⊱˙.✧ Always On My Mind
☆ Summary: Every week brings another letter. Every letter makes it a little harder to pretend you're only friends.
☆ Pairing: Levi Ackerman x Gender-Neutral Reader
☆ Genre/Tags: Canon Universe, Canon Compliant, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Love Confession, First Kiss, Levi Ackerman is Bad At Feelings, Angst with a Happy Ending
☆ Word Count: 1.5k
☆ Requested by @how-interesting-wow | Drabble Game #1 #42 Somehow, you’re always on my mind. #110 You can’t change my mind about this. #152 You're my best friend.
☆ AO3 Link
☆ a/n: don’t ask for a part two or I’ll make Levi say “let him cook” during a military strategy meeting.
The first letter Levi receives from you is folded neatly, sealed properly, and written in a hand too clean to belong to someone who most likely spends their entire year coordinating reinforcement and reserve placements for Survey Corps expeditions, where routes, supply delays, and half-trained replacement squads seem to multiply faster than anyone can file reports about them.
Captain Ackerman, your letter begins, enclosed are the revised reserve placements for the next expedition route, along with the reinforcement schedules requested by Section Commander Hange.
Levi reads the entire thing once, frowns at the attached map, and realizes that whoever drew the route has either never ridden south of Wall Rose or has a grudge against their horses.
Your eastern relay is wrong, he writes back from the old castle close to Trost, the southern road turns useless after rain, and unless Karanes has started breeding horses with gills, you’ll need to move the reserves west before the next expedition.
When your reply arrives four days later, the correction is made, but beneath the acknowledgement sits one small sentence that makes him pause.
Thank you for your charming recommendation, Captain.
Levi looks at it for a moment, feeling the faintest quirk at the corner of his mouth before he folds the letter and tells himself to snap out of it. He’s only amused because most soldiers are too stupid to be sarcastic correctly. That’s all it is.
.
After that, the letters keep coming.
At first, they remain professional, filled with supply requests, reserve placements, route changes, and casualty projections that neither of you ever focus too hard on. But somewhere between one expedition and the next, between the wilderness he resides in and the crowded city you live in, your correspondence begins to become more intimate than either of you want to admit.
You start adding small complaints beneath official notes, muttering on paper about incompetent people, cold offices, sleepless nights, and the misery of drinking weak tea because your district commander considers good tea leaves an unnecessary luxury. Levi’s advice grows each time, too specific to be indifferent.
Stop skipping meals, he writes one, your handwriting gets worse when you’re tired.
Another time, after you mention a superior who keeps changing patrol orders without warning, he writes, Write down every contradiction and make him sign the final version. Idiots with rank hate records more than they hate being wrong. You laugh alone at your desk when you read that one.
It becomes easier after that, dangerously easy, to write to him about things that have nothing to do with duty. You tell him when Karanes gets it first snow, when a new recruit cries after being assigned to the reserves, when you wake from dreams of Titans that you’ve only faced once or twice before, and he tells you, in his own way, about Hange’s experiments with Sawney and Bean, about cadets who can’t clean properly, about nights in the old castle when the wind makes the place sound haunted.
You keep his letters in the bottom of your desk beneath old route charts. Levi keeps yours locked away, though he would sooner throw himself into a Titan’s mouth than admit it.
.
One day, an expedition goes wrong. The official report reaches Karanes before Levi’s letter does, and for two full days, you feel nauseous when you hear every rumor of heavy casualties, every whispered mention of abnormal activity, every irrational thought that begins with what if and ends with a world where he never sends you another letter.
But when his letter does finally arrive, it’s painfully short.
Alive. Don’t make a fuss.
You cry when you read it, then get furious at yourself for crying, then get furious at him for writing five words after letting you imagine his body left somewhere in a field somewhere beyond the walls. Your reply is longer than usual, though you rewrite it twice before sending it.
Don’t ever do that to me again, you write, even though you know you have no right to demand anything from him. I know I should be grateful that you sent me something at all, but I spent two days thinking you were dead, and I hated every second of it. You’re my best friend, Levi. I don’t know when that happened, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it, but you are.
At headquarters, Levi reads the sentence until the ink blurs. You’re my best friend. He should feel relieved, he thinks, because best friend is safe, because best friend is not a confession, because best friend gives him enough room to pretend the feeling he has inside is just attachment and not affection.
But he can’t help but feel terrified. He thinks of the people he’s lost, of Isabel and Furlan, of the countless soldiers whose names are now lost to time, and then he thinks of you sitting in Karanes, trusting him with parts of yourself he has no right to know and keep if he can’t promise he’ll survive long enough to answer them.
So he responds, and his hands don’t shake until after the letter is sealed.
.
We need to stop writing. This has gone too far. It’s a distraction neither of us can afford. You can’t change my mind about this.
—L. Ackerman.
When the letter reaches you, you simply stare at it. The office goes strangely quiet around you, though wagons still clatter beyond the window and soldiers still call to each other in the yard below. You read it twice, then again, slower.
You don’t write back.
You have things to say—it isn’t that. But you have too much to say, and because Levi is a man who always means what he says, you don’t write back. What’s done is done. If he wants to cut you off, he has every right to do so, as much as it kills you.
For weeks, no letters come. No letters are sent. At first, Levi believes he’s made the correct decision. What you both did was careless.
But the silence keeps going. Every day, he expects to see a new letter on his desk, but nothing waits for him. No expedition reports from you, no sarcastic remarks hidden under formal updates, no updates about the tea in Karanes, which he knows is still horrible because you haven’t said otherwise once.
The absence becomes something he can’t shake off. It sits beside him at meals. It follows him through training. It waits inside the locked drawer where he keeps every letter you ever sent, including the one where you called him your best friend.
He can’t do this anymore.
.
Levi rides into Karanes with only one thought on his mind: this is foolish, reckless, and beneath what little dignity he has left.
He knocks on your office door anyway.
When you open it and find him standing there, cloak dusty from the road and dark hair wind-tossed around his face, your first thought isn’t anger or relief but pure disbelief. Disbelief before the rest of you remembers it’s supposed to be wounded.
“Levi,” you whisper.
He scans your face quickly, searching for any sign of damage he might have caused. But he sees nothing. Just a softness he doesn’t believe he deserves.
“You stopped writing,” he says.
You grip the edge of the door. “You told me to.”
Levi exhales and looks away for a second, jaw clenching. “I was wrong.” The way he says it suggests he’s had to pull it out of the most guarded place of himself. “I thought it would be easier if I cut it off before it became something I couldn’t afford to lose.”
You swallow against the tightness in your throat, hurt and hope pulling in opposite directions. “And was it?”
“No.”
Levi then slowly reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a folded letter, worn slightly at the edges, as if he’s carried it with him for weeks on end.
“Wrote this,” he says. “Didn’t send it.”
You take it with trembling fingers and unfold the page. You scan over it, tears blurring your eyes at every word. But one line catches your eye, and it nearly has you melting on the spot.
Somehow, you’re always on my mind.
The line blurs again before you can stop it, and when you look up, Levi looks as if he’s awaiting judgement in a court of law.
“You’re always on my mind too,” you whisper.
Something visibly breaks in him. He steps forward, giving you enough space to turn away or step back if you want to, but you don’t; you meet him halfway instead, and when his hand rises to your cheek, rough thumb brushing the corner of your mouth, the distance of all those letters breaks.
The kiss is barely there, almost uncertain, both of you struggling to translate words into touch, but then you grip his cloak and Levi sighs against your mouth like he’s been holding that breath in since the moment he told you to stop writing to him.
“You’re still my best friend,” you murmur against his lips.
Levi’s mouth twitches, almost a smile. “Good,” he says. “I’m not leaving Karanes empty handed.”
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