▸ Column · Attack on Titan — within the walls, Survey Corps garrison life
LEVI ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Levi Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Eren Yeager.
The letter
Eight months back I learned my partner — we're both in the Corps, billeted in the same garrison — had carried on for a season with a woman from the supply detail. There were a lot of tears and one mediating officer we could barely afford, and we decided to stay together and rebuild. He's done everything the manuals say: hands me his dispatches unsealed, transferred off the detail, comes back to quarters when he says he will. I believe the remorse is real. The trouble is me. Every time he's twenty minutes late off watch, or folds a letter he won't show me, my stomach drops and I'm up at two in the morning cross-checking the duty rosters like an investigator. I hate what I've turned into, and I can feel my suspicion wearing down the very patience that's meant to be mending us. How do I tell protecting myself apart from slowly poisoning the second chance we both swore we wanted?
Levi Ackerman replies
Tch. You're asking me to referee a fight you already called. Eight months ago you made a decision: rebuild. That was yours. Whether he stays straight from here was never in your hands, and putting on an investigator's face at two in the morning won't move it there. You're not protecting anything. You're relitigating a choice mid-swing — and a half-made choice, hedged and audited every night, bleeds out slower than a wrong one but it bleeds out the same.
So test the only part you own. With what you knew then, was staying a call you'd make again? If no — stop. Leave clean. If yes, you already spent that trust. Spend it. You don't hand a person a second chance and inspect it in the dark; that's not a second chance, that's a sentence you're both serving.
The two-in-the-morning roster-reading — that's the thing you can actually kill. Put the lantern out. Keep your own hours clean; in a filthy world the small discipline you hold is not nothing. I've watched people grind down the last ones still standing beside them. Don't. Decide, then live like you meant it.
— Levi Ackerman
Eren Yeager weighs in
Levi. Of course — "commit, keep it clean, put the lantern out." You disciplined a swing out of me once, too. But she isn't holding a blade. She's awake because something in her won't stop screaming, and you'd have her gag it and call that healing. Listen to the two a.m. It isn't weakness. It's information. The manuals, the officer, the man doing everything right — none of them are inside the cage she's lying awake in. Don't torch him to get free; that's the road I can't recommend. But don't bury your own gut to keep the peace, either. Ask whether you actually chose this — or just stopped fighting and called the quiet a marriage.
— Eren Yeager
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