A Devoted Heart (Attack on Titan // LeviHan) - Part 2

What Happens in the Closet Stays in the Closet

There were many places Zoë Hange would rather be than stuck in a tight, dark closet with a super tense Levi pressed against her back.

She had tried. She had tried and fretted and found excuses for his behavior. Clearly, Levi was grieving. He was exhibiting all the familiar signs of someone who was trying to cope with death and despair and was failing miserably at it. He had snapped on the day his entire squad, the best of the best handpicked and carefully trained by him, had been wiped out by the Female Titan like their skill amounted to nothing. No, wrong... Levi didn't snap. Levi took it all in silently. Levi barely moved a muscle in his face when he looked at the horrors that surrounded them and went on pretending it was nothing.

But she knew him. She knew him on a level she didn't know many other people, for better or worse. She knew that under his cold, haughty exterior, he was suffering greatly.

She had tried to talk to him about it. Talking didn't bring back the dead but it helped with the coping: Sharing your regrets, your fears, discussing the what ifs, what had gone wrong, eventually starting to make plans for the future - talking about it with your comrades was a necessary reassurance that others thought the same, felt the same, that they were all in this together.

But Levi had difficulties bonding with others. She believed it had something to do with losing his mother at an early age and then growing up with Kenny the Ripper. Who, she had heard from Erwin, had been Levi's uncle. Kenny had a gruesome reputation and from what she had been able to piece together, all of it was true. A coldblooded, power hungry killer who had left teenage Levi to struggle for himself after teaching him how to use a knife, drilling into him to be the most violent in a place of violence if you wanted to survive.

Talk about messed up families. Apparently hers wasn't the worst after all.

Maybe, Zoë thought as she stood in that cupboard and found it hard to breathe because this hiding space was not made for two adults, especially not two with a history like theirs, maybe she should have forced Levi to talk about what had happened to him in the Underground instead of letting him put up his guards again, this time even stronger and more insurmountable than before. Maybe she wouldn't have lost the ability to talk to him if she had. Maybe.

With the experiments in the weeks after his recovery, she had tried to help him. Nobody simply lived on after the kind of physical and mental torture the Panther and his people had exposed him to. But he had blocked all her attempts to be of use, deliberately or as an instinctive defensive mechanism, she didn't know. Admittedly, she had despaired quickly, feeling clueless and overwhelmed. It wasn't her specialty, dealing with people.

So, she had chosen a coward's way - she had made herself believe that stepping away and letting Levi sort it out for himself was the better course for both of them. That's why it had eased her mind to see Erwin and Levi develop such mutual trust and respect in the years after the Underground Debacle. Clearly, it signified that Levi didn't need her? It was Erwin who developed the ability to coax Levi out of that shell he liked to erect around himself, to tease him and be teased roughly in turn, and to use that phenomenal strength of his to the Survey Corps advantage.

But now that Eren had mastered his hardening ability, they were going to attempt to reclaim Shiganshina very soon. Ever since that day Eren had transformed into a Titan and Erwin had found a key around his neck afterwards, their Commander had worked towards one goal: Getting to that Yeager basement; taking another, maybe the decisive step closer to the truth by unearthing the secrets hidden down there.

Only... Erwin's time as their leader was coming to an end. The loss of his right arm made it nigh impossible for him to lead any future missions - the Survey Corps had a very strict rule about allowing wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Truth be told though, Zoë felt not at all ready to take over Command from him. She hadn't slept well a single night since he had appointed her his successor. She was... terrified of what lay ahead.