Mikasa generally enjoys being Levi's lieutenant and right hand, but the paperwork is intolerable. After each mission the two of them spend hours working side by side, heads down, listening to the nib-scratch of their writing and the occasional "Oi!" from Levi when her heavy lids slip closed.

Tonight, instead, he takes a piece of wadded-up scrap paper and throws it at her.

She jolts awake, halfheartedly swiping at the air long after the paper bounces off of her cheek and falls to the floor. "The hell?" Her voice is thick and slow with sleep.

"Wake up," he snaps. "You're not done."

Mikasa yawns, lifting her arms in the air and arching her back as she stretches in her rickety wooden chair. Levi averts his eyes. "I'm up," she insists, though the slow cadence of her words betrays her. She pulls the chair closer to the table in the mess hall, tonight's improvised office, and continues filling out the small stack of papers before her.

Levi turns back to his paperwork, trying to come up with a way to word his report in a way that conveys his contempt for the members of the Military Police caught blatantly stealing food from civilian stores without calling them stupid fucking assholes. He immerses himself in his work, silently congratulating himself when he comes up with what he finds to be an impressively witty but still professional turn of phrase, when he hears a soft snore to his left.

Levi finds himself smiling as he watches Mikasa's head loll forward, a sheet of black hair shining dully in the candlelight, obscuring her face. He pulls out another piece of paper, scribbles something on it in his small cramped handwriting, crushes it into a ball between his hands, and lobs it at her. It hits her squarely on the crown of her head, then falls to the table in front of her, next to her right hand.

When Mikasa opens her eyes and looks at him, he crosses his arms over his chest and furrows his brow. "Shit. How long was I out?" she asks.

Levi stares back at her coolly, his mouth drawn into an exasperated line. "Too long."

"Permission to go to bed, Captain?" she asks, blinking sleepily at him. "I really don't think I can stay awake any longer." Her last few words become indistinct as a deep yawn overtakes her. "Sorry."

"Permission granted," he replies after a moment, his voice soft and weary. She thinks it is because he is disappointed in her, hoped she would be able to stay awake half the night like he does. She may be his protege, but she refuses to become accustomed to his grueling hours. It is her last rebellion against him (as well as the last vestige of her vanity; she does not like the way she looks with heavy bags beneath her eyes).

Levi looks at the crumpled paper on the table, then at her face. Mikasa is not sure what he is trying to say to her and is too sleepy to try to discern it, so she simply bids him goodnight and trudges off to the room she shares with Sasha, her eyes half-closed as she stumbles upstairs.

After she leaves the room, Levi picks up the wadded papers from the table and floor, setting the pair of them before him. He unfolds the one that landed on the table, smoothing it out. Perhaps it was a bad idea to throw it at her while she was falling asleep, but in his heart of hearts he hoped that her soldier's instinct would kick in and she would be curious as to what Levi launched at her.

Then again, he is not sure what he would have done if Mikasa had discovered a note that reads, "You're really pretty when you sleep, even though you snore."