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- The river.
In the end, everyone faces this world alone. This is a truth apparent to anyone that has stared death in the eye as many times as Levi. When his time comes, he knows he’ll be alone.
In the freezing river, however –
An arm is wrapped tightly around him as they sink, two bodies entwined, and the heavy currents carry them away. His face is torn open, his hand mangled. As he breaks the surface briefly for air, he can hear distant shouting, a gunshot, and a loud gasp behind him.
Levi knows he should be afraid. This small life coming to an abrupt and useless end, unable to accomplish anything, to give meaning to anyone’s death - it’s something he doesn’t want to accept but knows he’ll be forced to, one day. But he knows the body holding his, knows the hand gripping the front of his jacket as if life itself depended upon it. As he’s dragged from the water and onto land, his consciousness leaving him and returning in intervals, he knows that this is not the end.
There are words lodged in his throat, and he can’t force them past the blood running into his mouth and the dirty water he’s coughing from his lungs.
- The ocean.
There is a glass jar of something bubbling on the countertop, a sweet and sour smell emitting from the strange object as Levi opens the lid of the jar.
It is a struggle, still, with his fingers. He has to hold the jar close to his chest with his forearm in order to get a good grip of the thing and press it uncomfortably into his ribcage to make it stay still.
In his less bitter moments, he’s grateful that he still has his thumb. This would have been damn near impossible without it, but still, the lack of finesse is infuriating. In his more bitter moments, he feels like the child he barely remembers being, too young to hold things properly, knocking over cups and whatever toys they’d managed to create out of scraps in the small room he would call his childhood home. His mother would never scold him, just laugh and pick up whatever had been sent rolling across the stone floor.
Being taken care of – it’s not something he’s been used to for the past, what? Too many years to count.
He’s not sure he likes it.
“What the hell is this?”, Levi says as the pungent aroma of whatever-the-hell hits him.
Hange looks up from the newspaper with a smile. “Sourdough. I thought I’d use it for bread, and the yeast development is just too fascinating. It’s just flour and water you know, but it uses the naturally occurring bacteria from the air to-“
“Alright,” Levi says, slamming the lid back on the jar. He puts it carefully back in its place on the counter and turns towards her. “Have you ever baked a loaf of bread in your life?”
“Sure I have,” she says. “Besides, how difficult can it be?”
-
The house is newly built, robust. The owners of the land wanted an extra income for the farm, and a house by the seaside was a sure way to never run out of eager tenants hoping for a peaceful life by the shore.
It was a place for forgetting and being forgotten – the closest settlements could barely be seen over the dunes of sand and waving yellow grass, and the footprints of the giants that had nearly crushed the island into nothingness had quickly been covered up by the forceful and quickly changing winds.
Hange had pointed out the different types of vegetation growing by the seaside, the way the water rose and sank every day like clockwork, the reflection of the sunset and the moon on the ocean surface, the way the trees had bent and curved under the harsh winds carrying the taste of salt. Levi had examined the fundamentals of the house, the kitchen, the fireplace, the cramped little loft serving as a bedroom.
It seemed as good a place as any, in order to – Do what exactly? Wait out the rest of our days quietly?
It was a question Levi had no answer to.
The road ahead of them had never been clear, quite the opposite. But there was always a next step to take, though perhaps rarely obvious which one it was. Pressing on, always moving forward, that was the way of the Survey Corps.
These days, it seemed like everyone was in a great hurry to leave.
Mikasa was to visit her newfound family – she left on their flying blimp with great pomp and circumstance, which seemed to embarrass her greatly. Armin boarded a ship shortly thereafter to explore the salt planes and frozen deserts and deep jungles he had used to read about in those contraband books of his, waving goodbye from the railing as he went.
They both swore up and down they would be back within the year, but Levi wasn’t so sure.
When Hange and Levi arrived at their old home, the place was half empty already. The usually bustling mess hall echoed desolate, most of the rooms cleared out and hollow. They had emptied their rooms in the barracks, packing crates of books and clothes and sheets and various equipment onto a borrowed cart, and they had left.
-
The bread has roughly the same consistency as brick and approximately the same taste as mortar. They take it down to the beach in the morning, tear it apart into small pieces to feed the white birds that always seem to wake them up right before dawn.
“Why are they so fucking loud?”, Levi asks, chucking a piece into the rolling waves. One of the birds, gulls, Onyankopon had called them, dives for it immediately.
“Hungry, I guess.”
Her gaze, as is so often the case, is vacant, fixed on some point far beyond the horizon. Levi doesn’t ask. He throws their ruined bread in silence.
-
Hange spends her time writing. Whatever time is left of the day is spent staring out at the ocean from the chair Levi carried out on the porch for her, wrapped in the heavy quilt blanket he had gotten from the market after an evening of especially harsh winds rattling their windows and knocking over their plants.
Levi spends his time watching Hange.
He always has – her constant movement and the voice that climbs in volume when she gets particularly excited demands attention. He’s used to seeing her in a blur, a mess of papers and pens and goggles flitting through her laboratory and her office like a whirlwind.
She’s quieter now, and he supposes he is as well. No more are the near-screaming matches of their early acquaintance, or the bickering mock-arguments of their late friendship. Erwin’s death, her promotion to Commander, it had changed them.
Not to mention the end of the world as they knew it. They didn’t speak of Eren anymore, hardly anyone could bear to take his name in their mouth after everything that had happened.
And so Hange writes.
“A summary of our exploits… of our world on the island of the Devils,” she says when he asks. “They want to publish it overseas. See what our primitive little lives really were like.”
“We’re not their circus animals,” Levi sneers, but he keeps glancing at her scribbling hand anyway. “Don’t write anything stupid about me.”
“Then I guess your parts will just have to be crossed out,” she laughs, and he chucks a pen in her direction.
-
“How is anyone supposed to read that?” he asks one morning, setting down a steaming cup of tea next to her hand, and Hange smiles.
“That’s a problem for later,” she says, taking a sip and cursing as the liquid burns her tongue. “The only one that could read my handwriting was Moblit.”
They fall silent at that. There’s nothing to say.
-
The letter from Armin arrives on a Tuesday, addressed to Hange’s old quarters in the city. It’s been shipped out here by the postman that comes by twice a week. The cheap paper is already slightly damp from the ocean air and it tears easily as Hange grabs a knife from the kitchen to use as an impromptu letter opener.
He asks politely about her health and timidly about Levi’s, about Jean, who’s taken up the mantle of command in the inner city, about the weather. He tells her about the places he’s seen, the flora and the fauna, the people he’s met.
He says he’ll be back on Paradis soon to restock and launch a new expedition two weeks from when he’s expected the letter to arrive.
He says, you’re welcome to join me, if you want to.
With the postal delays, his arrival is already three days away.
“You should go,” is what Levi says after he’s read the whole thing twice over.
“Come with me,” she says, her coverless eye pleading. “You must be feeling it too – this place isn’t the end for us.”
“It’s not,” he says. “Not for you.”
On Saturday, she is gone.
- The tide.
The manuscripts that Hange leaves behind are piling up, spilling out over her writing desk, the kitchen table, the floor.
“Clean this up,” Levi says, pushing a pile of scattered papers together with his foot.
“Don’t mess up the order,” she yells from her perch on the kitchen stool, scribbling furiously on an ink-stained sheet of paper. The boat leaves in three hours, and her clothes are still mostly scattered around the loft upstairs. Levi sighs and grabs her scuffed and beat up leather trunk, making a mental note of getting her a new one the next time he’s in town.
Again and again, she leaves him.
And again, and again, she returns.
The house is full of so many knick-knacks that Levi can barely keep track of them all – seashells, theatrical masks, colourful rugs, intricate teacups, exotic plants, books in languages neither of them can read…
Levi hates the camera the most. It’s finicky and hard to operate with his damaged hand, makes strange noises and captures images that frankly look nothing like him. Still, he always keeps the book of Hange’s collected images near at hand.
“There, all done,” she says, putting her pen back in its case. “You’ve packed for me?”
“You obviously weren’t doing it,” Levi says, clasping the trunk shut and carrying it over to the front door.
She smiles, and the words are back, the ones caught somewhere deep in his chest.
“Come with me next time,” she says, time and time again.
After she’s gone, he sits on the chair in front of the house, looking out at the waves crashing into the sand dunes far below. The sea is sinking, retreating from the shore to leave the exposed beach in its wake.
In the end, everyone faces this world alone. He will make his tea, clean the kitchen and the teapot, put his cup and the saucer back in the cupboard in its rightful place. He will go to the market, buy fresh eggs and vegetables and bread, and walk along the shore on his way back, picking up driftwood in odd shapes that he knows Hange will like.
In the morning, the water will be back.