Chapter Text
Levi stared at the small boy, whose hands were wrapped around the hubcap of the third of the tires of the Batmobile. The boy seemed impossibly small, with light brown, freckled skin, a messy mop of dark brown hair and bright, intelligent blue eyes. The boy couldn’t be older than eight, wearing a faded green t-shirt that was several sizes too large for him and shorts that would soon be completely useless because of wear and tear. He looked thin, but there was a stubborn quality to him that somehow made him seem larger than he was.
“Who are you?” He growled, glaring at the boy, wondering how on earth someone as small as that had managed to carry away two tires already in the half-hour he’d been gone.
“Aren’t you supposed to be taller?” The boy demanded, curious instead of frightened. Levi felt his eyebrow twitch slightly, beneath the material of the cowl, which protected him.
“You’ve mistaken me for Superman,” he said. “Now why don’t you put my tires back, and I don’t tell the police.”
The boy stared at him, incredulous. “Yeah, ‘cause they’ll believe it when ya tell ‘em that an eight year old tirejacked the goddamn Batman.” His grin was impish, revealing two missing baby teeth.
Levi gritted his teeth and stalked forward. He wasn’t sure what he intended to do—intimidate the kid?—but before he’d taken even three steps closer, the boy slammed a crowbar into his stomach and ran, his peeling and holey sneakers slamming hard and fast against the pavement as he dived into the backstreets of Shingashina.
Levi gave chase, and, in his ear, he could hear Hange and Petra laughing. He scowled deeper, embarrassed, despite himself.
“I like him!” Hange declared through the intercom. Hange Zoe often came to the Batcave, bearing more trinkets and weapons for Levi to utilize in his war on crime. Tonight Hange had been summoned to help repair some of Levi’s equipment, which was in need of an upgrade anyhow. “You should keep him, Levi, he’d keep you on your toes.”
“His name is Eren Jaeger,” Petra said, calm now that her mirth was under control. Petra was Levi’s oldest friend and companion—officially his housekeeper, in reality she was a jack-of-all-trades, helping Levi operate as Batman with steady hands and a kind heart. She usually ran operations while he patrolled, whispering advice into his ear and utilizing the databases to gather information. “He… oh my.”
“What?” Levi gritted out, turning a corner rapidly in pursuit of the small tire-thief.
“His father is Grisha—do you remember him, Levi?”
“The missing doctor?” Levi said, blinking in surprise. Doctor Grisha Jaeger had ran a free clinic in the southern part of Shingashina—which had been utterly destroyed only six months ago, with the doctor completely disappearing in the aftermath. Levi had been investigating it, but he could turn up no evidence. The doctor hadn’t been injured at the scene, as far as Levi or the police could tell, but he hadn’t been seen by anyone, either. Levi didn’t remember seeing anything about Grisha having a son—and that worried him.
“The boy hasn’t been seen since,” Petra said, sounding concerned. Levi could hear her typing on the big Bat-Computer in the background, searching for more information. “He’s on the missing persons list.”
Levi spun around another corner, and grinned to himself. He’d managed to corner Eren Jaeger—and now it was time for some answers.
“Eren Jaeger,” he started, but then he saw the boy swaying in place as he stared up at the expanse of brick wall in front of him. The boy sagged, fainting, and Levi only barely managed to rush forward to catch him before his head collided with the ground.
“Shit,” Levi muttered, looking at the kid in his arms. Well, now what? He thought.
“So let me get this straight,” Hange said, three days later. “The kid fainted. So what you did was… bring him to your house, tell him your secret identity, and decide to become a foster parent.”
They were sitting in Hange’s very large office. The wall behind Hange was made out of the most expensive, top-of-the-line, bulletproof, safe-shattering, tinted glass that could be bought, and looked out over a gorgeous view of the Shingashina River. The other three walls were covered in rich mahogany paneling, beneath which lurked layers of steel and concrete. Framed magazine photos and articles about Hange and Survey Corps hung on the walls, reminding whoever entered the room about exactly who ran Survey Corps Technical Industries, no matter who was the public face. The carpet was dark green, and brand new after the assassination attempt last month had covered the previous (pale red) carpet with scorch marks. A bronze plaque rested on the mahogany desk, reading Doctor Hange Zoe in large, imposing letters.
Important things to know about Hange Zoe
Hange Zoe is potentially the most valuable assassin target in the world, with a 500 Million dollar reward on their head. No one has ever collected it, and most know better than to even try.
Despite this, Hange averages about an assassination attempt per week.
Batman has only had to intervene in an assassination attempt twice, Superman once.
“When you say it like that it sounds so impulsive,” Levi sulked, crossing his arms and leaning back in the swivel chair that he was sitting in.
“Get Mike on the phone,” Hange said, pointing at him with a pen. “Handle the press. This is your disaster, Levi, understand? This isn’t just something you can do one day and change your mind about. This is a kid. You have so many freaking issues, and you decide to become a foster parent to a kid—you know the odds of the courts letting you keep him?”
“Higher than they should be?” Levi guessed.
“Ridiculously higher than they should be given your history of substance abuse,” Hange said irritably, shuffling the papers on the expansive mahogany desk. “But whatever, rich white man powers activate. But if you hurt that kid Levi, I’m locking you out of your Batcave.”
“I’m just keeping an eye on him until we can find his dad,” Levi swore, completely earnest. “Whoever went after Doctor Jaeger might come after the kid, and I can keep him safe.”
“You totally just panicked and went running home to Petra when the kid fainted,” Hange sighed. “Now scram, short-stuff. I’ve got three meetings to go to, a board of directors to handle, and a lot of investors that need to be reassured that you aren’t about to ruin the company.”
“Ah, the life of a CEO,” Levi drawled, tilting his head back and staring at the ceiling. “So glad I gave it to you.”
“Oh, shut up and get out of my office, you ass.”
Eren walked home from school, his backpack thrown over his shoulders. Class had been boring again. The school had taken one look at his transcript and decided that he couldn’t “handle” the “pressure” of being in “more advanced classes”, so they were making him repeat a grade. Which was bullshit, but the teachers didn’t actually give a damn. So Eren was basically just repeating material, but the teachers didn’t seem to notice that he knew all the stuff, and just kept making him do more of the same.
He kicked a pile of leaves, enjoying how the autumn colors looked against the drab grey concrete. Levi had a nice, big yard. He wondered if Petra would let him help her rake up all the leaves, and make a gigantic pile out of them, like kids did in books. Jumping in the leaves always sounded like fun.
Petra had offered to pick him up from school, but Eren had asked her to pick him up a few blocks away instead. He wanted to walk, just a bit.
Something caught Eren’s eye—a flicker of movement that was a bit too fast, a bit too out of place even for Shingashina.
“Hello?” Eren called, looking around, trying to find the source of the movement, but he could see nothing. “Is someone there?” His hand went towards his cellphone, which Levi had bought for him and pre-programmed with a whole bunch of numbers for people that Eren had met maybe once. But it still seemed like it might be a good idea.
“Hello?” A small voice whispered from the shadows, barely audible. Eren turned to where he thought it was coming from, but he didn’t see someone there. But Eren knew what he’d heard, so he plunged into the alley.
“Hello? Is someone there?” Eren’s Japanese wasn’t very good—he’d learned it from a few sailors at the ports, and an old lady across the hall from his mom’s apartment, but he knew enough to recognize the language that the voice had been speaking.
“You speak normal?” Eren turned again, but he still couldn’t see anyone.
“I speak Japanese,” Eren offered, confused. “Are you okay? Can I help you?”
There was a pause, and then a small girl appeared. She was Eren’s own height, with long dark hair. She was very pretty, with two missing front teeth and a black eye. She looked thin and scared. “Do you have food?” She asked quietly, reluctantly, as if not wanting to show weakness. Eren knew the feeling.
“Sure!” Eren grabbed for his bag and pulled out the apple and granola bars that Petra had packed in his bag that morning.
He offered them out to her, and she snatched them from his hand, clearly not trusting him not to take them away again. She vanished into the shadows before Eren could blink, but before long the shiny silver wrappers of the granola bars floated down to rest in front of him. The seeds and stem of the apple were thrown out as well, but no core.
“I’ve got more, if you’re still hungry,” Eren offered, pulling out a tangerine.
The girl reappeared, squinting at him suspiciously. “What is this?” She asked, snatching up the tangerine and squinting at it, suspicious.
“It’s a tangerine,” Eren stumbles, not knowing the word for the fruit in Japanese. “You peel it.”
“How?”
Eren extended his hand, and she reluctantly returned the tangerine to his hand. He dug his thumbnail into the thick skin, and showed her how to peel it away in long, thin strands. He wanted to show her how to remove it in one piece, but she looked so hungry that Eren didn’t want to take the time it would take to remember how to do it properly. He divided the orange into the sections, and handed them back to her. She tentatively bit into a thin slice he’d given her, and her eyes lit up, and before long, the rest of the fruit disappeared, just like the apple and the granola bars.
Eren’s phone rang, and Eren realized, with a shock, that Petra was probably looking for him. He pulled out his phone to answer, seeing her picture beaming up at him as he glanced at the screen.
The next thing he knew, he’d been knocked to the ground, and the girl was on top of him, his phone clenched in her hands and her face twisted into a terrifying snarl.
“You work for him?” She demanded, staring at the phone with an awful glare before switching to him again.
Three things about Mikasa
- She was raised by a man
- He taught her to fight
- She doesn’t know his name
“Who?” Eren asked, frozen in place. He could fight, could fight well, but something in him didn’t want to fight this girl.
“Him!” She cried out, her fist clenched in his jacket and her teeth bared. “You work for him!”
“I don’t work for anyone,” Eren protested, “That’s just Petra!”
“You have one of these, you work for him!” She insisted, throwing the phone against the ground, where it clattered but didn’t break. Eren winced—he’d seen the price tag on the phone before Petra had bought it for him.
“I don’t know what you’re saying!” Eren tried to tell her, “Can you get off me?”
It took Eren another orange and fifteen minutes to talk the girl down. By the time Petra finally found them, pale faced and furious, Eren had found out that the girl’s name was Mikasa, she was on the run from a man whose name she didn’t know, and that she didn’t have a home.
“Can we keep her?” Eren asked Levi, after a long, tense drive home. Mikasa was wearing Eren’s coat and had her mouth full of cookies. Petra, after she had ascertained that Eren’s black eye had been obtained in a misunderstanding, not an act of malice, had immediately descended on Mikasa with all of her might, and there were more cookies in front of Mikasa than she could ever possibly hope to eat, with more in the oven, filling the whole room with a chocolaty smell and the entire kitchen with a thin dusting of flour. Mikasa was munching away cheerfully, while Petra argued with Mike Zacharias—a friend of Levi’s who Eren had only met once—about getting Mikasa some clothes over the phone.
Levi looked at Mikasa, and then looked at Eren, who just grinned unrepentantly at Levi.
“You brat,” Levi sighed. “You’re going to cause me a whole lot of trouble, aren’t you?”
Eren just kept grinning, and squeezed Mikasa’s hand under the table.
Levi had met Hange Zoe when they were both attending Princeton. Levi had been a rich white boy from the richest part of Shingashina—albeit with a major case of PTSD and some anti-social tendencies.
Things Levi Ackerman, Heir to Survey Corps Technical Industries, did during college
- Drank
- Smoked
- Got into fights
- Did not attend classes
- Met Hange Zoe
Hange Zoe was his next door neighbor, a scholarship student who had been born in Turkey, who ignored anyone who called them “she” “he” or “it” with an air so casual and deliberate that one might actually believe that the speakers didn’t even exist. Hange wore glasses that were incredibly thick and highly reflective, because Hange’s vision was so amazingly bad that they couldn’t even wear contacts. They were a Business-Engineering-Physics triple major, here on a scholarship that demanded they maintain at least a 3.5 GPA, and they absolutely couldn’t stand cigarettes.
They also had an annoying habit of breaking and entering into Levi’s room whenever their roommate had sex. Which was almost alarmingly frequent.
“She’s at it again,” growled Hange, hair pulled up into a messy bun that positively crackled with static electricity, two pencils poking out of it, holding the whole thing tenuoualy in place. Textbooks thicker than Levi’s arm were clutched against their chest as they juggled their lock-picks in the other hand. “I have a test tomorrow, and they decide to have the boyfriend over again.”
“Go away, shitty glasses,” Levi groaned, arm draped over his eyes as he kept smoking. He was most definitely not supposed to smoke in his room, but the wing of the building he lived in was named after his grandfather, and he’d already lost his deposit after he dented the wall on the second week of school, so he didn’t really give a fuck.
Hange, either not knowing or not caring about the state of Levi’s room deposit, snatched the cigarette out of his hand, stubbed it out on the metal bed post of Levi’s bed, and threw it in the trash. “Not a chance, cancer breath.”
“Why can’t you go somewhere else?”
“I live to make you miserable,” Hange informed him cheerfully, grinning widely. “Now either shut up or help me with my flashcards.”
As freshman year crawled by, Hange somehow ended up on Levi’s speed dial, his IM contacts list, his Facebook friend list, and on his bulletin board. They ended up rescuing him from campus security on more than one occasion, forced him to actually attend some of his classes, and tried to goad him into actually picking a major.
Over the summer, Levi actually found he missed them. It was a peculiar feeling.
Things Levi Ackerman did that summer:
- Slept
- Drank
- Smoked
Things Hange Zoe did that summer:
- Worked at McDonalds
- Worked an internship
- Invented and patented a new type of refrigerator
- Laughed at the concept of sleep in a slightly despairing manner
“You’re a sophomore, Levi,” Hange pointed out, feet on his couch as they lay on his floor, reading their textbook, face turned towards the ceiling. Levi had, reluctantly, attempted to get Hange as his roommate, but administration were assholes about Hange’s gender, so it had fallen through. So Levi languished with Mike Zacharias, a journalism major who seemed to be unusually strong even for his bulk, as his roommate, (Levi’s abysmal GPA had prevented him from getting a single room that year, and Petra had refused to allow Levi to bribe his way into a single) and Hange as his once again frequently reoccurring guest.
“You two dating?” Mike asked, one day, out of the blue. Mike wore thick rimmed glasses, but unlike Hange, didn’t seem to need them. He also had a remarkable sense of smell which he mostly used to tell when Levi had been smoking, much to Levi’s displeasure. Mike was not letting Levi trash their deposit. Clearly, having a roommate was a mistake, even if Mike had a much better fake ID than Levi did.
“Who?’ Levi looked up from his reading, confused.
“You and Hange,” Mike said, shrugging. He muted the television, which was playing a news program of sorts. “Are you two dating?”
“What, me and shitty glasses?” Levi blinked at Mike. “Are you fucking serious?”
“They’re always here, that’s all.” Mike shrugged, his eyes going back to the television. “I was just curious.”
Levi looked at Hange when they next came in and Mike was gone. “We’re not dating, right?” He asked flatly, half afraid of their answer.
“Hell no. You’re too white boy for my taste,” Hange said, not even looking up from their textbook, which they were reading at a dizzying speed. This year, they didn’t need to pick the locks—Mike had managed to get them a key, much to Levi’s displeasure. He’d been meaning to get Hange to teach him, this year. Lock picking seemed like a useful skill—one that might help him fulfil the promise he’d made, half-forgotten, all those years ago.
“Good,” Levi said, relieved. He turned his attention away from Hange, and that was the end of that.
Until the anniversary pulled around.
A few things about the anniversary:
It was the eleventh one. Levi had spent the tenth with Petra, drinking tea and sleeping away the hours, nightmares flickering beneath his eyes. But Petra was sick for the eleventh anniversary, and so Levi was alone, the nightmares tormenting him while he was awake instead.
“Levi!” Hange’s grip was like iron around his bicep, trying to keep him upright even though Levi weighed a ton for someone so short.
“Go away,” he slurred. His tongue felt heavy and useless in his mouth. Actually, his whole head felt heavy. All he wanted to do was go to sleep. But if he slept, he’d dream, and he didn’t want that either.
“No!” Hange slapped him, returning a little feeling to his face, but not enough. “Stay away, you asshole! You fucking stay awake, you hear me? Mike, you calling the ambulance?”
“Doing it!”
“How much did you fucking take?” Hange demanded, shaking Levi slightly. His head lolled, limp, against his shoulder. His vision was blurred, the colors swirling together like one of those shitty impressionist artists that Mike so loved. Blurrily, as if he was hearing through water, he could hear someone scream. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, Mike, help me get him to throw up! We gotta get this out of his system!”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Levi felt himself being helped to the sink, the cold porcelain pressing against his arms as he was draped over it by his friends. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and wished he hadn’t—he hadn’t known he was crying until then. His head was bent over, pressed down by someone’s firm hand against his head, and all he saw was the white expanse of the sink.
“Fuck you so much for this Levi,” Hange hissed in his ear—he knew it was them, it couldn’t be anyone else. That was the last thing Levi remembered before the world dissolved into colors and the smell of vomit.
He woke up in the hospital thirteen hours later, to find Hange and Mike sprawled across three uncomfortable hospital chairs, soundly asleep, and one furious Petra, wide awake. He smelled disinfectant and felt bruised from head to toe. He answered the Doctor’s questions with as little emotion or inflection as he could, and avoided Petra’s sharp gaze. He heard whispers of medication and therapy and depression, and balled his hands up in fists where no one could see them, beneath the stark white hospital sheets. Petra left to speak with the press, who were having a field day, even if they didn’t realize that it wasn’t an accidental overdose. Levi didn’t know what she was going to tell them, and he didn’t really care.
“Why’d you do it, Levi?” Hange asked quietly, eyes heavily lidded with sleep, from their position, sprawled across multiple plastic chairs, Mike’s jacket tucked around them like a blanket. Their voice was low and rough, as if they’d been screaming for hours on end, and they looked like they’d been crying. “You wanted to die, didn’t you?”
“No,” Levi said honestly, his own throat feeling like it had been filled with broken glass. “I just wanted to forget.”
“Forget what?” Hange said helplessly, sitting up slightly, trying to catch his eye.
He stared at them, bewildered. “You don’t know?”
Hange looked at him, frowning. “Why would I know?”
“Everyone does!” Everyone had. The professors, soft spoken and far too kind, until he’d taken their patience and stretched it beyond anything reasonable, knew. The other students, tittering and giggling and whispering, knew. The reporters, shouting questions and throwing pictures in his face, all knew. But Hange?
“Levi, I’ve been in this country for three years, and it’s not like I did a background check on you!”
He stared at them again, jaw hanging open. They actually didn’t know. Something twisted in his stomach. No wonder Hange didn’t treat him like a meal ticket, or like he was spun from glass. They hadn’t known. Hange, who hated tabloids, who never was in a single class with him, who avoided most students because of people’s allergy to using the right pronouns, Hange hadn’t known because no one had ever thought to tell them. He got to tell his own story for once, and it was terrifying, confusing, because he’d never had to.
“My parents,” he struggled, trying to find the words. How could he describe the end of everything? “Were wealthy. Really fucking rich. But they pissed off the wrong people. So someone had them killed. In front of me. I was eight.”
A Memory:
Blood, blood in his eye, something grey on his shirt, it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere, he’s filthy, he’ll never be clean again, Mother’s eyes are wide open, staring at him, oh God oh God he’s covered in blood, a bullet wound through Father’s head, a tiny little mark on his forehead, but the back of the head oh God, so much blood, blood everywhere, someone’s crying, someone’s holding him, oh God is that him so much blood, he’ll never be clean, everything’s filthy, why isn’t Mother getting up, window glass crunching beneath the police woman’s feet, Petra’s arms around him, covering her good white blouse in blood, is that him who’s making that noise?
Levi escaped the hospital, snuck on board a ship heading away, and disappeared. No one saw or heard from him for six whole years.
Mike finished his journalism major, and then went to work in Trost, where he found a good job working for a major newspaper. Eighteen months later, rumors began to emerge about a “Superman”. Hange suspected, but they kept their head down and said nothing, not even in their weekly phone calls with Mike.
“I miss him,” Hange told Mike softly, late at night in their apartment, after a long week of classes. Hange’s Master’s degree was coming along slowly, held back by both their job as a secretary for a real estate agent and their regular inventing and patenting process.
“So do I,” Mike said.
What Levi was Doing:
“I won’t kill another human being,” he snapped at Rod Reiss, his knuckles bleeding and bruises, his ribs broken and his ankle fractured. His eyes were narrow with pain and he breathed heavily, but his stance was firm and his mouth was a thin line. “Fuck you,” he spat. He left the Shadows, and the building burned behind him.
He was going home.
Levi returned home to a hug from Petra, an outcry from the paparazzi, and a punch in the nose from Hange Zoe.
“You asshole,” Hange hissed, and it was a testament to just how much Levi knew he’d fucked up that he hadn’t even tried to avoid the punch. “You fucking asshole.”
“Sorry?” Levi asked, examining the blood on his hands.
Hange punched him again. Levi let them, even if it knocked him to the ground. After all, it had been six years.
“I thought you were dead,” Hange hissed, crossing their arms to stop themselves from hitting him again. “I thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere, you bastard!”
“Sorry, shitty glasses,” Levi muttered.
Hange pulled him up and hugged him. “Fuck you, cancer breath,” they muttered into his shoulder. “Don’t you ever do that again or I will kill you and they’ll never find the body.”
“Noted,” Levi said, and he believed them.
Levi had been Batman for less than two weeks when Hange broke into the Batcave.
“Shit, crap, awful,” Hange tore through his supplies with a critical eye, tool box in hand. “You better set me up a workbench, short stuff. Clearly, there’s a lot for me to do if you’re going to save this city properly.”
Levi stared at them, still dressed in his Batman outfit, his mask still on. The alarms hadn’t even gone off.
A Few Things About Hange Zoe:
Levi Can’t Keep Them Out of the Batcave. Ever.
Hange figured out that Levi was Batman after one day. It took them nine days to figure out where the Batcave was, which they think is a great compliment. Levi is never quite as sure.
Without Hange Zoe, Levi would have died three weeks into his crusade. Hange absolutely never let him forget this.
“I don’t need your help.”
Hange pointed at the sad, sad Batmobile. It was an armored car that Levi had painted black. Depending on who was telling the story in later dates, there may or may not have been cardboard wings attached to the trunk of the car.
Petra, the only neutral party, would always refuse to comment.
“Yes,” Hange said pointedly. “Yes, you really do.”
After a few weeks of Hange working in the Batcave, Levi had high-tech weapons, body-armor, and a car that actually looked intimidating. After a few months, Hange had designed a super-computer that was installed in the cave.
It took Levi two whole years to get bored of being CEO of his own company. He passed the title onto Hange, who took to it with a surprising and terrifying ferocity, and watched as the paparazzi drove itself off the deep end trying to speculate about Levi’s motives for doing so.
It took Levi twenty-five whole months to figure out that his college roommate was Superman, and Hange laughed themselves silly once they realized that Levi hadn’t known.
“Shut up, shitty glasses,” Levi growled, which only made Hange and Mike laugh harder.
Mikasa stayed. She was quickly enrolled in the best English classes that Hange could find for her, and privately, Eren enrolled in Japanese classes. Hange knew Japanese, unlike Petra and Levi, and they talked with Mikasa for hours on end, after Eren’s throat and vocabulary dried up. Hange wrote down some of what Mikasa said, locations and names and dates that they think might be relevant for Levi’s search for him.
Levi’s inability to learn anything other than English hindered his relationship with Mikasa, but Mikasa learned quickly, with English soon pouring out of her mouth in a waterfall of questions and requests. She wanted Levi to spar with her. She wanted to go to school with Eren. She wanted to go to mosque with Hange.
Levi did his best. He sparred with her, and got his ass kicked, much to his bewilderment and Petra’s quite amusement. Whoever had trained Mikasa had done it well—she moved with lightning fast lethal grace, despite her age and size. She couldn’t be much older than Eren, but she was as well trained as Levi.
Petra produced fantastically forged paperwork that “proved” that Mikasa was a distant cousin of Levi’s. There were birth certificates, artfully faked family photographs, a homeschool transcript, and even a social security number. Levi looked at Petra’s smiling, sweet face, and, as always, didn’t ask where or how she had gotten her hands on the documents. He enrolled Mikasa in the same school as Eren, much to the delight of both of his wards.
Soon, the sight of the two of them, homework spread all over the large kitchen table, eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate, became a regular sight in the Ackerman Estate. Levi growled and grumbled, but it was an oddly soothing sight. And it made Petra happy, which Levi knew was a rare enough thing, despite her smiles.
Petra Ral:
Petra had been working for the Ackermans since she was eighteen. She had never held another job, she never would even think of leaving. But she would see Levi go out, and every time, she wondered if he would come back, and what she would do if he didn’t. She bandaged his cuts and set his bones and stitched up his gashes and wondered what she would do when the hurts were once against too much for her. She wished, sometimes, that she had been able to stop him from running away.
If she had, she might have been able to prevent all this from happening.
The mosque was a curiosity, an oddity. Hange had taken both Eren and Mikasa with them, claiming that they would both like it. Eren was interested because his mother had been Turkish, and most of Hange’s mosque was as well. Eren’s mother had been Orthodox, not Muslim, but Eren wasn’t particularly religious. Mikasa was curious, and so she went, her small hand slipped into Hange’s.
Mikasa came back, excited and energized.
“I want to convert,” she told Levi that night at dinner.
Levi squinted at her. “You’re like, eleven,” he pointed out to her, frowning into his oatmeal.
“I want to convert,” Mikasa repeated, frowning.
Levi sighed. “I’ll talk to shitty—to Hange about it.”
A Reaction:
“Will she need to wear the scarf thing?” Eren demanded of Hange, running up to them as soon as they entered the Estate.
Hange blinked down at Eren. “The hijab?”
“Yeah, that! Is Mikasa gonna have to wear it, like she did when you took us?”
“Outside of the mosque? It’s her choice. But in, yes, probably.”
Eren nodded, his face confident. “I’m going to get her one. Will you help me?”
The hijab he bought Mikasa was deep, dark red, with a black, white, and gold paisley pattern around the edges. It was silk, and soft to the touch, a solid square of fabric that he carefully examined for five minutes before choosing. He bought it with his own money, and wrapped it in crinkly white tissue paper before he gave it to Mikasa, who struggled for a while to put it on before Hange gave in and helped her wrap it snuggly around her head, hiding her hair completely.
Mikasa will own many other hijabs, but that hijab will be the one she will always wear on special occasions.
This is the hijab she will wear to Eren Jaeger’s funeral.
Mikasa and Eren, not long after Mikasa’s conversion, decide that they want to be superheroes like Levi.
“No, no fucking way, no way in hell,” Levi said, his cowl in one hand and a boot in the other.
“Levi!” Petra said.
“No, no freaking way, no way in heck,” Levi corrected himself, with the air of a man still unused to self-censorship and the flattest, dullest tone imaginable.
Eren and Mikasa crossed their arms in unison and looked unimpressed.
“Why can’t we?” Mikasa demanded. “I can already beat you in a fight.”
“You’re, like, eleven,” Levi said, bewildered as to why this was even a question. “And Eren’s, like, ten. You can’t go out and fight, the commissioner would throw me into prison for child endangerment before you could even do anything.”
“So?” Eren demanded. “We want to help!”
“Wait until you’re fourteen,” Levi said, struggling to remove his other boot, hopping on one foot to do so. “You can be a superhero when you’re fourteen.”
Three Years Later
“Fuck.”
Hange laughed. And laughed. And laughed.
“Well, they’re fourteen,” Hange said, trying, and failing, to hold back another wave of laughter.
“I hate you so much, shitty glasses,” Levi said, staring at the costume designs that he was holding in his hands. They were carefully drawn and labelled in Petra’s neat handwriting, with annotations from Eren and Mikasa in the margins.
Eren had designed a colorful, caped monstrosity that he had dubbed Robin. The color scheme was red, green, yellow, and black, and it gave Levi a headache just looking at it.
Mikasa’s was more sensible, a grey and black creation with a tattered cape and a full-face cowl. She didn’t have a name for it, but Eren’s scrawl read Batgirl in the top right corner.
“C’mon, Levi, you brought this on yourself!” Hange laughed, leaning against their desk, propping themselves up with their elbows. “Fourteen, really? You couldn’t have said sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-seven?”
“I didn’t think I’d be allowed to keep them!” Levi defended himself. “I’m a walking disaster, I didn’t think any court would actually let me keep them that long!”
Hange raised a single eyebrow as they examined Levi. “Levi, we talked about your rich white man powers, right?”
“But… children!” Levi protested, holding out the costume designs.
Hange laughed. “Give me those,” they snatched them out of his hands. “Doable,” they declared, examining them, the light reflecting off their glasses in a scary manner.
“What?” He yelped, shooting up onto his feet. “You’re not actually suggesting that I—”
“Levi, at this point, they’re going out there, with or without our help and permission,” Hange said firmly. “I might not think this is a good idea, but I think it’s better that we do this in a safe and supervised manner, where we can keep an eye on them at all times and install trackers in their costumes than let them figure it out on their own like you did.”
“I knew what I was doing!” Levi said, stung by the accusation.
“Levi, since I’m your friend, I won’t correct you, but you are so, so wrong.”
He glowered at Hange, crossing his arms.
“Levi, Mikasa’s been able to beat you in hand-to-hand combat since she was nine,” Mikasa said. “Eren’s a black-belt in two types of martial arts now, and has been learning throwing knives from Mikasa, so he’ll be able to use batarangs. Mikasa’s training was expansive and thorough—whatever the villains throw at her won’t be anything she hasn’t seen before.”
“She’s been shot,” Levi said quietly. “That bastard shot her.”
“And we can do our best to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” Hange agreed. “But Levi, this is going to happen. They’re going out there, and they’re going to help people. This way, we can make sure they’re safe.”
“You just want me to spend more time with them, don’t you,” Levi said.
“You are desperately in danger of becoming an absent father-figure,” Hange said, nodding seriously, even as they got to their feet, smirking. “This is really the best form of father-child bonding you’ll ever be able to figure out.”
“Fuck you, shitty glasses.”
“Right back at you, short stuff.”
Armin Arlelt was very smart.
He knew it, his teachers knew it, and his grandpa had known it. Even his parents, according to his grandfather’s stories, had known it, even though they had died under unusual circumstances when Armin was only four. He remembered them mostly as warm, pleasant blurs who read to him and carried him around. Grandfather, having only died four years ago, was much more concrete and real—solid hands, an earthy smell, a large hat, a rumbling laugh.
But his new foster parents didn’t seem to realize that Armin was smart. They weren’t good people, and they thought he couldn’t see. Armin knew they had multiple guns in the apartment. He knew there was money hidden under the floorboards. He knew they answered the phone in codes he couldn’t crack, and wrote letters in ciphers he didn’t understand. He knew they only had taken him in for the money, and as a potential hostage, should things go bad.
They were criminals—more than that, they were masked criminals. He’d found their costumes, hidden in their closet, guarded only by a security passcode that had been easy to crack.
Armin didn’t really think of himself as a snoop, or a detective—he’d just put the pieces together, and tried to find more evidence, that was all.
He had the evidence now, Armin thought, crouching in his room, right over the vent that led into the kitchen, where his foster parents were fighting about money again. So what should he do with it?
He could go to the police, but he knew that his foster parents knew people in the police department—if he went to the police, what were the odds that people would listen to him?
That left Batman—or maybe Batgirl or Robin—but it was hard to get in contact with them. Armin couldn’t think of a way to get onto the top of the police station to access the signal—not without having to explain the situation to the police, which he really didn’t want to do.
Armin gnawed on the hangnail that he’d developed on his left thumb, and thought hard.
Maybe there’s another way to get their attention.
The only fabric available at the craft-store was purple. Armin sighed, bought it anyway, and began to craft a cape. He wasn’t very good at sewing, but he did his best, and in the end he had a serviceable, if not fashionable, superhero outfit.
He called himself the Spoiler, and he filled his pockets with marbles and thumb-tacs and carried a sock full of pennies. He found a sturdy length of pipe, and he carried a mini tape recorder, full of the conversations he’d overheard. He wrote a journal full of coded shorthand, to serve as his case notes. He bought himself a pair of dime-store binoculars, a map of the city, a polaroid camera, and a length of clothesline (to tie up bad-guys with). A moped was recovered and repaired from the junkyard, painted black, and strategically concealed in a nearby alleyway.
Soon he was actually ready.
If he wanted to get Batman’s attention, it was probably best to start making a name for himself. So Armin liberated a police scanner, found petty crimes, and did his best to intervene in a safe, yet timely manner. He ran out of clothesline within a week, and, after some investigation, found that fishing line was almost as effective and a lot cheaper. He stopped muggings regularly, and left car thieves tied to nearby light posts, with pictures of their crimes attached to their chests with safety-pins. He carefully reminded victims and criminals alike that they were saved/foiled by the Spoiler, and listened in on the scanner to see if he was mentioned.
Armin was practical, although the hero thing was fun. But, since he needed sleep, he only went out three nights a week, on the nights before he had study hall to recover in.
It took him six whole weeks to make contact with Batman, and it didn’t exactly happen in a way that Armin had planned.
He had just finished taking down a mugger, and was pinning the developing picture onto the man’s shirt, when he heard someone land behind him, and say, “Nice right hook!”
Armin, panicking and surprised, grabbed the first thing that he could reach, which happened to be a brick, and lobbed it in the general direction of the speaker.
It wasn’t until he’d thrown it that he realized that he’d just thrown a brick at Robin, and that Robin was currently unconscious on the ground.
Shit, Armin thought, running forward to check on the unconscious boy. Shit, shit, shit, shit.
He was breathing, at least, Armin noted. There was a small bump on the side of his head, where the brick had hit him, but his eyelids flickered when Armin tried to shift him, so he figured he hadn’t hit him that hard.
Armin wasn’t exactly sure what to do. Call an ambulance? Hello, 9-1-1? Yes I just hit Robin the Boy Wonder with a brick, please come check him for a concussion. In the end, he dragged Robin up onto a rooftop, and sat with him until he regained consciousness.
He spent a lot of time slightly freaking out, hoping he wasn’t about to be labelled a supervillain and thrown in jail, and the rest of the time slightly freaking out because this was Robin, and he was going to talk to him, presuming he woke up that is, but Armin was pretty sure he hadn’t hit him that hard.
“Oww,” Robin finally said when he woke up, only fifteen minutes later. Armin was relieved.
“Sorry,” he said apologetically. “You startled me.”
“Nah, it’s cool,” Robin said, shaking his head, wincing slightly. “Batgirl says I need to be more careful about sneaking up on people—guess she’s right. She usually is,” he added thoughtfully. “But hi, I’m Robin!”
“Spoiler,” Armin said, doing his best not to stare.
Robin was a little taller than Armin, and about the same age. His skin was brown, with freckles covering his cheeks and nose. His hair was dark brown and long, flopping all over. His eyes were covered with a domino mask—black, with white lenses. His costume was a red tunic, a yellow belt, green tights, and a black cape lined with soft yellow fabric. There was a badge with R embossed on it right above Robin’s heart, and he wore sleek black gloves that bristled with technology. Armin, in his homemade purple outfit, felt inadequate.
“Oh cool! I’ve been wanting to meet you, but Batman says we’re not supposed to encourage you, but you’re really good at this, the pictures are a really good idea!”
“Thanks?” Armin replied, tilting his head slightly. He wondered if the other boy was naturally predisposed towards babbling, or if that was just the head injury talking.
“Anyway, I should probably get going, Batgirl’s going to be worried.”
“Will I see you again?” The words were blurted out before Armin could stop them, and he blushed, because wow that was embarrassing, Robin probably thought he was a complete and total loser now.
“Sure!” Robin said, grinning widely. Robin’s grin was nice. It was big and sweet and kind and real, in a way that most smiles just weren’t in Armin’s experience. “Do you have a pen?”
Armin did, of course, have a pen. He had three, as a matter of fact. Robin carefully selected the blue-ink pen, and scribbled a phone number across the palm of Armin’s hand with wide, easy to read numbers. Armin stared at the number, and Robin grinned at him, wide and trusting and good. “Give me a ring, and we can meet up!”
He then swung away into the night, and Armin was left staring at his palm, memorizing the numbers as fast as possible.
Batgirl was nice, too, despite the fact that everyone described her as really scary. Maybe it was her mask—the mask was kind of intimidating, and you couldn’t see her smile, unlike Robin.
Batman was actually scary, but he was willing to help Armin with his foster-parents, which was all that Armin had really wanted.
“You’re pretty good at this,” Batman admitted when Armin showed him the pictures and recordings of his foster-parents criminal activities. “I’ll get this evidence to Commissioner Smith—he’s one of the good cops.”
“Are you going to stop now?” Robin wanted to know. “I mean, you’re really good at this, you shouldn’t if you don’t want to!”
“I don’t think I’m good enough to keep doing this,” Armin said regretfully. “I’m not really that good at fighting.”
“We can help you!” Robin said eagerly, grinning from ear to ear. “Batgirl’s really good at fighting!”
And she was. She was fantastic, even Armin could tell that. And she was a good teacher—but Armin quickly learned that her fighting style wasn’t something he could keep up with. He did his best, but he struggled.
Robin and Batgirl quickly became his friends. He saw their faces surprisingly soon—he learned their names not long after. He clutched these small signs of friendship close to his heart, still partially in awe.
A Truth:
If it wasn’t for Annie, Armin wasn’t entirely sure what he would have done in the long run.
Armin’s foster-parents were quickly arrested, thanks to Batman’s help, and the ever-helpful Commissioner Erwin Smith.
Erwin Smith had been a good cop his whole life—Internal Affairs continually investigated him, because they refused to believe anyone could actually have as good of a record as he did.
He was a tall, broad shouldered blond man with thick, heavyset eyebrows and a charming, smug smile. He was clever and well-spoken, polite and charming, and he snapped Armin right out of the foster-homes before Armin had time to blink, or Eren time to convince Levi to apply for custody. Eren sulked, but Armin found that Erwin’s home was more suited for his tastes than the sprawling Ackerman Estate. Besides, he got to see Mikasa and Eren at school.
And Erwin could teach him to be a better detective.
Annie barely could remember her parents, which was the awful truth of the whole matter. She remembered a hug, she remembered her father apologizing—she didn’t know for what. She had grown up looking at photographs, and picking out her features on her parent’s faces—that was her nose on her father’s face, her mother’s eyes were the same that stared back at her from the mirror.
Annie mostly remembered being covered in their blood—it had gotten in her eyes, which had been why she had cried, until she realized that her parents weren’t waking up, and then she had cried even harder, confused and angry and lost.
Blood cried for blood, Annie knew that. A crossbow was her weapon of choice—it fitted into her hand like it had been made for her, and she blasted her bolts through the targets, remembering the masked face of the murdered, imagining the sound her bolts would make as they ripped through his hands.
She returned to Gotham City with a fortune in blood money, ripped from her family’s vaults, and a customized crossbow hidden in her suitcase.
She crafted herself an outfit, since Shingashina was the realm of masked vigilantes, it seemed. She could blend in—there were so many of them, no one would make the link between her, the returned Leonhardt daughter, and the Huntress, viciously cutting through the Mafia.
She searched for evidence—she ripped apart their worlds, searching for answers, for a why. Why had she been spared, why had they decided that her parents must die.
And then… there was Batman.
A Meeting:
“You need to get out of my city.”
“You don’t own it,” Annie snarled, glaring up at him. “It’s not yours.”
“You’re killing people.”
“I’m destroying the Mafia,” she gritted out. And she didn’t kill parents—unlike them, she left no orphans in her wake, no children to ask unanswerable questions.
“Here,” Spoiler offered her a cup full of coffee. His mask was off, revealing a very pretty face. His features were delicate, his eyes were wide and blue, and his hair was wispy and straw-colored, gathered into a ponytail that hung over his shoulder. His skin was pale. He had to be younger than she was, but there was something about him that told her he was not to be trusted, despite his wide eyes and kind smile.
“Thanks,” she said, accepting the coffee anyway, wrapping her cold fingers around the warm take-out cup, savoring the warmth. The stakeout she was currently on was long and cold, the wind seemed to ignore the layers of clothing she was wearing. She had wrapped her cloak as close to herself as possible, so it functioned as a blanket, but the winter wind still nipped.
“Why do you do it, Annie?” The boy asked, perching next to her.
She nearly fell off the roof. She did drop the coffee, the hot brown liquid spilling all over the rooftop, steaming in the frosty air. “What?”
“Sorry, was I not supposed to know that?” He tilted his head to one side, and Annie felt a shiver go up her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
“What do you want?” She spat out, gritting her teeth.
“Nothing,” Spoiler said, and she hated how wide-eyed and sweet he looked, when he clearly wasn’t. “I just want to help you.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” She snapped.
“That’s your problem, Annie. But I think you can be better,” he told her, reaching out, revealing a crystal necklace.
Annie’s head snapped up. She knew that necklace. It was a cross, made of shimmering crystal quartz, cut into a hundred thousand facets, so it gleamed like a rainbow prism with every slight shift of his gloved hand. It was her mother’s—she hadn’t seen it in years, not since she’d left that house for the final time.
“Where did you get that?” She demanded, her throat tight.
“You can be a good person, Annie,” he coaxed her, his voice sweet and wheedling, and, looking at him, Annie almost believed it. “You can be better than this.”
“You… you didn’t answer my question,” Annie said, resisting the urge to snatch the necklace out of his hand—she didn’t know if she wanted it, or if she wanted to shatter it into a thousand pieces. It was hers, this boy had no right to it.
“I found it,” he said, evasive, but staring right at her, unabashed. He let it slide into her hand, heavy and solid and beautiful.
Annie stared at it, almost mesmerized. “Thank you Spoiler,” she said, begrudgingly, fingering the facets of the crystal through the thick material of her gloves. It shimmered in her palm, twinkling and sparkling as she brought it closer to her eyes.
He smiled at her, wide and sweet. “Call me Armin,” he offered, another gift, a precious thing, far more precious than the necklace.
Annie looked at the boy, and tasted the strange name, whispering it softly, so softly that the wind almost hid it completely, but the boy’s grin told her that it wasn’t.
“Armin.”
He was very good, but at the same time, he really sucked. He was clever and persistent, he was efficient and fought smart, but he fought like he was three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than he actually was. He’d been trained, but by someone who didn’t know how to adjust for height or weight.
“You’re doing that wrong,” she told him, looking at him out of the corner of her eye as he slammed a man into the ground.
He looked at her, curious. A familiar feeling washed over her—that he’d played her. Again. But she found she mostly didn’t mind—she liked him well enough to put up with a little manipulation, every now and then.
“Will you show me how to do it better, then?”
“Sure,” she said, and she did.
A Kiss:
She kissed Armin only once—his breathing was soft and even, but Annie could not ignore the steady beeping of the machines, nor the fact that he was pale and ghostlike. His eyes flickered beneath his long-lashed lids—what was he dreaming about?
“Annie?” He whispered, and Annie felt her throat close up.
“You idiot,” she muttered, smoothing back his hair—it had been cut, now it was almost painfully short. “If I hadn’t been a good person this wouldn’t have happened.”
He turned his head and smiled at her wanly, looking exhausted. “Guess I won my bet, then,” he said hoarsely, and Annie fought back tears.
She bent down, and pressed a gentle kiss against his lips, before getting up to leave.
“I won’t walk again,” Armin said, staring up at the ceiling.
“I know.”
“I can’t be Spoiler anymore.”
“I know.”
“What will I do, Annie?”
“Not let that stop you, Armin.”
Going to the best school in Shingashina on a scholarship was not the easiest thing at the best of times.
It was even harder when you were Armin Arlelt, and apparently had a gigantic bully-magnet attached to you.
Luckily, Mikasa and Eren usually drove them all off, but it did make studying at school difficult. So, four nights a week, Armin was loaded into the car with Eren and Mikasa, and was driven by Petra Ral to the Ackerman Estate.
After the homework was done and the cookies were all eaten, Mikasa and Eren took him to the Batcave, where they practiced combat and worked on detective skills.
Mikasa and Eren turned sixteen—they celebrated their birthdays on the same day, even though Mikasa didn’t know her birthday—and Hange taught them all to drive. In the Batmobile.
“This is incredibly awesome,” Eren declared, eyes alight.
“This is probably a bad idea,” Armin said, eying Mikasa nervously as she sat in the driver’s seat, her arms ramrod straight.
“This thing is armored beyond belief, and has state of the art systems,” Hange reassured him. “Trust me, I designed it.”
The thing was? Armin did trust Hange. It didn’t mean he wanted to be in the backseat for Mikasa’s first drive.
All things taken into account, it probably could have ended a lot worse, but that didn’t stop Petra from yelling at all of them for all the skid marks.
Erwin Smith was a very good detective. It had taken him less than a year to figure out that Levi Ackerman was Batman by following the money trail. He had burned the evidence, deciding that, although unorthodox, it was probably the best cure for the rampant corruption and violence. He’d buried everything he could get his hands on, to protect both Levi and Hange Zoe.
It took him less than a week to figure out that his new foster-son was Spoiler.
That was a little… more complicated. Erwin sat at his desk, looking at the dossier he had gathered on Spoiler.
He didn’t like it. Not one bit. Armin was only fifteen. But then again, he knew that Eren Jaeger and Mikasa Ackerman had been only fourteen when they had begun their own careers. (And really, he wanted to strangle Levi sometimes. What had he been thinking?)
Spoiler Alert:
Levi hadn’t been thinking.
He could try to stop Armin, he supposed. Bar the windows, throw away the costume, tell him to stop. But he doubted that Armin would listen—and it wasn’t as if the boy couldn’t just slip away into the foster system again. The boy was a survivor, Erwin had to admit that.
He sighed, slumping against his desk. Clearly, there wasn’t much he could do. He couldn’t stop Armin, and he could hardly have him arrested for vigilantism when he wasn’t willing to do the same for Levi.
He’d just have to be sure that Armin understood what he was doing.
Erwin walked up to Armin’s room. Armin had already left for the night—he’d left a facsimile in his place. Erwin sighed, disassembled it, put it away, and sat on Armin’s bed, waiting for him to return. He had brought a pile of paperwork with him, and he set to working on it.
At four in the morning, Armin emerged from the window, freezing when he saw Erwin. “Um…”
“If you insist in continuing this,” Erwin said, closing the file he was working on with a definitive slap, “We must understand a few things. You are not to abuse my position as police commissioner to gain information. You are to seek appropriate medical treatment when necessary—I believe Levi Ackerman has access to what will be necessary, or at least he ought to. I intend to sign you up for martial arts lessons—you can select which type at a later date. And I cannot know anything about this. As far as I am concerned, this never happened. Understand?”
Armin, half-in, half-out of the window, with a split lip and a limp, nodded. “Yes sir.”
Erwin sighed—he’d thought they’d left the “sir” thing behind ages ago. “Also, I’m formalizing the adoption. Unless you have an objection?”
Armin startled, even though Erwin would have thought he’d have been beyond surprise at this point. “You mean it?”
“Yes,” Erwin confirmed.
It was his turn to be surprised, when suddenly, Armin was embracing him. The boy usually didn’t like physical contact, but Erwin recovered quickly enough to hug him back.
Something was wrong, Mikasa could tell. Petra didn’t come to the door when Mikasa and Eren pushed open the heavy oaken door—and the door hadn’t been locked.
Mikasa looked at Eren, who looked just as concerned as she was.
He reached into his backpack, produced two flat, narrow daggers, and handed her one. Mikasa curled her fingers around the wire-wrapped pommel, even though she knew her own hands were deadlier than the weapon.
“Petra?” She called, raising her voice so it carried through the halls.
There was no response.
“Let’s check the kitchen,” Eren whispered in her ear, and she nodded, her body tense.
One foot in front of the other, moving silently, they pushed through the Estate, their backpacks abandoned in the hallway. Mikasa took point, ready to throw herself between Eren and the threat at a moment’s notice. Eren was breakable. He healed slowly and gunshots meant he could not fight. He had taught Mikasa to fight with bullets buried in her shoulders, her knees, her hands, and her feet. She had fought with knives in her ribs and broken fingers and a concussion. Things that could stop Levi couldn’t stop her. She could fight, no matter what.
There was a man in the kitchen. He was tall and skinny, with dark, long greasy hair and a thin beard. His smile was wide and cruel, his hands scarred as they held a slender silver gun.
Mikasa would have known him anywhere.
“You!” Mikasa screamed, charging forward without a second thought. The knife went up, and she slashed downward in a sharp, abrupt motion.
He grabbed her arm and slammed her to the ground, twisting her wrist to force her to drop the knife. “Heyya, kid,” he said. There was a click as he pointed the gun at Eren, and Mikasa froze mid-struggle. “Hey, now stay back. This is family business.”
“You aren’t my family,” Mikasa hissed, squirming slightly even as he held her down.
“Where’s Petra?” Eren demanded. Mikasa couldn’t see him, but he sounded fairly far away—he probably hadn’t moved since she charged. “And who the hell are you?”
“The servant lady? She’s locked in the closet, nice and safe and unharmed. An’ you can call me Kenny.”
“Why should I believe you?” Mikasa hissed, consciously avoiding slipping back into Japanese as she mentally reeled at the name, even though she knew it was probably fake. He’d never let her call him anything—not even a title.
“She ain’t got nothing to do with this, Kasa,” Kenny said, letting her up. She scrambled to her feet, carefully keeping her distance. “This is between you and me.”
“What do you want?” She demanded, glaring at him. He looked older—there were lines around his eyes that weren’t there before, and his hair now was touched with silver around the temples. There was a scar on his lip—Mikasa knew where it was from. She had a matching one on her knuckles.
A Memory:
Blood on her hands, his hand on her shoulder, a smile—he’s proud—but the other is dead, and she doesn’t understand. People always fight back when she fights them, they always know what she’s going to do, but he hadn’t, he’d just sat there, and now there was nothing.
“Good job,” he tells her, and something inside snaps.
“Look,” Kenny sighed, throwing himself onto the chair. He snapped open his gun and began to disassemble it right there on the table, as if this was a casual conversation back in the cabin where he’d raised her. “I screwed up, okay? I get it. You weren’t ready—I shouldnta taken you on that mission, but you were doin’ so well with the fightin’ an’ all that I figured you could handle it. So you ran off. My bad, I figure, ya’ve earned it. Give you a few years on your own, see what happens. I’ve got shit to do in the meantime—coupla jobs I’d been puttin’ off to take care of you. Then the contract got cancelled, you were doin’ well, so I figured—why not?” He finished taking the gun apart, and began cleaning it, nodding slightly to himself as he spoke. It was strange to hear him speaking English—he sounded different, speaking with a strange twang that she couldn’t quite place.
“Contract?” She couldn’t help but ask, confused.
“What, you thought I was raisin’ a kid out of the goodness of my heart?” He snorted. “Nah, some big-shot wanted a super-assassin bodyguard. Changed their mind after you ran off, though.” He shrugged. “None-a my business. But anyways, but then something came up. I got a new contract.” He began to reassemble the gun, deliberately slowly. “And it’s gonna be a doozy.”
“What does it have to do with me?” She demanded.
“Simple. It’s dangerous—and it’s not the usual stuff.” Kenny grinned at her. “It’s saving the world.”
“What?” Eren said.
Mikasa narrowed her eyes. “Explain.”
He grinned. “Some poor shmuck is the key to the end of the world—and someone’s plannin’ on using ‘em. Problem is, there’s a lot of guards, technology, and the like. I’ll need help. That’s the job. Kill one person. Save the world.”
“I don’t kill,” Mikasa snapped.
He blinked, looking up at her. “What?”
“I said,” she hissed, clenching her fists. “I don’t kill.”
“Ah, c’mon,” he said, looking at her incredulously. “I mean, I get it, you were too young the first time, but—”
“I. Don’t. Kill,” she yelled, resisting the urge to charge him and slam him against the table.
“He can’t be stopped,” Kenny yelled back, getting to his feet. “He’ll destroy the whole fucking world if no one puts a bullet in his brain—”
“I don’t believe you,” Mikasa snarled.
“Why the fuck not? I never lied to you, Kasa!”
Mikasa ignored the old, familiar nickname and focused on her rage, her hatred. “Doesn’t mean you’re a good person, Kenny.”
“I’m shit,” he agreed, squinting at her. “Doesn’t mean I’m a liar.”
“You stole me,” she screamed.
He blinked. “Stole you? What the fuck makes you think I did that?”
She stared at him. “But… you said…”
“Just ‘cause you’re not my brat doesn’t mean I stole you,” he said, sounding vaguely offended. “Your dad was my cousin. He got himself offed—him and your ma. So I took you in.”
“You sucked at it!” Eren yelled from the doorway.
“Seriously,” Kenny said, jerking his finger. “Who the hell is this guy?”
Suddenly, Mikasa saw movement behind Kenny, and then Levi was there, slamming Kenny into the table. Mikasa lashed out, shattering Kenny’s knee with a well-placed kick. Kenny howled, and Eren lunged, grabbing the gun out of his hands.
“What the—Levi?”
“You know him?” Eren asked Levi, eyes wide.
“You didn’t know I lived here?” Levi demanded, confused.
“I didn’t exactly look at the mailbox!” Kenny said, squirming slightly, apparently having not even noticed that Mikasa had smashed his kneecap. “I knew she was fine, I wasn’t about to inquire more!”
“How do you know him?” Mikasa demanded.
“I fuckin’ trained him!” Kenny said. “I figured I owed my nephew that much when he showed up on my doorstep!”
“Wait, I’m related to Levi?”
“You’re related to me?”
“What the fuck is happening?” Eren demanded.
A Truth Universally Acknowledged:
The Ackerman family tree is very hard to keep track of.
Ymir would be the first to tell you—being in the closet was exhausting. It was lying, day in and day out, faking, hiding, lying, pretending.
So once she entered the police academy, she stopped lying. Well, mostly. She didn’t so much come out of the closet as set the closet on fire, and screw the consequences. She wasn’t dependent on her parents or their money anymore—she had her degrees in criminology and Spanish literature, she could risk their ire and their disownment—she had her own apartment, her accounts and her credit cards were separate from her parents—the only thing they could do was change their locks and numbers, and take her off their Christmas list. Which they did.
It hurt, of course it hurt, these were her parents, but she’d known it was coming since she was five, when the priest had spoken of hell and perversion and sodomy, and her parents had nodded along, good little Catholics to the core.
She threw all her crucifixes away, buried her family photos in nests of spare sheets and blankets, hidden away in drawers that she would never open, and dated whoever she wanted. Pretty girls, smart girls, nice girls, rich girls, white girls, black girls, and then…
Christa.
Christa was sweet, a fake, cloying, nausea inducing sweet and nice. The sort of nice that came from practice and effort, not anything real. Her hair was thick and golden, her eyes a sparkling blue. Her features were like an angel’s, sweet and open and beautiful. She fascinated Ymir—Ymir wanted to rip aside the lies, figure out who Christa was beneath all the layers, beneath all the lies.
They went on one date. Then two. Then three. Then Ymir had a drawer at Christa’s place, and Christa kept a spare toothbrush at Ymir’s and they did all their laundry at Christa’s. They took turns going to each other’s places, of buying food.
Christa was a pastry chef at a five star restaurant—she came back from her restaurant covered in powdered sugar and carrying paper bags full of rejects. But she had too much money, and she never mentioned her past—it was as fake as the rest of her.
Ymir lived for the moments when she saw a glimpse of something real, a flicker of anger or selfishness, a hint of something substantial.
Everything about Christa was fake, but it only made Ymir more interested in her and maybe even more in love with her—she was a detective at heart.
But she didn’t expect to find the beginning of her answers in a police file.
Marco, her partner, smiled at her as he explained the case to her. Marco had been her friend in the Police Academy. He was nice enough, Ymir supposed. Decent, hardworking, didn’t make rude comments or stare inappropriately.
A Question, From the Future:
“What is your greatest regret? What would you change if you could?”
Ymir laughed, her hair greasy and unwashed. A fourth bottle dangled from her loose fingers—the other three were broken around her.
“Marco,” she whispered, her eyes heavily lidded, her speech slurred. “I wouldn’t have killed him.”
“Historia Reiss,” he said, smiling at her as he brandished the thick manila file. “She’s been missing for ten years.”
Her mother had been a debutante—her father’s identity had been a mystery, one the tabloids had loved to make guesses about. Historia Reiss had been ten years old when she disappeared, making her twenty now—Christa’s age. Mother murdered, child missing, DNA found at a crime scene from just last week—a single, blond hair.
If Ymir hadn’t been with her at the time of the murder, Ymir might have worried. As it was, she just resolved to do some investigation on her own.
A Lost Hair:
Plucked off a hairbrush, dropped at the crime scene. A birthday present, from the girl’s father.
Historia, Historia, Historia. Ymir wanted to sing it, wanted to whisper it into her girlfriend’s ear until the mask cracked and crumbled and revealed whoever was underneath.
But instead, she went home, and had a drink with her girlfriend.
It would be too easy, letting the name slip from her lips and into the air—to corner Historia, to demand the truth. Ymir didn’t want that. She didn’t want to blackmail or extort or force her—Ymir wanted honesty. She wanted to see Historia trusting her, laying her secrets bare of her own free will. She wanted for the mask to be taken off, not removed.
She drank and smoked a cigarette in the apartment, even though Historia wrinkled her nose and pretended to mind—but that was fake, Ymir was learning the tells, learning to find the hidden, buried realities of Historia Reiss. Christa Lenz was a lie, a beautiful, well-crafted lie, and Ymir couldn’t wait to see it fall apart.
She tugged at Historia’s shirt, pulling her up for a kiss, slow and lazy. They both tasted of scotch, and Ymir wanted to laugh—Historia had been drinking as well, even though she’d been hiding it.
“Let’s go to bed,” she murmured, low and soft.
“You’re drunk,” Historia said, pulling away slightly.
“I’m tired,” she corrected. “I just wanna sleep.”
The two of them fell into Historia’s silk-sheeted bed—and how did a pastry chef afford silk sheets?—and Ymir pressed a final kiss against Historia’s porcelain cheek. And right before she went to sleep, she leaned in and asked the question.
“Why do you keep lying?” She slurred, her eyes drifting shut.
It was a very good question.
It was just an ordinary patrol. Just an ordinary, routine patrol.
Just an ordinary gunman, with a gun.
Just a shot in the back.
Just three bullets clustered in the base of his spine.
Just, just, just.
Erwin was waiting at the hospital, grey in the face, demanding answers.
Levi and Hange were there as well, shouting and arguing with Erwin.
Heard Through a Drugged Haze:
“He’s eighteen! He knew the risks!”
“He’s my son!”
“Shut up, both of you! We’re going to need to do some cover work here!”
“What are you talking about?”
“No one can know Armin is Spoiler. This can’t be linked back to him.”
They faked it. Mikasa wore the cape for a few days, and Eren a few others. Annie wore it for a solid week. Even Hange took a turn.
They start a rumor of Spoiler’s retirement.
Armin stared at the ceiling as they told him all about it, trying not to be angry, or resentful. He wouldn’t walk again. He could never wear the purple cape again—to think he had once resented the color, hated the impracticality of it. Now he would do anything to be able to wear it again.
Someone flopped down beside him, and he blinked, confused. Everyone was supposed to be out that night. He turned his head, and stared.
Ymir, one of his dad’s officers, was sitting there, eating an apple.
“Your dad asked me to keep an eye on you,” Ymir said. She smelled of cigarette smoke and gunpowder—she had just been at the range.
“Why, does he think someone’s coming back to finish the job?” He asked, dull and uncaring.
“You look pretty alive to me,” Ymir said, shrugging. “Yeah, it sucks. But you knew the risks when you put on that freaking eggplant cloak, didn’t you?”
Armin stared at her. She looked at him, pitying. “Please. I can do some math.” She took another bite of her apple. “The way I see it, you can sit there, and feel sorry for yourself—which is a perfectly legitimate reaction, I mean, no judging—or you don’t let this stop you. Everyone knew the Spoiler—you were good at the detective stuff. You don’t have to stop doing that just ‘cause you can’t walk anymore, hermano.” She shrugged. “But then again, I don’t know how your superhero shit works. I’m just a cop.”
Eren had a freaking broken ankle, which meant that he couldn’t go on the mission.
“It shouldn’t take that long,” Mikasa reassured him. He glared at her, crossing his arms.
“You get to meet Wonder Woman,” he groused.
“Don’t tell Isabel you’re excited about that, she’ll never let me live it down,” Levi groused. “I’ll throw a gigantic fucking party once it’s done okay? You’ll get to meet everyone then.”
“Don’t invite Aquaman, he’s an ass.”
“I thought you said he looked like a horse, not a donkey.”
“You’re freaking hilarious, Levi.”
Mikasa sighed. “Jean’s not that bad, Eren.”
“You just say that ‘cause he has a gigantic crush on you.”
Mikasa rolled her eyes fondly, and then kissed him on the forehead. “We’ll be home soon. Don’t do anything stupid while we’re gone."
Four Messages:
Click. “Hi, you’ve reached the super-secret cell phone voice mail of Levi Ackerman, leave him a message at the beep, he might actually listen to it!”
“Shitty glasses what are you—”
BEEP
“Hi. Levi. Uh, it’s me. Eren. So I found my dad. He’s in Turkey—near my mom’s old town, right? I know you wanted me to stay put, but it’s my dad, y’know? So, like, I’m about to get onto the plane. I’ll be fine—I’ll probably be back before you and Mikasa get back from that trip. Well, talk to you later.”
- “This is Armin Arlelt, leave a message at the tone and I’ll get back to you.”
BEEP
“Hey, Armin. I know, you’re probably asleep. Time zones are awful, aren’t they? Anyways, don’t worry about me, I found my dad, and he’s, like, actually giving me answers. I can’t wait to tell you when I get home—but anyways, I better get going, Dad’s going to take me out to eat.”
Click. “You’ve reached the desk of Doctor Hange Zoe at Survey Corp Technical Industries. I’m either away from my desk or with a client, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
BEEP
“Fuck. Hange, look, you gotta call Levi, okay? Something’s wrong—I found my dad, but he’s involved with something—something really bad, I don’t know what, I can’t figure it out, but it’s bad, he’s in too deep, and he can’t get out. He doesn’t want my help—no, I didn’t tell him I’m Robin, don’t worry, the secret’s safe—but I have to help, y’know? He’s my dad. Please, call Levi and get him to get out here as soon as possible—I’m going to need help. Look, I’m sorry, I’ll be careful, I know I promised I wouldn’t do anything stupid, but he needs my help. I’ll see you soon.”
Click . “This is Mikasa. Uh, leave a message?”
BEEP
There was a sound of heavy breathing, of a vague shuffling that sounds like someone trying to crawl. The phone was dropped. There was a small, pained cry.
“I’m sorry,” Eren whispered.
An explosion cut out anything else he had to say.