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When Erwin says they need to shop for new curtains he doesn’t really mean they need to shop for new curtains, and not just because there’s nothing new in the world anymore. This is how Levi chooses to interpret the suggestion, because it is a suggestion, and an awful one at that.
He has no idea why Erwin wants the damn things. He doesn’t ask.
The Walls channel wind into unchanging patterns; the same grass has always grown here; the curtains available for purchase at the markets will be shitty forever.
So Levi decides to make the curtains himself.
Scraps of fabric are hard to come by. When one squad mate needs a shirt taken in, someone somewhere will inevitably need one taken out. It’s one big balancing act. Full swathes of fabric are expensive—not prohibitively on Levi’s pay grade, but more than he or anyone with sense should be willing to pay for a piss ugly sheet to hang over a glass hole in the wall.
He starts with a few squares of his own. Then a long strip salvaged from somewhere, a few irregular patches after that. It grows. Word spreads through the squads that Levi has a domestic project. When the rumor grows to encompass the fact that it’s for the Commander, people begin donating their spare scraps to Levi with concerning zeal.
Obviously Erwin knows about it, even before the curtains become public knowledge. He sees Levi working on it a few times. Once outside when Erwin makes rounds, as Levi sits against the wall of the barracks keeping half an eye on Zoë’s research antics. In passing after dinner, Levi at the table listening to the squad’s chatter and his needle flashing in the candlelight. Again one morning before they have to get up, Erwin rolling toward Levi and watching quietly from the pillow.
Levi makes the edges neat, sewing them into soft straight lines. Despite the irregular pieces the curtains as a whole are perfectly rectangular. He chases the grass and dirt and blood stains out with every trick he knows. He mends the tattered patterns. No two colors or designs are the same. There’s a piece from every squad in the Survey Corps by the time it’s finished.
He hands the project over to Erwin without much ceremony. Erwin holds it like a cherished thing.
People like them don’t need curtains. Curtains can’t keep the monsters out. Neither do shutters, but at least they keep out the cold if the wood isn’t too busted up. But Levi knows that caring about something gentle and human like curtains is what matters, if not the curtains themselves.
—and it occurs to him, as Erwin hangs them up and turns back for a kiss, that the busybodies across the street can’t watch them do stuff like this through the window anymore either.
Well.
Levi slings his arms around Erwin’s neck and pulls him down right in front of what used to be a glass hole in the wall, absolutely hidden from anyone on the other side. Levi guesses that can matter too.