fling a page into the fire, he wasn’t even sure how to feel about that.
When he looked back Levi was holding out the book for him, and Erwin felt oddly touched by the gesture, even though he had no particular urge to vent his frustration on literature and it had been his book to begin with. He tore out a page with renewed zest and didn’t ask how or why Levi chose the poetry anthology, or if he’d ever read poetry before this moment. It was hard to imagine.
When they ran out of pages and Levi heaved the cover on the logs, Erwin watched it smoulder and then catch and thought about Levi, stalking into the house in a quiet fury and running his hands along the shelf until he hit a book with a creaseless spine.
Instead of saying what he was thinking, he said, “Let’s take a bath, Levi,” and stood and offered Levi his hands.
The next morning Levi was as surly and collected as ever, and Erwin knew it wasn’t anything to worry about. So several days later Erwin replaced the poetry anthology with a long battle epic and presented it to Levi, who received it with all the enthusiasm of a lamp post and spent their evenings together reading it apparently just so that he could mutter recriminations. When he was done, though, he shelved it well away from the entrance, and, though he eventually threw an ethnography into the sink and stabbed a cookbook through with a paring knife (repeatedly), no further harm was visited upon any poetry.
+++
After that, either Levi or Erwin always replaced whatever he destroyed. It wasn’t by way of apology or forgiveness or guilt, so it didn’t really matter which one of them did it, just that they did. Sometimes they even went together. After Levi meticulously picked a threadbare quilt apart into its constituent squares they went out together to find a replacement and came home with a quilt massive and warm enough for Levi to cocoon himself in and still leave an edge for Erwin to huddle under.
But it wasn’t the only way that they made Erwin’s house into their home, and Levi’s presence in the house was unmistakable even without the replacements. Levi smashed three successive vases, purchased at progressively less pricey stalls. He kicked down a trellis that Erwin had had installed specifically because Levi’d complained so many times that their bedroom window let in the city’s stench, so that the night air could blow over roses before it came through to their bed. Erwin even helped him reduce a chair they’d picked out together to kindling and went with him the next morning to pick up another with one eye to wood less likely to splinter when it met the garden wall. If and when they died outside the walls none of it would matter. Levi broke things because he still had his life and his strength, and Erwin was just glad to be there to see it.
When he was invalided out of the mission to retrieve Eren Jaeger and Historia Reiss from their kidnappers, Levi looked half-ready to reduce humanity to ashy bits for daring to continue its regularly scheduled antics while he healed. “You better not saddle me with babysitting this pack of morons by myself,” Levi warned, watching one of the recruits do some kind of good-luck rain dance and another manhandle a rabbit’s foot into her friend’s pocket. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t do anything you would do,” Erwin promised, grin calibrated somewhere between ‘fond’ and ‘shit-eating.’
“You better not,” Levi agreed with ill grace. “Remember, it takes more gas to haul your fat ass around. Don’t use it all in one go.”
“I won’t. Levi—I wish you could go too,” Erwin said, and before Levi’s discomfited retort was much more than a growl he concluded, “but at least our new dishes are safe this time out.”
Levi assembled a glare out of momentary stupifaction before anyone else could see it. “I’m going to burn the house down,” he said and stalked purposefully away, leaving Erwin to assemble his troops and ride out with them.
This time, Levi didn’t go home before Erwin. When the Survey Corps returned, reduced and limping, he stayed in a chair in the infirmary and worked through the paperwork that required signatures, staring back at flustered military messengers with pointed disinterest as he signed a perfect facsimile of Erwin’s name. ‘Erwin Smith’ managed to work through a backlog of administrative detritus as thick as a titan gut before he even woke up. By the time he was actually alert and speaking in coherent sentences again the couriers had been trained to announce their messages from Headquarters for Commander Smith without any awkward pauses or maudlin babbling. The first two after Erwin woke up bore hulking inventory reports for Erwin to read, and these Levi casually dropped to the floor and kicked under his chair before their couriers were even halfway back to the door.
The third courier interrupted a confab between Erwin and Hange, both of whom were too comically exhausted and hurt to do much more than exchange shimmering, excitable looks and occasionally exclaim something like “And the wall!” or “And that shout!” or “Nnnnnghh.” Levi figured it was probably a good outlet for their pent-up insanity and took the opportunity to sling his arm over the back of the chair, assume an ostentatiously indolent slouch, and subtly flex feeling back into his writing hand.
The courier meeped out the beginnings of a “The General requested that Commander Smith make this a priority—” before Levi stopped her cold with a long backward tilt of his chin, took the folder, and said, “If you come back before next week, I’ll prioritize my boot so far up the General’s ass he’ll be spitting titan shit for a week.”
“Titans don’t shit,” Hange offered unhelpfully, and then lapsed into a meditation on where undigested human meals went after a transformation until a nurse came to haul her bodily to her own sickbed.
Levi had nearly convinced Erwin to rest when another courier arrived, loudly requested a signature from Commander Smith, and without further ado handed Levi the paper and pen. “Lieutenant, I’m Commander Smith,” Erwin said gently, giving her a look that said I’m sorry this bad man has conned you.
“So you are,” Levi agreed, and pushed the paper back into the courier’s hands. “Scram.”
“Levi,” Erwin sighed with excessive patience as soon as she was gone, which was remarkably quickly even at a full-tilt scurry, “first you’re going to tell me everything you agreed to while you were busy impersonating me.”
“I don’t remember,” he shrugged. “Just bureaucratic bullshit.”
“Exactly how much of this bullshit did you sign?”
Levi shrugged, measured out a sketch of Erwin’s dick and leered. When Erwin appeared unmoved he indicated a pile roughly his own height, remarkable only in this context, and elaborated, “Those pigs already think I’m just your sentient extra arm, anyway,” and didn’t even flinch.
“Nice try. Bring that pile of paperwork you’re hiding under your chair over here.”
“More bullshit,” Levi averred, but knelt to retrieve it anyway and dragged his chair to the bed to use Erwin’s legs as a knobby desk. “If it were important they’d come talk to you in person.”
“I need to file my action report,” Erwin said, tension pulling at his jaw, “where’s my—?”
“Here,” Levi said, shuffling papers through Erwin’s long silence. “You haven’t filled me in yet, so I’ll write while you talk. I’ll be pissed if you report whatever damn fool thing you did out there before you tell me.” When Erwin still didn’t reply Levi looked up and demanded, “What? Do you need some water first? Use your words, Erwin.”
“The nurse said you haven’t left,” Erwin said finally, apropos nothing.
“So I should begin this thing with, ‘First I hit my goddamn head?’”
“She didn’t mention you viciously unrolling all the gauze, though,” he continued, smiling down at the linens. “So I guess it’s safe to assume that the only thing you destroyed while I was out was my reputation.”
Levi snorted appreciatively. “Well, it was bullshit too. Here,” he conceded, and climbed catlike onto the bed and against Erwin’s good side, flattening the folders over their laps in two piles and neatly arranging Erwin’s arm around his back. He folded the fingers of Erwin’s left hand over his inkpot and said, “Hold this for me. If it makes you feel better you can watch. I promise not to edit anything you say as long as you don’t spill that shit on my lap.”
“Levi,” Erwin ventured, and Levi said, “Don’t get used to it. After this I’m teaching you to sign your own damn name. I don’t care if you’re a cripple. Those itineraries are your problem.”
Erwin smiled and wished he had a second hand so he could trace the smile lurking under Levi’s familiar, studied flat look. “Fine. What’s in the other pile?”
“That,” Levi said, “is a bunch of pompous drivel.” He glanced significantly at the fireplace, and then up again at Erwin.
“Oh good.” Erwin pulled his arm more tightly around Levi’s side, and settled against the pillows. “I was a little cold.” And then he began his report.