Chapter 16: Stark reality check
The echo of her crutch on the cobblestones faded, absorbed by the general din of the courtyard. Levi stood frozen, watching the empty space where Amiya had been. The dismissal in her glance, the absolute neutrality of it, lodged in his chest like a sliver of ice. It was worse than anger. It was nothing.
“You know she thinks she’s a burden, right?”
Petra’s voice came from beside him, quiet but clear. She was coiling a length of reins, her movements methodical, but her eyes were on him, sharp.
Levi didn’t turn. “What?”
“Whatever you said to her last night in the woods. She thinks she’s a burden. Someone you feel obligated to protect but don’t actually want around. An annoyance.” Petra’s words were clinical, a report from a front line he hadn’t known existed. “That’s what she feels right now.”
He finally looked at Petra, a flicker of genuine confusion breaking through the cold static in his mind. “That’s illogical.”
“Is it?” Petra let the reins drop into a tidy loop. “Think about it from her side. She gets transferred in, breaks her leg almost immediately on a routine exercise. You, personally, haul her back. Then there’s the mess in the supply alcove. Then the canyon.” Petra counted the events on her fingers. “Every major incident since she arrived, you’ve been the one cleaning it up. And in the canyon, she used your own emergency signal—the one you gave her—to force your hand. She manipulated you to save the squad, and it worked. And you just got… pissed.”
“She exposed herself,” Levi said, the argument feeling thin even as he said it.
“She saved our lives. You wouldn’t have moved. We all saw you. You were waiting for an opening that wasn’t coming.” Petra stepped closer, her voice dropping. “You saw that flare and you moved. Instantly. Yeah, she was fine. She wasn’t in immediate danger. But you didn’t know that.” She held his gaze, unwavering. “She fired that flare to keep you alive. Not just out of duty. And you reacted like she’d committed a personal betrayal. You’re blind.”
The last word hung in the air, simple and devastating.
Out of love.
Petra hadn’t said it again, but the echo of it was there, in the space between her other statements. It was a variable he had not calculated. A motivation that didn’t fit into any tactical column. Duty, yes. Camaraderie, maybe. But the rest? It implied an emotional investment that skewed the math into territories he had deliberately walled off years ago. It was messy. It was dangerous. It was the exact opposite of clean.
He thought of Amiya’s face in the woods, defiant and afraid. You gave it to me. He thought of her walking away just now, the complete absence in her eyes.
Petra shouldered her gear. “She’s in the south stable block. Oluo said she went to check on Bell, but she’s been in there awhile.” She gave him one last look, a mixture of pity and frustration. “Fix your math, Captain.”
She walked away, leaving him alone in the bustling courtyard. The noise around him—the shouts, the clang of steel, the whinny of horses—receded into a dull roar. His mind, usually a chamber of clear, rapid-fire decisions, was a snarl of contradictory data.
A burden.
You’re blind.
She fired that flare to keep you alive.
He moved without conscious decision, his feet carrying him away from the main barracks, toward the sprawling, weathered complex of the stables. The air grew thick with the familiar, pungent scent of hay, manure, leather, and animal sweat. It was a honest smell, uncomplicated. He pushed the heavy wooden door open.
The south block was quieter, a long aisle of stalls lit by dusty shafts of light cutting through high windows. Most of the horses were out or settled. He heard the soft, rhythmic sound of a brush on hide before he saw her.
Amiya was in Bell’s stall, her crutch leaning against the wooden partition. She stood on her good leg, bracing one hand against the mare’s broad flank for balance as she worked a currying brush in slow, sweeping circles over the dun-colored coat. Her movements were careful, absorbed. Her braid was messy, strands of dark hair escaping to frame her profile. She was talking to the horse, her voice a low, murmuring stream he couldn’t quite make out.
He stopped at the stall door, saying nothing. Watching. This was her, unobserved. The compassionate cadet who cried over lost scouts, the stubborn soldier who’d fire a flare into a sky full of enemies, the artist who hid sketches in her journal. The person who thought she was an annoyance in his ledger.
Bell’s ear twitched toward him, and Amiya’s brushing hesitated for a second. She didn’t turn.
“Medical is waiting for you,” Levi said. His voice sounded foreign in the hushed space.
“Bell needed tending. She pushed hard yesterday.” Amiya didn’t stop her work. “I’ll go soon.”
Silence stretched, filled only by the brush’s whisper and the horse’s contented sigh.
Levi unlatched the stall door and stepped inside. The space was tight, crowded with the large animal and the two of them. Amiya finally glanced at him, her green eyes guarded, then looked back at Bell’s coat.
He reached out and took the brush from her hand. His fingers didn’t touch hers. “You’re doing it wrong. You’re just moving dirt around.”
She relinquished it, a faint frown on her face, and shifted her weight to her crutch. He took her place beside the horse, his own movements brisk, expert. He applied firm, precise pressure, following the grain of the hair, lifting the dust and old sweat to the surface in a cloud.
“You’re not a burden,” he said, the words coming out flat, direct, like he was reporting a stock count.
Amiya let out a short, humorless breath. “Petra talks too much.”
“She’s usually right.” He focused on a patch behind Bell’s withers. “The flare was the correct tactical choice. I would have… delayed. Too long. The guns changed the equation. You saw it first.”
It was as close to an apology as he could muster. An acknowledgment of error. Not a personal one, but a professional one. It was the language he knew.
Amiya was silent for a long moment. “I didn’t do it because it was tactically correct.”
The brush stilled in his hand. The air in the stall felt too close, too warm. He could smell the hay, the horse, and the faint, clean scent of her soap.
“I know,” he said, the two words quiet.
He put the brush down on a ledge and turned to face her. She was looking at the floor of the stall, at the straw scattered over the stone.
“You said the math becomes impossible,” she whispered. “I understand that. I do. My presence… complicates your calculations. That’s what I am. A complication.”
He took a step closer. She didn’t back away. “I miscalculated,” he said, forcing the words out. “In the woods. I focused on the variable, not the reason for it.”
“The reason was simple.” She finally met his eyes, and the guarded wall was down, leaving just a raw, tired honesty. “I couldn’t watch you die. Not when I could do something. Even if the something was stupid. Even if it made you hate me for it.”
The word hate was a physical blow. It was so far from the tangled mess of what he actually felt—frustration, fear, a relentless, grating concern, a need for her to be safe and capable and away from the dark calculus of his world—that it left him speechless.
“I don’t hate you,” he said, the statement utterly inadequate.
“It feels like it sometimes.” She gave a small, shaky shrug. “It feels like I’m a problem you’re constantly having to solve.”
He had no protocol for this. No clean solution. There was only the truth, messy and undeniable. He reached out, slowly, giving her every chance to pull away. His hand, calloused and stained with horse dust, came up and cupped the side of her face. His thumb brushed over the smudge on her cheek, the one he’d noticed the night before and had done nothing about. It came away clean.
“You are a problem,” he said, his voice low. “A persistent, unpredictable, infuriating problem.” His thumb rested just below her eye. “You’re also the reason we’re not digging graves for Eld and Gunther today. The math isn’t impossible. It’s just different. And I’m… learning it.”
Her breath hitched. She leaned almost imperceptibly into his touch, her eyes searching his. The nothingness from the courtyard was gone, replaced by a vulnerability that terrified him more than any Titan.
Outside, a shout echoed, and the moment fractured. Levi dropped his hand, the absence of contact immediate. The stable door banged open farther down the aisle, followed by the sound of boisterous voices—a fresh squad coming to tend their mounts.
The real world rushed back in.
“Go to medical,” Levi said, his tone shifting back toward command, but softer at the edges. “Get that leg checked. Then report to the cartography office. I want the canyon terrain drawn with the ambush points marked by tonight.”
It was an order. It was also an offer. A return to the framework they understood. Duty. Work.
Amiya nodded, a faint, understanding ghost of a smile touching her lips. “Yes, Captain.”
She retrieved her crutch, gave Bell one final pat, and maneuvered past him out of the stall. As she passed, her shoulder lightly brushed his arm. It wasn’t an accident.
He stood in the stall for a long time after she left, listening to the sounds of the stable, the lingering warmth of her skin against his palm. The equation was different now. Infinitely more complex. Terrifyingly so.
He picked up the brush and finished currying Bell with smooth, automatic strokes. The problem wasn’t solved. But it was, for the first time, properly defined. And that was a start.
And that was a start. The rest of the day was a retreat into sanctioned routines. He attended the long, grim debrief with Erwin, dissecting the ambush’s chilling implications. Interior Military Police. A sanctioned kill operation. The enemy wore their own faces. He filed the fury away, a cold, sharp tool for later.
Amiya, he knew, would be in the cartography office. He pictured her there, bent over parchment with her meticulous lines, translating the horror of the canyon into sterile, useful data. The image was a quiet counterpoint to the shouting in his head. It was a place where her mind, not her luck or her leg, was the asset. He left her to it.
Night draped the headquarters, a deep velvet black punctured by torchlight at the gates. His own rounds were complete, every lock and corridor checked. Silence pooled in the stone halls. His feet, without conscious command, diverted from the path to his quarters.
The cartography room door was ajar, a sliver of warm lantern light cutting across the cold floor of the passage. He pushed it open silently.
She was asleep. Her head rested on a large, half-finished map of the canyon ridge, her cheek pressed against the inked lines of cliffs. One hand still loosely held a fine-nibbed pen. The lantern guttered low beside her, painting her features in soft, shifting gold. Her braid was undone, dark hair cascading over the parchment and her shoulder.
A dried spot of ink stained her temple. He watched the slow, deep rhythm of her breathing for a long moment. The fierce, infuriating soldier was gone. In her place was just a woman, exhausted, seeking solace in the geography of a nightmare.
He stepped inside, the floorboards silent under his weight. He gently extinguished the lantern, plunging the room into near-darkness save for the moonlight from a high window. He then leaned down, his presence a shadow in the dark.
He didn’t shake her. He raised his knuckles and, with a touch so faint it was almost air, ran them down the curve of her cheek, from temple to jawline. It was less a wake-up call and more a transfer of awareness.
She stirred, a soft, confused sound escaping her lips. Her green eyes fluttered open, unfocused and deep with sleep. “Mm… Captain?”
“Your neck will be a ruin,” he said, his voice low in the quiet room. “Your room. Now.”
She was pliant with sleep, her usual defenses dissolved. She nodded slowly, fumbling for her crutch leaning against the desk. He took it, hooked it over his own shoulder, and without a word, slid an arm behind her back and under her knees. He lifted her.
She made a small sound of surprise, her hands coming up to rest loosely against his chest. “I can walk,” she murmured, but her head already lolled against his shoulder, her protest weak.
“You’re slow,” he stated, already moving through the door and into the dark corridor. Her weight was negligible, a warm, trusting bundle. The smell of ink and paper and her hair filled his senses. He walked with a silent, measured pace, past empty offices and sleeping quarters.
Her room was a small, spartan cell like all the others. He shouldered the door open, nudged it closed with his foot, and crossed to the narrow bed. He laid her down, the coarse wool blanket scratching against his arms. He pulled it up over her, his movements methodical.
As he went to pull away, to retreat to the clean, ordered silence of his own space, her hand found his wrist. Her fingers were warm, her grip soft but insistent.
Her eyes were half-closed, blurred by lingering sleep and something more vulnerable. In the dark, her whisper was a fragile thread. “Stay?”
The word hung in the cold air of the little room. It wasn’t a demand. It was a question, barely formed, steeped in the honesty of exhaustion and the unspoken fear of the canyon’s echo. It asked for a presence, not a promise.
Levi froze, his hand still under hers. Every protocol, every wall of discipline, screamed at him to leave. This was a line, clear and bright. He had no map for what lay across it.
But he remembered the feel of a flare gun in her hand, aimed at the sky for him. He remembered the absolute void in her eyes in the courtyard, the one he had put there.
Slowly, he sat on the edge of the thin mattress. The bed frame creaked under his weight. He didn’t lie down. He simply sat, his back against the rough stone wall, one leg stretched out, the other bent. A sentry in the dark.
He turned his wrist within her grasp, just enough to let his own hand close around hers. His thumb brushed over her knuckles once.
“Go to sleep,” he said, his voice a quiet rumble in the night.
He felt her hand relax, the tension seeping from her fingers. Her breathing deepened, evening out within minutes. She believed him.
He stayed. He watched the moonlight trace a path across the floor. He listened to the sound of her breath and the distant, periodic call of the watch. The math was different. Terrifying. But here, in the quiet dark, with her hand in his, it didn’t feel impossible. It just was.
It just was. He sat in the dark, her hand a warm, steady weight in his. The stone wall was cold through his shirt, a grounding discomfort. Her breathing, deep and even now, was the only sound that mattered in the quiet room.
They weren’t okay yet. The easy rhythm from before the canyon mission was gone, shattered by his reaction on the ridge. He had messed up. She had done the right thing, the only thing that could have worked, and he had made her regret it.
He missed her. The realization was a dull ache. He had missed her during those three interminable days pinned on that ridge, every stagnant hour filled with tactical calculations poisoned by a sharper, more desperate want. He missed the way she kissed him, a hesitant press that could unravel his focus completely. He missed the impossible warmth of her curled against him at night, a silent challenge to the chill he carried inside.
Three days of sitting like a target, planning an exit, but mostly just wanting to get back to her. He remembered the night before he left, her silhouette in his doorway. “You’re coming back?” she’d asked, voice soft. “I should,” he’d said, the non-answer tasting like cowardice even then. He’d thought about that exchange constantly, a useless loop during the siege.
And then the purple light had torn the sky open. Panic, pure and scorching, had vaporized every other thought. He’d moved, a creature of pure instinct, because the idea of her hurt was an equation with no solution. To reach her, to see her whole and unharmed and clever, and to then unleash his fear onto her as anger… it was the worst kind of failure. He had broken her trust. He’d made her feel unwanted, a burden, when the terrifying truth was the exact opposite.
The thought she was hurt had been a punch to the gut. Finding out she wasn’t had been a different kind of blow, leaving him breathless and disoriented and furious at the world, at the ambush, and most of all at himself for the raw, exposed nerve she had become.
A shiver ran through her. The room was cold. Gently, he disentangled his hand from hers and stood. He tucked the blanket more securely around her shoulders, his movements precise. He hesitated, then toeed off his boots. The floorboards were frigid under his socks.
He stretched out beside her on top of the blanket, on his back, one arm bent behind his head. The bed was narrow; his shoulder brushed her arm. He stared at the ceiling, a landscape of shadows.
“Levi?” Her voice was thick with sleep.
“Go back to sleep.”
“You’re on top of the blanket. You’ll freeze.”
“I’m fine.”
She shifted, a rustle of wool and a wince for her leg. She didn’t speak again, but a moment later, the edge of her blanket was lifted and draped over him. The weight of it, warmed by her body, settled over his chest. The gesture was so simple, so defiantly kind after everything, that it lodged in his throat.
He didn’t move. He just lay there, enveloped in a shared warmth, listening to her breathing sync with his own. The canyon was still between them, a fissure. But the silence now wasn’t empty. It was a fragile, temporary bridge.
Dawn came as a grey smear at the window. He was awake before the first bird call, his body tuned to the earliest light. Amiya was turned toward him, her face relaxed in sleep, one hand curled near her chin. The ink stain was still on her temple.
Carefully, he slid out from under the blanket. He pulled on his boots, his movements silent. At the door, he looked back. She sighed in her sleep, her fingers clutching at the empty space where he’d been.
He went to his own quarters, washed, changed into a fresh uniform. The routine was grounding. By the time he entered the mess hall, he was Captain Levi again, posture rigid, face unreadable. His squad was already at their usual table.
Petra looked up as he sat, her eyes flicking over him with an analyst’s precision. She said nothing, just passed him a cup of tea.
Oluo was mid-sentence. “—and so I said, if you think that’s a clean gear dismount, you’ve got rocks in your head, obviously, because the pivot was all wrong—”
“Your porridge is getting cold,” Levi said, not looking up from his tea.
Oluo shut up. Eld and Gunther exchanged a glance, a silent bet placed on whether the Captain’s mood was lethal or merely toxic this morning.
Amiya entered a few minutes later. She was in uniform, her hair neatly re-braided, the crutch under her arm. She paused at the entrance, scanning the room. Her eyes found his table, then skittered away. She moved toward the service line, her progress slow.
“Ito,” Levi called out. His voice cut through the clatter of the hall.
She stopped, turning. Every table nearby had gone subtly quieter.
“Sit. Eat,” he said, nodding to the empty space beside Petra. “You’re behind on your terrain sketches. We’re not wasting daylight.”
It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. But it was a public one, pulling her back into the fold of his squad, reinstating her place. Petra shot him a look he chose to ignore, then waved Amiya over.
“Saved you a seat,” Petra said brightly, shifting down the bench.
Amiya navigated to the table, setting her crutch aside. “Thank you.”
“How’s the leg?” Eld asked.
“Stiff. Medical says the cast can come off in a few days.” She accepted a bowl from Petra. Her gaze lifted, meeting Levi’s across the table for a fleeting second. There was no smile, but the guarded nothingness from the courtyard was absent. There was a question, and a trace of wary acknowledgment.
“Good,” Levi said, stirring his tea. “Then you can get back to proper training. Your vertical maneuvering is sloppy.”
Oluo nearly choked. “Sir, with respect, her vertical maneuvering scores were in the top—”
“I said it was sloppy,” Levi repeated, silencing him. He looked directly at Amiya. “We’ll fix it.”
It wasn’t an apology. It was a plan. A path forward. Work. Improvement. Something he knew how to do.
Amiya held his stare, a spark of her old defiance returning. “Looking forward to the critique, Captain.”
Around them, the mess hall’s noise swelled back to normal. The moment passed. They ate. The conversation turned to gear maintenance schedules, the strange smell from the northern latrine, the rumor of a new batch of recruits arriving.
They weren’t okay. They weren’t how they were before he left for the ridge, all tentative touches and stolen moments in quiet hallways. But it was something. It was a shared table. It was a plan to fix her maneuvering. It was the memory of a blanket shared in the dark.
As they filed out to begin the day’s duties, Levi fell into step beside Amiya, his pace shortened to match her hobble. He spoke, his voice low, for her alone. “The map from last night. You labeled the eastern outcrop wrong. The scale was off by ten meters.”
She glanced at him, a faint crease between her brows. “I used the standard survey notes.”
“The notes are wrong. I’ve been there. It’s shorter.” He paused, then added, “I’ll show you on the revised chart. After training.”
She nodded, looking ahead. “Alright.”
It was just terrain. It was just a correction. But it was also a promise of more time, a reason to be in the same room later, a thread pulled taut between them, mending, one deliberate, practical stitch at a time.