What the Fire Left

The nurse who told Levi that Hange Zoë was alive did it the way people in Marley delivered all news to Eldians that winter: from the doorway, without coming in, as if the words might need a quick exit. "The woman from the port at Odiha. The Azumabito people brought her across on the second ship. Third floor, east wing." She paused. "She asked if you were dead. We said we didn't know your name. She described you." Another pause, longer. "She said 'short' four times." Levi was out of the bed before the door finished closing. It took him eleven minutes to reach the third floor. He counted, because counting gave his head something to do besides think. The chair they'd given him had a bad left wheel that pulled toward walls, and his right hand, with its two missing fingers still wrapped in gauze, couldn't grip the rim properly, so he steered with his left and shoved with the heel of his right and hated every inch of the corridor. A boy in a Marleyan orderly's coat offered to push him. Levi looked at him until he went away. East wing. The doors had numbers painted in a careful hand. He didn't know which number. He went to each one and looked through the little glass window, and at the fifth door he stopped, because there was a figure on the bed bandaged from the collarbones up to the hairline on the left side, and the right side of the face was turned toward the window, and the hair that showed above the gauze was the wrong color, scorched and cut short, and he knew anyway. He knew from the way one hand was moving in the air above the blanket, sketching something, explaining something to nobody. He pushed the door open with his knees. The hand stopped. The head turned, slowly, the way a head turns when the neck is wrapped too tightly to move fast. "Oh," Hange said. Her voice came out of the bandages scraped down to almost nothing, but it was hers. "Oh, look at that. They found the short one." "Shut up," Levi said. "Four times was excessive, I admit. I panicked." He rolled the chair to the side of the bed. The bad wheel caught on the leg of a stool and he wrestled it, and she watched him do it without offering a single word of help, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for him in weeks. When he finally got himself there, close enough to touch the blanket, neither of them said anything for a while. Her right eye, the good one, had lost its lashes. The skin around it was pink and shiny with some ointment that smelled of camphor. Her glasses were folded on the bedside table, one lens cracked in a star. "You're supposed to be dead," he said. "So are you. You look terrible, by the way." "I was blown up by a thunder spear at point-blank range." "I was cooked by a Colossal Titan," Hange said, with a terrible kind of pride. "Several, actually. I think I win." Levi looked at the window. Snow was falling over the harbor, the gray Marleyan kind that seemed to come down already dirty. Somewhere out there the ships were still bringing people back from the continent, the ones who'd been lucky enough to be standing in the right place when the ground stopped shaking. "Tell me," he said. She tried to shrug and abandoned it halfway. "There isn't much. I held them at the bridge long enough for the boat to clear the water. That was the whole plan, and the plan worked, which is more than I can say for most of my plans. Then the steam got under my cape and I couldn't see, and the wire on my left side snapped, or melted, I don't know which. I went into the harbor." Her fingers twitched on the blanket. "The water was so cold, Levi. After all that heat. I remember thinking it was the most wonderful thing I'd ever felt and that it was a shame I'd be dead in about a minute and couldn't write it down." "And the Azumabito." "Kiyomi's engineers hadn't evacuated. They were in the old hangar dragging out spare parts, because of course they were, merchants to the end. One of them saw me fall. He had a boathook." She laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and the cough went on long enough that Levi leaned forward without meaning to. When it stopped she said, a little hoarse, "A boathook. All that steel and gas and science, and I was saved by a fisherman's pole. Don't tell anyone. It's undignified." "I'll put it on your gravestone." "You'd have to spell my name right." He didn't answer that. His throat had done something strange. On the flying boat, when the burning shape on the bridge had finally gone still and the harbor had dropped away behind them, he'd sat against the hull with his ruined hand in his lap and decided, very calmly, that it was done. He'd been doing that kind of arithmetic for over a decade. You added up the names and carried them forward and you didn't stop to look at the total, because the total would kill you. He'd added her to the column the way he'd added Erwin, and Mike, and Petra, and Moblit, and the hundred others, and then he'd gone and fought a god. And now the column was wrong. He had no idea what to do with a column that was wrong. "Levi," Hange said softly. "What." "Your hand." He looked down. He was gripping the edge of the mattress so hard with his left hand that the knuckles had gone white, and the bandaged right one was pressed flat against the blanket next to her hip, as if he were holding her down so she couldn't float away. He made himself let go. "It's nothing." "It's two fingers." "I have eight more." "You'll hold your teacup differently now." She said it as if it were the saddest thing in the world, and maybe it was. "That ridiculous grip. All the recruits used to try to copy it and burn themselves." "I'll learn a new ridiculous grip." "Will you show me?" "When you can sit up without coughing up a lung, Four-Eyes." Something changed in her face then, or in the half of it he could see. The good eye went bright and wet, and she blinked hard, and the ointment shone. "Nobody's called me that in weeks," she said. "The nurses call me 'Commander,' because someone told them to, and it makes me want to crawl under the bed. I keep thinking, I'm not, though. I'm not anything now. There isn't a Survey Corps. There's nothing left to survey. The whole world's been walked flat." She stopped. "Armin came. Did you know? Yesterday. He sat right where you are and cried so hard the nurse thought I'd died." "Sounds like him." "He told me about Eren." Her voice dropped. "About Mikasa. All of it." Levi nodded. He'd been there. He didn't need it told twice. "I keep trying to think what I'd write in the report," Hange said. "Isn't that stupid? Fourteenth Commander of the Survey Corps, final report. Objective: save the world. Outcome." She laughed again, more carefully this time. "I don't know how to fill in that line." "Then don't." "Someone has to." "Not you. Not today." He leaned back in the chair, and the bad wheel shifted, and he let it. "You gave enough. You gave all of it, and then some fisherman pulled you out of the water, so now you get to give nothing for a while. That's the rule." "Whose rule?" "Mine. I'm the senior officer still breathing." "You're a captain. I outrank you." "You said yourself there's no Survey Corps." She opened her mouth and closed it. "That's dirty." "I learned it from you." For a while they listened to the snow, which made no sound, and the hospital, which made a great deal of sound: carts, coughing, someone in another room calling for water in a language neither of them knew. Hange's hand moved across the blanket, inch by inch, the way a hand moves when every inch hurts, until her fingertips touched the gauze over his missing ones. She didn't hold. She just rested them there. "Do you remember," she said, "what you told me? On the dock. Before I went." He remembered. She'd been joking, or pretending to, about going out in style, and he'd known she wasn't. Nobody had asked him for the salute. He'd given it anyway, fist to chest, the old words they'd shouted at a thousand funerals, said straight to her face, and then he'd watched her walk away to burn. "I remember," he said. "I've been lying here thinking I should give it back," Hange said. "The heart. You told me to dedicate it, and then nobody came to collect. That's practically a refund." "Keep it." "Really?" "You've got a terrible heart, but you'll need it. Somebody has to explain to the Marleyans how a water pump works." She laughed, really laughed, and it hurt her, and she kept doing it anyway. Her fingers pressed down on his bandage, very lightly, just once. "Stay a while?" she asked, when she could breathe. He looked at the stool, at the bad wheel, at the narrow window with the dirty snow behind it. Out there the column of names waited, as long as it had ever been. One of them, he decided, could be crossed out in pencil. "This chair pulls to the left," Levi said. "I'd only end up back here." He stayed until the lamps came on, and then he stayed after that, and when the nurse came to the doorway to tell him visiting hours were long over, Hange was asleep with her good eye half open the way it always used to be in the lab, as if she couldn't bear to miss anything, and Levi held one finger to his lips without turning around, and the nurse, for once, said nothing at all and closed the door softly from the outside.