Chapter 4: Fevered Confessions
The infirmary light was a cold, relentless white. It bleached everything—the walls, the sheets, the faces of the nurses, the fear. It hummed, a steady electrical note underneath the other sounds: the rustle of starched fabric, the clink of glass bottles, the low, urgent voices that never seemed to rise above a certain level of dread.
Levi stood just inside the doorway, a statue carved from grime and exhaustion. They’d tried to make him leave. A medic with tired eyes had pointed to the chair by the wall, told him to sit, to rest. He hadn’t moved. He’d washed his hands and arms at the deep sink in the corner until the water ran clear, scrubbing under his nails with a clinical ferocity, but the forest felt like it was still under his skin. The smell of damp earth and her blood seemed lodged in his sinuses.
Sage lay in the center of the room on a raised cot, a small island of crisis. The ragged field bandages were gone. A crisp white dressing covered the surgical incision on her chest where a proper chest tube now snaked from between her ribs into a plastic drainage container on the floor. Clear fluid, tinged pink, bubbled inside it. An IV line ran from a suspended bottle to the back of her hand, the tape stark against her pale skin.
For two days, she’d been still. A deep, concerning stillness. Now, the fever had her.
It started as a twitch. A finger curling against the starch of the sheet. Then her head rolled to the side, a low moan escaping her cracked lips. The monitor by her cot began a faster, insistent beep.
“No… no, not there,” she slurred, her voice thick and unfamiliar.
A nurse moved to adjust the IV line. Sage’s arm jerked away, a weak, flailing motion. “Get it off! The roots… they’re moving…”
Her breathing hitched, turning rapid and shallow. The beeping accelerated. She began to thrash, a slow-motion struggle against the sheets, her legs tangling. “Levi!” The name was a half-scream, ripped from a nightmare. “Where’s the tube? It’s inside me, I can feel it growing—”
Her hands flew to her chest, fingers clawing at the pristine dressing. The nurse grabbed for her wrists. “Hold her, please!”
Levi was already moving. He crossed the room in three strides, his own fatigue burned away by a colder, sharper fuel. He batted the nurse’s hands away—too gentle, too slow—and locked his own around Sage’s forearms, pinning them to the mattress beside her head. Her skin was furnace-hot, slick with sweat.
“Sage.” His voice was a command, but it had no purchase in her delirium.
Her eyes were open, but they saw nothing in the white room. They were wide, green glass filled with forest shadows. “It’s in the trees,” she panted, struggling against his grip with a surprising, fevered strength. “It’s coming through the roots. You have to cut it out. You have to cut!”
She was tearing at her own flesh in her mind, reliving the surgery, twisted by infection and terror. The heart monitor screeched a frantic protest.
The nurse fumbled with a syringe. “I need to sedate her.”
“Wait,” Levi snapped.
He didn’t think. He released one of her wrists, gripped the side rail of the cot, and swung his legs over, lowering himself onto the thin mattress beside her. He was still in his filthy trousers and a clean-ish undershirt they’d given him. He didn’t care. He used his weight and his strength, turning her onto her side towards him, trapping her flailing limbs between their bodies. He wrapped one arm around her back, his hand splaying between her shoulder blades, holding her firmly against him. His other hand came up to cup the back of her head, tangling in the damp, wild mess of her hair, pressing her face into the hollow of his neck.
“Stop,” he growled into her ear, his voice low and rough, a vibration against her skin. “You’re safe. You’re in the infirmary. The tube is medical-grade plastic, not a root. It’s draining the poison. Now stop.”
She fought him. She writhed, a choked sob breaking against his collarbone. Her heat was immense, a desert wind pouring off her. “It hurts. It’s everywhere.”
“I know it hurts.” His grip tightened. He was holding her together, a human bandage. “You think I don’t know? You have an infection. That’s all. It’s in your blood, not the trees. Your mind is lying to you.”
Her struggles grew weaker, not from compliance, but from the fever sapping the last of her energy. Her body shuddered against his, wracked with chills even as she burned. “Don’t let go,” she whimpered, the words muffled against his skin. A child’s plea.
He closed his eyes. The smell of her fever-sweat and antiseptic filled his lungs. He could feel the rapid, irregular drum of her heart against his own. “I’m not letting go.”
He didn’t recognize his own voice.
The nurse stood frozen, syringe in hand, watching the humanity’s strongest soldier lie in a hospital cot, holding a delirious woman as if she were the only anchor in a storm.
“The sedative,” the nurse whispered.
“She’s calming down,” Levi said, his tone leaving no room for argument. The beeping of the monitor was slowing, incrementally, from a panicked race to a rapid trot. Her breathing, while still ragged, was deeper. The violent tension was leaching from her muscles, leaving a boneless, trembling exhaustion. “Just… give us a minute.”
The nurse retreated, a silent shadow against the wall.
Levi didn’t move. He held her. He listened to the wet, uneven pull of her breath, felt the damp spread of her sweat through his shirt. Minutes ticked by, measured by the drip of the IV and the soft gurgle from the drainage container on the floor.
Her voice, when it came, was a shredded whisper against his neck. “You smell like soap.”
A hysterical sound, something too broken to be a laugh, caught in his throat. “I washed.”
“Liar.” She nuzzled weakly, inhaling. “You still smell like the forest. Underneath.”
He had no answer for that. He just held her.
“I was back there,” she murmured. “The roots were alive. They were in my chest. You were there, but you were made of stone. You wouldn’t help me.”
“I’m here now.”
“Why?” The question was simple, devastating.
His jaw worked. The white walls pressed in. The truth was a tangled, barbed thing in his gut. Duty? Guilt? The memory of her mouth on his, the desperate, dirty heat of her under him in the leaves? The sheer, unthinkable silence of the world without her reckless, infuriating voice in it?
“You don’t get to leave,” he said finally, the words ground out like gravel. “Not after that forest. Not after what we did. You don’t get to check out and make it mean nothing.”
She was silent for a long time. He thought she’d slipped back into unconsciousness. Then her hand, trapped between them, moved. She didn’t have the strength to lift it, but her fingers uncurled, pressing weakly against his sternum.
“It wasn’t nothing,” she breathed.
The monitor’s rhythm settled into a steadier, more persistent beat. The crisis, for now, was passing. The fever hadn’t broken, but the peak had crested.
Slowly, carefully, as if handling something infinitely fragile, Levi loosened his hold. He shifted, lifting his head to look at her face. Her eyes were closed, the frantic energy gone, replaced by a deep, sickly exhaustion. The sweat on her brow had cooled. He reached over to the bedside table, picked up a cloth from the basin of water, and wrung it out. With a focus that bordered on reverence, he wiped her forehead, her temples, the line of her jaw.
She didn’t open her eyes, but a faint, almost imperceptible sigh escaped her.
He climbed out of the cot, his body protesting with fresh aches. He rearranged the sheets around her, his movements precise, orderly. He adjusted the IV line so it lay smooth. He stood back, his arms hanging at his sides.
The nurse approached cautiously. “Captain? Her fever…”
“It’s down a degree,” Levi stated, though he hadn’t touched a thermometer. He could feel it. “The antibiotics are finally getting ahead of it.”
He turned and walked out of the room, not towards the chair in the corner, but out into the hallway. He needed air that didn’t smell of sickness and confession. He braced his hands against the cold stone of the wall, head bowed, and simply breathed.
In the sterile white room behind him, Sage Renn slept, not peacefully, but deeply. And on her forehead, where he had pressed his lips in the dark of the hollow, the memory of his touch lingered, a warmth separate from the fever.
The memory was a ghost on her skin, a point of clarity in the fever-fog. She surfaced slowly, the white ceiling resolving into cracked plaster instead of canopy. The hum was electrical, not insects. The smell was antiseptic, not damp earth and sex. Her body felt hollowed out, scraped clean, and stuffed with wet wool.
A different nurse, an older woman with a permanently creased forehead, was checking the drainage bottle. “Back with us, are you?” she said, her voice devoid of cheer. “Good. Your fever broke an hour ago. Captain’s timing was almost decent for once.”
Sage’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. “Levi?”
“Went to file a report. Or to scrub a floor. Possibly both.” The nurse prodded the dressing with efficient, unsentimental fingers. “Don’t get used to the personal attention. He’s been lurking like a bad conscience since they wheeled you in.”
The door clicked open. He didn’t stride in; he entered, a silent infusion of dark green and restrained energy. He’d changed. His uniform was pristine, his boots dull but clean. He looked like Captain Levi again, all sharp edges and impatience. Only the shadows under his eyes, deeper than before, betrayed the last few days.
He dismissed the nurse with a glance. The woman left, her shoes squeaking on the polished floor.
He walked to the foot of the cot, his eyes doing a quick, invasive inventory of her: the IV, the tube, the pallor of her face. “You look like shit.”
“Feel worse,” she croaked. She tried to shift, and a lightning bolt of pain seared from her chest down her side. She hissed, freezing mid-motion.
“The pleural lining is inflamed,” he stated, moving to pour water from a pitcher into a cup. “Every breath grates. It’ll pass.” He held the cup to her lips, his other hand behind her head to lift it. The support was impersonal, necessary. The water was lukewarm and perfect.
She drank, then sank back. “How long?”
“Four days since the gate.” He placed the cup on the table with a precise click. “The sepsis is resolving. The chest tube comes out tomorrow if the lung stays inflated.” He finally looked directly at her, his gaze a physical weight. “You nearly died twice. Once in the forest, once in this bed.”
“You told me I didn’t get to leave.” She watched his face, searching for a crack. “You sounded pretty sure.”
He didn’t flinch. “I was stating a tactical reality. Losing a soldier after that much investment is poor strategy.”
“Is that what it was?” Her voice gained a shred of its old strength, a thread of challenge. “An investment?”
The air between them tightened. The memory of his body pinning hers in this very cot, his growl in her ear, vibrated in the sterile space.
“It was a complication,” he said, his tone final. He turned toward the window, his back to her. “One your recklessness created. You ignored a direct order to fall back. You took an abnormal’s swipe that was meant for a decoy formation. Your sentimentality almost got you dissolved.”
Each word was a lash, cool and precise. They were the words of her commanding officer, not the man who had kissed her forehead or held her through the delirium. The whiplash was intentional. She felt it.
“The decoy was Oluo,” she fired back, anger giving her words heat. “He was tangled. He wouldn’t have made it.”
“And you did?” Levi turned, his grey eyes glacial. “You call this making it? You traded a clean death for a slow rot in a medical bed. Your choice cost the Corps resources, time, and nearly a captain. Sentiment is a luxury. It gets people killed.”
The cruelty was calculated. She could see him building the wall, stone by stone. He was pushing her back into the box of ‘soldier,’ pushing himself back into the role of ‘captain.’ The forest, the hollow, the desperate heat between them—it was all being classified as a battlefield anomaly.
She stared at him, her green eyes hard. “You’re a liar.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped. He said nothing.
“You can call it a complication all you want,” she continued, her breath hitching painfully. “But you were there. In the hollow. You were there in this cot. You don’t hold a ‘complication’ like that. You don’t beg a ‘strategic investment’ to stay.”
He crossed the room in two swift steps. He didn’t touch her, but he loomed over the bed, his presence forcing her head back against the pillow. “What do you want, Renn? A confession? You want me to say it was a mistake? Fine. It was. Every second of it. From the moment I cut you open to the moment I carried you out. A profound, regrettable mistake.”
His words should have felt like a blow. Instead, she heard the strain in them, the effort it took to wield them as weapons. She saw the faint tremor in the hand he braced on the bed rail.
“Then why,” she whispered, “are you still here?”
For a long moment, he was silent. The hum of the lights filled the void. His gaze dropped from her eyes to the white dressing on her chest, to the place his makeshift valve had been.
“Because my mistakes are my responsibility,” he said, his voice low and stripped bare. “I see them through to the end.”
He straightened up, the mask of command settling back into place. “The physio will be in this afternoon. They’ll make you sit up. It will feel like being torn in half. Do it anyway.”
He walked to the door.
“Levi.”
He paused, didn’t turn.
“It wasn’t nothing,” she repeated her own weak words from the fever, this time with certainty.
His shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly. Then he was gone, the door sighing shut behind him, leaving her alone with the ghost of his touch and the raw, aching truth of her healing body. The battle was over, but the war inside him, she realized, was just beginning. And she was now entrenched in the middle of it.
The afternoon light through the infirmary window was a dull, dusty yellow, illuminating motes of dust dancing over the empty cot where Levi had lain. Sage watched them, trying to find a pattern in their drift, trying to distract herself from the deep, grating ache that had replaced the fire in her chest. Every breath was a conscious effort, a negotiation with pain.
The door opened without a knock. A man in a medic’s uniform entered, but he wasn’t like the nurses. He was broader, with a practical, unsmiling face and forearms that suggested he spent less time with bandages and more with hauling equipment. He carried no tray of medicine. He looked at her like she was a problem to be solved.
“Renn. Time to sit up,” he said. His voice held no malice, just a flat inevitability.
A cold dread, sharper than the pain, pooled in her stomach. “The captain said it would feel like being torn in half.”
“The captain is frequently correct,” the physio said, moving to the side of the bed. “This isn’t about comfort. It’s about preventing your lung from adhering to your ribcage. If it scars down, you’ll never take a full breath again. On the count of three.”
There was no preparation. No gentle coaxing. He simply hooked his hands under her armpits, his grip impersonal and iron-strong. “One, two—”
He pulled.
It wasn’t being torn in half. It was being unraveled from the inside out. The inflamed pleural lining, raw and sandpaper-rough, screamed as her lung shifted. The healing incision on her chest became a line of white-hot wire. The muscles of her abdomen, weakened and bruised, shrieked in protest. A choked gasp was all she managed, her vision spotting at the edges.
He wasn’t done. He kept pulling, hauling her upright until her back was perpendicular to the mattress, her legs still flat. The world tilted, a nausea of pure agony rising from her core. He held her there, a puppet with its strings cut. “Breathe. Deeply.”
She tried. The intake hitched, caught on the barbed wire in her chest, and shattered into a shallow, panicked pant. “I can’t.”
“You will.” He adjusted his grip, one arm bracing her back. “Again.”
She sucked in another breath. The pain was a living entity, expanding, filling every cavity. It vibrated in her teeth. It blurred the room. A low moan escaped her, built in her throat, and broke free.
It wasn’t a scream at first. It was a raw, animal sound of protest, torn from a place before language. The physio remained unmoved, a stone pillar holding her upright. “Good. Now, exhale fully. Collapse the lung. Do it.”
She sobbed, the exhale a violent shudder that made the pain spike again. The sound from her throat escalated, losing coherence, becoming pure sonic distress. It ripped through the quiet infirmary, echoing off the sterile walls. Tears streamed down her face, hot and helpless. “Stop, please, stop—”
“Thirty more seconds,” he said, his voice a monotone over her screaming. “Breathe in. Or we start the timer over.”
She screamed. She screamed for the forest, for the roots in her dreams, for the feeling of Levi’s teeth on her thigh and the sterile smell of his soap. She screamed because her body was a prison of broken, grating parts. The sound was ragged, desperate, and it poured out the open infirmary window into the quiet afternoon of Karanes.
Levi was three blocks away, in the temporary Survey Corps barracks, scrubbing the grout between the floorstones with a stiff-bristled brush. The rhythmic scrape, the smell of lye, the tangible progress of filth being eradicated—it was a logic he understood. It was an order he could impose.
He heard it distantly, a faint, strained thread of sound on the breeze. He paused, brush hovering. It could have been a gulls. It could have been cart wheels.
It sharpened.
His hand stilled. The sound wasn’t an animal or machine. It was human, female, stretched to its absolute breaking point. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated agony, stripped of all pride or pretense. It was a sound that didn't care who heard it.
It was coming from the infirmary.
He knew, with a cold, sinking certainty, what it was. The physio will be in this afternoon. He had said the words. He had clinically described the feeling. Hearing the reality was a different thing entirely.
The scream peaked, hit a cracked, wavering note of sheer unsustainable torment, and then dissolved into wrenching, hysterical sobs that were almost worse. They carried clearly, painting a vivid, terrible picture in the quiet air: the physio’s implacable hands, her body betraying her, the absolute violence of healing.
He looked down at his hands. The knuckles were white around the brush handle. He forced them to relax. This was necessary. This was medicine. This was the consequence of survival.
Another choked, piercing cry sliced through the town. A civilian woman hanging laundry in a courtyard across the street paused, her hands still on a wet sheet, her face tilted toward the sound with a wince of profound pity.
Levi stood up. He placed the brush neatly in the bucket. He walked to the window and closed the shutters with a firm, definitive click. The sound was muted, now. But it was still there, a persistent, haunting vibration in the wood.
He stood in the sudden dimness, the scent of clean stone and lye filling his lungs. His jaw was so tight it ached. Every instinct screamed to move, to intervene, to stop the noise. He didn’t.
He had told her to do it anyway. This was the price. He listened to the distant, tortured rhythm of her suffering—the sharp cry, the gulping sob, the physio’s inaudible, relentless prompting—and he absorbed it. He let it settle into the catalogue of things he owed her, a new, fresh debt etched beside the memory of her blood on his hands and her heat against him in the dark.
The sounds finally ceased. An abrupt, ringing silence followed, more deafening than the screams.
Levi opened the shutters. The afternoon was unchanged. The woman was gone from the courtyard. He emptied the bucket, cleaned the brush, and stored them both with methodical care. His face revealed nothing.
But when he left the barracks, his steps didn’t turn toward the mess hall or the command building. They carried him, with a momentum that felt both inevitable and grim, back through the narrow streets, following the fading echo he could still feel in his bones, back toward the infirmary. The debt was calling in its due.