Chapter Text
Levi moved to the town of Maria two weeks before starting sixth grade, and he met Hanji Zoë the next day. Their first encounter was hostile and it quickly evolved into a fist fight which ended with Hanji panting on the floor, sporting a black eye, their short brown hair messy and full of leaves and dirt, and their brown eyes shining as they declared that Levi had given them the best fight of their life, which meant they should be best friends.
Levi had dismissed that statement with a scoff, because he had no use for a best friend who punched people just because they could, but the next day Hanji had shown up at his door with a map of the town marked with all the places they should explore. Levi spent the rest of his summer break running around, getting his knees so scraped and his clothes so dirty his mother almost had a heart attack. Levi didn't care much; those days with Hanji were some of the most fun he'd had in a long time. Hanji treated everything as if it were fascinating; their enthusiasm contagious, although Levi would have liked not to have to worry so much about what would happen if his new acquaintance fell down a tree and broke their head open like a coconut.
When school started and Levi found his not-friend during recess, he was going to tease them for playing with the girls when he realized that Hanji was, despite the short hair, the dirty clothes, the scraped knees, and the coarse language, a girl. It would be nice to say that their friendship survived their first trial that day, when Levi decided that, even if his classmates would tease him for spending his time with a fifth grade girl, he enjoyed his time with her too much to care (in order for it to be a trial, Levi would have needed to care about his classmates teasing him and about her gender). The truth was that Levi didn't really mind what his classmates thought as long as they didn't bother him much, and he also didn't care about whatever Hanji was, since he knew it wouldn't have any influence into how many times a week they went to get him and force him to go out, so he just registered that he had to address Hanji as a "she" and kept going with his life, which he'd already assumed would be Hanji-filled for as long as she needed someone willing to follow her on her dumb adventures. He was torn between wanting her to get tired of him soon, so he could go back to having a peaceful existence in which he didn't have to stop her from picking fights with upperclassmen, and wanting her to keep him around for years, so he'd never have to worry about boredom again.
It was around the middle of sixth grade that Levi understood that he wasn't some sort of disposable sidekick in Hanji's life, but a part of it. He'd been doing his homework when he heard something hit his window.
"O Levi, Levi! Wherefore art thou Levi?" He could sense the laughter in Hanji's voice and when he turned to look he saw, perched on the tree that grew next to his house, Hanji, grinning like a maniac, her brown hair sticking out in every direction as if she'd sprinted the ten blocks that separated their houses.
"What are you doing there?" he whispered when he opened the window, trying not to think about what could happen if she fell, or if his mother saw her.
"Move out, I'm jumping in!" she exclaimed in a soft voice, ignoring his question, before leaping. Levi instinctively reached to catch her, even if she'd been close enough that she didn't need it, and they both fell to the floor of Levi's room.
"What were you thinking? This is the second floor!" He barely kept panic out of his voice, but Hanji's eyes were shining in the way they did whenever she was right about something.
"I needed to see if I could get into your house from the tree. Now I can visit you anytime I want!"
"You already visit me whenever you want," he pointed out matter-of-factly, calming down.
"Yeah, but I have to ring the doorbell and greet your mom, and she always get anxious if I don't leave before seven. That's no fun! All the interesting things happen at night."
"Hanji, nothing happens in this town. The only interesting thing I've seen in the months I've been here is a dead squirrel," Levi said tensely. "There's no reason for you to be here late. And your parents will notice."
"They won't. I've been sneaking out for years to see the stars and they've never noticed. They won't start now!" Hanji shrugged, a flicker of resignation passing through her face before she looked carefree again.
"Still…"
"Don't worry, it'll be fine! And about the interesting things, they'll happen someday. They have to. And when they do, we won't have to worry about calling each other to discuss them, because we'll have been together in that moment."
"Exactly how often do you intend to come here?"
"Once a week? Or less, I don't know. Whenever I feel like, really."
Levi frowned, thinking, and accepted that the only way of talking Hanji out of visiting him at night would be by telling her why he didn't like the idea, and that probably only would make her want to visit him more often. He shrugged, feigning disinterest, as he wished Hanji would never be around to hear his mother cry.
"Why would you come here in the middle of the night?"
"Because we're friends."
Levi froze for a second, because Hanji showing excessive enthusiasm for things at first didn't mean she'd eventually lose some of that enthusiasm; instead it meant she'd try as hard as possible to make them part of her life, so she'd never have to miss them. He should have known that, when she declared they'd be best friends, she'd been serious.
"Don't make a mess when you come here, though," he managed to say, because he needed to say something, anything, to fight the awkward sensation that had settled on his chest. "Bring clean shoes."
"I can do that!"
True to her word, Hanji started showing up at his room approximately once a week, without following any pattern. Sometimes she'd show up on Monday, and the next week she wouldn't appear until Saturday; sometimes she'd climb into his room just half an hour after she'd left his house through the front door, or she wouldn't show up until three in the morning, and the amount of time she stayed could range from ten minutes to three hours. It got to a point where Levi would leave his window slightly open at night so he could hear her when she climbed, and he always let her know if he wouldn't be home one night (despite his tendency not to talk much, he still had a couple of friends in his class, and every now and then they'd get together to watch movies, or to camp in someone's backyard).
She always had a reason to visit him, from "I read this cool article about beetles" to "Have you ever thought about how tiny we are in the universe?" which was mainly an excuse to talk about whatever came to her mind. Levi half-listened to her rambling as he did something else, nodding and commenting when he felt it was appropriate, satisfaction filling him whenever Hanji said something with the intention to catch him distracted and he proved that, no Hanji, there was no reason for him to not listen to every word she said. Even if it was Levi who felt proud of himself when that happened, it was Hanji who smiled as if she'd just won the lottery.
"Hey, Levi, would you notice if I disappeared?"
Sometimes Hanji asked that, usually after reaching a point in which she couldn't think of anything else to say. Levi hated that question, hated that she felt the need to ask it, hated knowing that she was waiting for a reply he didn't know how to put into words or actions; so he learned to look for interesting articles in magazines and to keep them in a drawer in his desk, to pull one out as soon as Hanji went quiet and give it to her to read and analyze.
He ended up answering the question without prompting about a year after the nightly visits started, when it was he who showed up at Hanji's house unannounced. Levi had sneaked through his window and climbed down the tree, and then he had run to Hanji's house and knocked on the first floor window that belonged to her room.
"Levi, what are you doing here?" the girl had asked, rubbing her eyes, looking at the panting boy in front of her.
"My dad showed up," he said, with a tone that implied he didn't want to say anything else and which Hanji, of course, didn't notice.
"Oh. Fuck. Do you want to talk?" Hanji looked at him sadly, and Levi cursed himself for going to her house, when the exact thing he didn't want was pity.
"Shut up. Just let me in," he scoffed as he started passing through the window.
"It's okay, you know?" Hanji said quietly, looking at her feet. "I just thought you might want to talk. People are always saying that's good."
"Talking is overrated." Levi didn't look at her as he spoke, focusing on the pile of books next to Hanji's bed.
"Yes, it is." When Levi turned to look at Hanji, he found her giving him a knowing look that made him want to kick himself.
"Your parents have never noticed you sneaking out?" he said instead, because he was sure Hanji wouldn't approve of him hurting himself.
"They have their own problems."
"They're idiots. It's impossible not to notice when you aren't somewhere. It's always peaceful. And empty," he finished in a low voice that Hanji must have heard anyway, judging by the wide smile she was giving him. They spent the rest of the night looking at a book about natural wonders of the world that she'd bought with her savings the previous week.
Levi left before Hanji's parents woke up, and went back home. He snuck back in through the front door and found that his father hadn't left yet, and for once in as long as Levi could remember his parents agreed to yell about something that wasn't each other. They took Levi's copy of the front door's key and grounded him for a month, but the only thing Levi felt was relief that they hadn't realized he'd left through the window. He didn't want to imagine what would happen if they discovered how easy it was to climb down the tree. What if they cut it down? What would he do if Hanji couldn't return?
The next night, Hanji was at his window at 1 a.m.
"Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar," she whispered, smiling, as soon as she set foot into the house. Levi knew those words (they'd read them together just a month ago, when she got obsessed with dissecting the plans of every character in every Shakespeare play she could get her hands on, filling notebooks with charts and diagrams of each thing that had gone wrong and with ideas for how they could have been improved), and he tried to convince himself that his heart wasn't beating just a bit faster in anticipation for the last verse, "but never doubt my window's open for you too."
"Stop butchering the bard's words," Levi scoffed. "It's enough you went calling everyone in his play an idiot."
"But that part's pretty!"
"Hamlet played crazy, killed Ophelia's dad, and she killed herself. After going mad. Pick something more reassuring next time."
He wasn't sure if he was relieved or disappointed that Hanji had changed the words of the poem, but he was absolutely certain that he wasn't ready to deal with it yet.