A Farewell for a Beginning

Chapter 6

Inside Fort Salta:
"I don’t…”

It’s been five days. Five days since they parted ways with those words ringing in his ears, and five days since Mikasa has been missing.

There is no question that Mikasa is more than capable of looking after herself. He’d be a fool to even suggest she couldn’t. But Mikasa also wasn’t the type to dilly dally when charged with a mission, and he was certain that, if she’d had it her way, she’d have been here no later than the midday after they’d left her in the desert.

It is with this fear that Levi is haunted every spare moment his dwindling consciousness doesn’t overtake him — and he tries his damndest not to let it. His condition is already too shitty to risk surrendering to that all-too-enticing darkness without seeing that brat one last time. And so, when he wakes after a three-day coma, he’s angry at himself, to say the least, when he learns that she still hasn’t returned.

What wonderfully shitty timing it was, he thinks, for him to learn that she doesn’t hate him only after they parted ways. From the moment he’d ordered it, he’d been certain that Mikasa would despise him for coercing her to deal the final blow to her childhood friend. Though immensely reassuring that it wasn’t the case, it’s frustrating that they hadn’t the time for him to ask what he’d truly wanted to before they were so conveniently interrupted.

But things never do go as planned, if Levi’s learned anything from his time as a soldier, and neither has he or Mikasa ever been good with words; ever the silent characters of their respective trios. How ironic it is, then, that he has so much to say.

There’s little point in refuting it now, especially after their most recent interaction. If he hadn’t known it already when he held her limp frame in his arms in Eren’s maw, then he knew with clarity what she meant to him when they were strapped together in the air, and even more so when she’d lowered him so carefully back to the ground. Had it been up to him, he wouldn’t have let her go.

But then, of course, the brat got it into her head that she needed to look for Gabi so that her little boyfriend wouldn’t have been left out on his own in the wilderness.

Why is it that he’s always having to deal with such stubborn brats? And none are so stubborn and gloomy as the Ackerman brat.

His brat…

He sighs in defeat. Any defensive objections his mind tried to make that day were so greatly overpowered by his body’s very clear signals, and it’s not the first time he’s noticed his body’s treachery before, either. All the times they’d accidentally (or deliberately) made physical contact in their tempestuous past had elicited a similar response, but none so definitive as their embrace high above the ground.

He can’t help but wonder what sort of reaction he’d get if he told the brat that he paradoxically enjoyed their dangerous situation. Not counting the times she’d almost slit his throat open (though, if he’s being honest, he enjoyed those, too), it was the first time they’d been so intimately positioned, and his body has ached for it ever since.

The memory of how it felt to hold her in his arms and to feel her body so closely pressed against his own fills him with a tension that he’d known since his youth, and, until recently, always loathed and rejected. But with Mikasa, it felt natural. Exciting, even. And though he can’t help but feel like a perverted bastard for thinking it, he keeps wondering what else would have become of them in that moment if the situation hadn't been so dire.