Mikasa feels the candies before she sees them, hard little lumps that go skittering across the knotted wooden floorbeams in the room she shares with Sasha.

"This is ridiculous," she grumbles, shaking her scarf out as she unfurls it, sending more candies falling to the ground.

Sasha enters the room then, crushes an orange heart beneath her boot before she realizes what's on the floor. "Is that candy?" she asks, standing on one leg and inspecting the lump of powder on the sole of her shoe.

"Yeah, it was in my scarf." Mikasa crouches on the floor, picking up the candy hearts and holding them in one cupped hand.

"Like that note from last month?" Sasha chirps, clasping her hands together. "Someone liiiiiiiikes you."

"Someone likes sticking things in my scarf, that's all," Mikasa mutters. She gets up and dumps the candy on the small desk next to their bunk, then wipes her sticky hand on her pants before sitting on her bed. "Do you want some of these?"

Sasha walks over to the desk, pulls out the rickety wooden chair pushed up against it, and plops down. The chair creaks in protest. "Mikasa, they were on the floor. Gross."

"Yeah, but it's candy. Who knows when we'll see this next?"

"Point taken. What color do you want? There's pink, white, blue, purple, orange, and green."

"Give me a pink one." Sasha hands her the candy; Mikasa peers at it, squinting, as she holds it between two fingers. On the side facing Sasha are words stamped in faint red ink. "I LOVE U," she reads.

"What?" Sasha asks, loudly crunching on a white heart.

"Candy says it," Mikasa replies. She gets up and inspects the sweets on the desk, flipping over the pieces whose text she can't see. "'ONLY YOU,'" she reads when all of the messages are revealed. "'CUTIE.' 'I LOVE YOU.' 'BE MINE.' 'TOO SWEET.' 'KISS ME.'"

"This one says 'I'M YOURS.' I'm noticing a theme here."

Mikasa shrugs, then puts a pink "BE MINE" in her mouth. The candy is sweet, sweeter than she likes, but when she bites down on it her mouth is flooded with the thick, bland taste of chalk. "Ugh!" she grunts, spitting the candy into her palm in chunks and a torrent of thick pink drool. "That's disgusting!"

"Really? I love them," Sasha says, tossing a purple "SWEETHEART" in the air and catching it in her mouth.

"Then take them. Happy Valentine's Day." Mikasa gets up and walks across the room to drop the half-chewed candy in the waste basket, then wipes her hand on the towel that hangs from a hook on their door. "Actually, wait. Save me one."

"Thanks. So do you know who your secret admirer is? Is it Jean?"

"I don't know," Mikasa says, but her lips slowly curl into a smile.

Sasha grins. "You're a terrible liar, Mikasa. It is Jean!"

"No, no," she replies. "It's someone else."

Levi's breath comes in thick puffs of water vapor as he trudges across the snowy camp. He understands why the latrines are so far from the barracks — in summer, the cloying effluvia of fermented human waste makes the blood-shit reek of Titans and corpses seem almost pleasant in comparison — but in winter, when the only thing he can smell is the brutal chill in the air, it seems like an incredibly stupid justification. He has had to double back across camp to go from his office to the latrines back to the officers' barracks, and in that time his fingers and the tip of his nose have turned an angry, stinging red.

Before he appreciates the warmth of his small room, he is alarmed at the fact that someone has been in there, even if it is only to light a fire. And, he finds as he surveys the room, a small purple heart candy has been left on his nightstand.

Levi swallows when he realizes Mikasa has given his gift back to him, then freezes when he reads the faded red text printed on the candy: "KISS ME." He nearly pisses his pants (but will never admit that fact to anyone) when, a few seconds later, there is a loud knock on the door. He strides across the room, muttering to himself that he's going to castrate Erwin if he wants a fifth opinion on his stupid quarterly budget proposal, and throws open the door.

On the other side is Mikasa Ackerman, her scarf wrapped around her face until only her dark eyes peek out, her long black lashes dotted with snowflakes. She jumps at the suddenness of his actions, which makes him jump as well. They both look away from each other, bearing twin blushes at the thought of being caught off guard.

"It's really cold out," she says by way of a greeting, but over the past five years Levi has gotten to know the language of her scarf: draped low and loose, barely wearing it at all when she feels sick or frustrated, wrapped tightly around her neck like a noose when she feels overwhelmed, covering her face when she is feeling shy, when she is feeling vulnerable.

He smiles then, realizing that her heart must be beating just as hard as his is. "Come in," he says, ushering her into the room. "There's a fire going."

"I know," she replies, revealing a lazy little smile as she unwraps her scarf from her face and sets it aside. As he watches her bare her pale throat to him inch by inch, Levi's mouth goes dry and he tries not to gasp: aside from laundry days, he has never seen her without that scarf. "My neck is sweating," she explains, as though she can read his mind. Her unspoken words: Don't read into this. Please, please don't read into this if I'm wrong about you.

He mumbles something in response, but neither of them can tell what it is. "So what can I help you with?" he asks after the silence between them starts to stretch to an uncomfortable limit.

"You know why I'm here," Mikasa replies shortly.

Levi cocks one eyebrow. "Do I now?" He wants to sound as though he is teasing her, but his voice is hard, the same voice he uses to cow insubordinate soldiers and civilians who think they can challenge him. It is too harsh to use on a young woman confronting her reticent secret admirer, but he has tried to be soft, to be sweet, and this is the best he can do.

"Thank you for the candy, Captain," she says, her voice low and even. She looks him in the eye like a challenge, her brow furrowed and eyes narrowed — not unlike the day she watched him beat her brother, he thinks. Her reaction makes him smile, which he does not even try to hide. He likes her like this — he always has.

He wants to play coy, to make her think she is mistaken, but like the blades she wields so expertly she is unyielding before him — and sharp, so sharp. It would be an insult to string her along any further; she must be smarting at the thought of him placing those little candies between the layers of her muffler. Although, he thinks, if she did not want a scarf full of sweets, she should be more diligent about not dozing off while she completes her paperwork.

His rationalizing occurs during a split second and so there is no lull in the conversation before he spits out a terse, "You're welcome."

"They taste like shit," Mikasa tells him. Levi frowns, a deep line appearing between his dark brows. "But it was sweet. I liked it."

"Mm," Levi grunts. He looks away from her for a moment, wondering what she intends to do now.

"I did have one question, though," she asks, slowly walking over to the nightstand, then to him. "Did you mean this?"

"Mean what?"

She holds the purple candy heart between two fingers, the red "KISS ME" standing out like a flaming beacon against the lavender-colored sugar. (Funny, too, how he considered not including this candy in his sweet missive to her, since hours earlier the text seemed too faint though still on the right side of legible, but now he thinks he could see those six red letters if Mikasa was standing on the moon.)

"Do you want me to kiss you, Levi?" she asks, and her voice sounds a lot huskier than it usually does.

So does his, he realizes, when he breathes his answer: "Yes. Very much."

He has thought about their first kiss before, imagined that his hesitance, his nigh-undetectable overtures would frustrate her to aggression. He has thought about her hands on his chest, pushing him up against walls, grabbing him by the lapels of his jacket and pulling him behind buildings to crush her lips against his. So when she leans down to kiss him and her lips softly press to his, he finds himself smiling, his mouth stretched to its limit, unable to resist the feeling of elation that runs rampant through his body, electrifying his nerves, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He gives a silent thanks for the existence of his ribcage; he feels as though his fluttering heart would simply burst forth from his body without the protection of his bones, propelled by fear and adrenaline and a swelling in his chest he cannot name but assumes must be happiness. He wants to scream for joy, to run around camp whooping his glee for all to hear, but that would mean tearing himself away from the warmth of her mouth. At this moment he would rather lose a leg than the pressure of her lips against his.

She feels it too, the way his mouth feels firm beneath hers, the slick-solid barrier of his exposed teeth, and this is all the impetus she needs for her own mouth to curl up, expressing a mere fraction of the fireworks that explode inside of her when Levi wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her closer. Mikasa responds in turn, resting one arm over his shoulder, splaying her hand across his muscular back to keep him anchored to her. Her other hand cups itself around his face, her thumb rubbing against the fine stubble at his jawline, her fingers teasing the closely shorn hair at the nape of his neck. He moans against her mouth and a small bubble of laughter comes out, a giggle of pure mirth and more than a little bit of disbelief, even now, even as he flicks his tongue against hers, then presses his teeth into the fullness of her lower lip.

Her laugh is followed not ten seconds later by the sound of a throat clearing loudly, deafening compared to the crackle of the fire and the soft, wet movements of their lips.

"I was going to ask you to review the budget once more, but it seems as though you've found other ways to occupy your time," Erwin says dispassionately. He looks down at them, his dark brows shadowing his eyes, creating an almost ghoulish look. By contrast, Hanji stands behind him and off to the side, maniacally grinning at the sight of the Captain and his right hand embracing, their foreheads still touching as they look up at Erwin with gazes that betray nothing but the narcotic haze of their kiss.

They disengage under the stern glare of the Commander, a thin string of saliva joining their lips together for a moment before it breaks, ending the dizzying spiral of their first kiss. As they untangle their limbs Levi catches one of her hands in his and squeezes it twice, firmly, as if to say, Don't leave. Please.

Before she moves away from him and steps into the stiff military salute she has perfected over the last eight years, she squeezes his hand back. I won't.