Field Dressing

The cut wasn't deep enough to kill her, which Levi had confirmed twice already — once when he'd pulled her off her horse, and once when she'd tried to stand up on her own and he'd shoved her back down. "It's fine," Hange said. "You've said that four times." "It keeps being true." He unwrapped the field bandage and examined the gash along her ribs. She'd taken a blade — her own, bounced back off a Titan's hardened nape at the wrong angle. Stupid. Also the kind of thing that happened in the field, which was why he didn't say stupid out loud. He'd said it internally twice already. That was enough. The fire in the abandoned farmhouse was low, mostly coals, enough light to work by. Everyone else was asleep or on watch. Outside, the wind was doing something complicated with the tree line. "Hold still." "I am holding still." "You're breathing dramatically." "That's because it hurts," Hange said, and there was no complaint in it, just information, the same tone she used to report on capture results. Hange's pain was always reported clinically. He'd noticed that years ago. He'd never decided what it meant. He pressed a clean cloth against the wound and she made no sound. Her fingers found the edge of the cot frame and gripped it. "Moblit would have yelled at you," Levi said. The grip tightened. "He would have," Hange agreed, after a moment. Levi tied off the bandage. It wasn't his best work — his hands were tired and the light was bad — but it would hold until they got back to Trost. He checked the tightness with two fingers, adjusted slightly, checked again. "He yelled at me once for jumping off the Survey Corps building to get a better measurement window," Hange said. "I told him I had a rope. He said the rope wasn't the issue. I never entirely understood what the issue was." "The issue was that you scared him." "I know that now." She exhaled slowly. "I knew it then, too. I just. There was a really excellent window." Levi sat back on his heels. The fire shifted. In the orange light, Hange looked older than she looked in his memory of her — which was the problem with memory, it was always a few years behind, and every time you looked directly at someone you had to absorb the gap between what you remembered and what was true. They'd started in the same year, more or less. She'd been assigned to Titan research before he'd been assigned anywhere; he'd come later, rougher, useful in the way a sharp tool with no handle was useful. She'd looked at him like he was interesting. He'd looked at her like she was insane. Both assessments had turned out to be accurate. Irvin had said once that Hange Zoë was the only person in the Survey Corps who was genuinely excited about the future. As opposed to simply running toward it because the past was on fire. "Get some sleep," Levi said. "I'm not tired." "You lost blood." "Not that much." "More than the recommended amount." She laughed — short, real, the laugh she had when something landed unexpectedly. He'd catalogued her laughs without meaning to over the years. There were five distinct ones. This was the second. "I was thinking," she said, "about that expedition three years ago. The one where you found me trying to get that armored variant to hold still long enough to—" "I remember." "You were furious." "You'd been out there for four hours." "I had a system." "Your system had a four-hour hole in it." "We got the data," Hange said, and her voice had shifted into something softer, not soft the way some people were soft, but quieter — the frequency she used when she was being honest rather than enthusiastic. "Gunther found me, actually. Before you. He didn't yell. He just sat down next to me and waited until I was done." Levi didn't say anything. "I think about that a lot," Hange said. "The sitting down." Outside, one of the horses shifted against its tether. The wind worked through the tree line again. Levi stayed where he was, on the cold floor next to the cot, and didn't move. Hange's hand found his shoulder — not gripping, not needy, just present, the way you put your hand down to check if a surface was real. "Thank you," she said. "For the—" She gestured vaguely at her ribs. "You'd bleed out on me otherwise." "Terrible paperwork." "Exactly." Her breathing evened out over the next few minutes. He sat there until it did, watching the coals, thinking about nothing in particular — the route back, the supply count, the names on the wall at Trost that were longer than they'd been last month. Then he got up, checked the bandage one more time, and went to take over the watch.