Claustrophobia

Chapter 2

"pressure cooker"

Mikasa and Levi Ackerman had spent many hours not exchanging more than a handful of words. This was not a direct departure from the way they normally did things when they were not held captive by sworn mortal enemies in a dungeon prison. Still, their protracted silence as the hours melted away to the irregular pitter-patter of sewer water, had a certain bite to it. Someone attempting to eavesdrop on the room, say two or three unlucky intelligence officers, would have long felt uncomfortable without perhaps knowing the source of their discomfort.

"What is wrong with them?" the officer said, viciously shredding a handful of toasted wheat bread and shoving it in her mouth. "Just sitting there like they are waiting for the bus to work."

The man sitting at the desk across from hers, his ear glued to a receiver, shrugged. He was lanky like a river weed and in his bony fingers he always held a cigarette or most likely a trail of ash and a filter.

"Frank- Sergeant had a look and said they don't seem to be communicating any other way either. No hand signals or anything."

"Do you reckon that was for real before?"

The door slammed open before he could say it but yes, their infamous prisoners probably did not get along great. Their superior officer, Sergeant Frankie Daniels barged in. Her mouth was pinched, cheeks scarlet. When the central intelligence unit had been told by HQ that her brother was crushed by a boulder less than forty-eight hours ago, no one had known how to approach, let alone comfort her.

She walked over to her empty desk and picked up the receiver. A few minutes later, she hung up and straightened her shoulders. "Still nothing."

"Nothing of import, ma'am," said the female officer, her lunch haphazardly stowed away between her knees and the wooden chair.

"Recap, again."

The officer looked at her notes.

"Female subject, Mikasa Ackerman, 19 years of age, of notable strength. Sustained serious head injury, not critical… Injury to the leg, not critical. Male subject, Levi Ackerman, relationship to female subject unknown, reports by Paradis agent Reiner Braun suggest no immediate familial connection up to the second degree, mid-30s, said to be humanity's strongest soldier," a slight pause, "at least among the five people living on their baby fart of an island," she murmured.

"Cross that part out."

"Yes, ma'am. It wasn't, uh, written, ma'am. I'm sorry."

"Continue, Ray. It's all right."

"Male subject has sustained injuries to the torso and head, mostly during unsuccessful preliminary questioning…" the officer glanced at her superior and took to her notes with a long, prim swipe of the pen. "Crossing that out. 09:28 am… First contact. Six minutes after placing them together. Female subject: 'What happened?' Male subject says nothing for thirteen minutes. 'I don't remember. Hit my head. Tell me what happened,' says female subject. Male subject says nothing for twenty minutes. Female subject kicks the bars, presumably with her good leg. 'Are they alive? Captain, what happened?', then sharply 'Levi.' Male subject is quiet for two hours six minutes, then says, 'This place smells nastier than titan's ass.' That was an inaccurate statement, ma'am, as everyone knows Titans have no digestive tract, and it was half an hour ago."

"Evil son of a bitch won't spill while we're listening. I want to have some private time with them before Commander Magath gets a chance to. Hit them with the knock-out gas."

"All due respect, Sergeant, that is ill-advised," said the young man. His name was Flint. He was younger than them by half a decade but had established himself well. Frankie Daniels had been known to lend him her ear, not always graciously but sometimes gratefully.

"I know," the Sergeant conceded. "We also don't have the time to do it. He is on his way."

No one blamed her for entertaining the idea of beating the two captives within an inch of their lives. It was not just revenge – not even intelligence gathering. They were Eldians.

"Prep the gas anyway?"

The Sergeant nodded. "Up the dosage. They can take it."

Mikasa was grateful for the bars between the Captain and herself. Were it not for them, she would have surely pulled out every single stupid hair off his stupid Captain head and shoved them in his stupid, useless Captain mouth. Not only did he refuse to acknowledge her legitimate questions, he had turned his back on her. She was not a moron and did not expect a detailed report; the Marleyans were obviously listening on them, but they also must be aware of the circumstances of their capture. There was no reason to keep quiet about it unless he was sure she would not like the answer, and that was not acceptable.

She could feel her body swelling with nervous tension, reverberating in her temples, making her leg pulse yet more loudly. She pushed herself off the floor, limped to the spot in the middle and back of the cell where he was leaning closing to the bars, facing away from her and sat down beside him.

"Just tell me if Eren is okay. And Armin. Please," an almost-whisper.

He glanced at her briefly from the corner of his bruised eye. The purple around the eyebrow was growing livid. It offset the cool light blue of his gaze, which offset the coolness of his attitude, and those things combined made him seem vague and incorporeal. She found the effect unsettling, as though she was the only living being in miles.

Someone had hit him with no regard to his eyesight; that unsettled her too for personal and very corporeal reasons.

"They can still hear you, Ackerman. They must have more advanced methods of surveillance than the old glass on the wall," he said at full volume and then some.

"Fine, find another way to tell me." She reached through the metal and jabbed him in the forearm with her fingers. Levi did not startle, neither did he pull away. He watched her with passively furred eyebrows as she tapped soldier code through the black rubbery sleeve of his uniform. S-a-f-e-?

Something akin to a guffaw spilled out of him, acrid and awful. "Mostly. Stop worrying about them, start worrying about yourself."

At this, Mikasa's grip on him turned wooden. Terror clawed through her as she considered the permutations of 'mostly safe'.

"What happened? Eren…" She thought of Eren's thousand-yard stare as Armin lifted him onto the zeppelin. She thought of a young boy shining like a nugget of gold amid the pebbles that life had thrown her, handing her a blood red scarf to keep her warm at night. She thought of dying for him, if not with him, of tearing through enemy after enemy, bloodying their lands and her hands to get him to a place where he could smile warmly. It was a thread she was hanging from, a thin one, and she was swinging over a pit too deep and too black. She had to hold on and hope it would not snap.

Levi fidgeted. "Jaeger was a bit hurt, but he'll be fine. The others probably got back safely."

"Hurt how?"

"Hard to say. There was an explosion on the zeppelin. You remember nothing?"

She shook her head no.

"Well, it stayed airborne. Jaeger was a bit hurt but if they got back in one piece, he'll recover," he said. "That's all I can tell you."

"Wait. Switch to code?" she murmured, inching in closer. He hopped on the balls of his feet, balanced himself with great care and precision and got up. His hands were still cuffed behind his back. His feet were similarly bound at half a step's width. Levi looked rather miserable as he started pacing back and forth as best as he could.

"The setup of this cell…" he said, and Mikasa could hear the strain his voice before he fell quiet.

"I know they are listening."

"Yeah, that's not it. There are few things we could casually say in here that they wouldn't already know from Braun or that hairy glasses bastard."

She kept her mouth shut. If there was a one in a million chance they weren't onto to Zeke Jaeger already, it was smart to throw some mud or at the very least sprinkle some dust in that direction.

"What's it for then?"

Levi paced around faster, a very grim look about him.

"Never mind; Ackerman, I need a favour," he said.

"Fine-"

"What the hell, kid- what is wrong with you? You don't even know what it is." His short, bluntly chopped hair haloed parts of his face and stuck to others. His forehead was beaded with sweat, although the ambient temperature in the cell was far from hot.

"I trust you, Captain," she said levelly. "I just need to know what happened first."

Mikasa raised an eyebrow and glowered at him in expectation of what he should have long offered her. Some time passed before he returned to where she was now standing and looked up at her.

"You fell."

Mikasa Ackerman did not fall, not when she was equipped with 3DM gear.

"I… fell?"

"You fell," Levi deadpanned, raising his knee to press against two bars. "You were hit in the head by debris from the explosion and you fell."

"Right. And how were you captured?"

"I - "

" – fell," they finished at the same time.

If looks could kill, this match would have ended in a draw - in hell.

Mikasa was about to gift him with an unusually long and eloquent chewing out, when she noticed that he seemed pained. It was not often that one got to see Levi in genuine, unfettered discomfort. It was written all over his posture to the point where one could say he almost looked desperate. Then he winced, and that settled it.

"What is it? This favour. Where are you hurting?"

He seemed taken aback. "You'd make a bad negotiator."

Of all the people to be stuck in a cell with, it had to be this obnoxious squirrel of a man.

"I am also the only negotiator who can help you, Captain, and I am about to be the negotiator who will not help you," she retorted darkly.

Levi regarded her for a dozen heartbeats or more. Whatever he wanted to ask, he probably would prefer to scrape the bowl of a public toilet with his face than ask it if he had the choice. The seriousness of it made her forget that he was dodging her question, again.

"I would never piss myself, Ackerman," he said. It was a simple statement, but she had once sat through a lecture on the physics of 3DM gear, adjusted for different manufacturing methods, altitudes and body types that she had had less trouble wrapping her head around.

She stared at him dumbly as he shifted from one foot to the other. If he thought he was passing for calm, he was wrong.

"I mean, I don't want to."

She nodded; wondered how ridiculous this whole situation was, wondered who was the genius who tied his hands behind his back and left him like that for so many hours, wondered if they would leave this place with their dignity intact, wondered how she had not been more preoccupied with how to escape before, panic rising as reality hit that they were captives of war, at their mercy, she would never be helpless again, she swore–

Breathe. Mikasa. One step at a time.

She grounded herself and brushed the awkwardness away. His face, heart-shaped normally, seemed to have dropped to the ground, hollowness and shadows under his eyes, cheekbones. "All right."

She understood a little of his background to know that letting him soil himself would be worse than stabbing him in the teeth. He had overcome the unending filth of the underground to re-invent himself above ground. She shared similar sensibilities about other, no less sensitive things. "I'll help."

They nodded at each other and in that shared downward movement of the head, there was a promise. I am strong. You are strong. We will stick it out. It will suck.

Also, for fuck's sake, let us never speak of this again.

She reached both arms over to his side of the cell and motioned him closer and, once he did, she immediately went for his belt. In battle, if you hesitate, you die. There was no reason why the same principle would stop applying when it was not your enemy's sword you were facing but your Captain's trousers. It should not have come as a surprise, but she had to slouch down ever so slightly for her hands to be able to work efficiently with the metal buckle.

She did not want to see what he looked like while she numbly fought with the stupid thing, wondering why on Earth he had buckled it so tightly in the first place. She pulled it first to the wrong side and then to the right one but not strongly enough, until she pulled it way too strongly, alerted by a tiny oof from its owner.

"Sorry, it was stuck."

"Please hurry," he grunted close-mouthed and, without thinking, she looked at him as her hands unfastened the clip and pulled the whole thing off his waist. Levi was gripping the bar, unbent like a statue, staring past her shoulder in pissed off martyrdom. They locked eyes for an instant and it made matters a hundred times worse. She worked with the top button of his trousers, trying to be a mature adult in a war hostage situation saving her comrade from a spirit-crushing situation, but her fingers were jelly and she was close enough to smell him, which was inappropriate, plain and simple. She got down on one knee, came in closer and berated herself for not concentrating on the task and protracting their embarrassment.

She would not graze anything. Even if she did, it was fine, as they would both probably be dead soon. The first button came loose in seconds then, and soon the second and the third, and she did not even have to rip anything off before pulling her hands away.

"All right, thanks, get up now," he said, emphasis on the last part, as he stepped away with obscene speed.

In doing so, the two strips of fabric, formerly fastened together at the front of his uniform bottom, came apart, revealing dark underwear. There were some things one did not want to know about their superior and neither did he seem keen to show her as he turned away discreetly.

"Can you pull them off now?" she asked, noting with surprise that she sounded extremely annoyed at this whole endeavour. In truth, though, she mostly felt sorry. He was a proud guy. It must have been hard for him.

"I'll try," He stood over the basin. "Mind watching that other wall for me? I saw a nice loose brick to kill someone with."

Unwillingly, the corners of her mouth went up a little. He fussed with his clothes until the rustling stopped and he managed to relieve himself. It took too long. No wonder he felt like death. Then the rustling started again, then some mild cursing, then some heavy cursing.

She did not dare look back.

"Up is harder than down," he said, a very questionable thing to say and one nobody chose to think of the wrong way, probably. "I never thought I'd say this," Levi said, just about done with life as he struggled on, "but I miss the titans." It sounded so childlike coming from him.

Mikasa and Levi had very little time to react when they started feeling the effects of the knock-out gas that had quietly spilled in the room through the cracks in the brick walls. This was of no import, as there was nothing they could have done. They both instinctively braced for impact with the ground.

When they came to, roughly at the same time, they were strapped to the wall in heavy chains and everyone was mercifully clothed. A behemoth of a man, heavily decorated on his jacket, loomed over Levi.

"It's been forty minutes. How much did you dose them with?"

"Just enough for a horse, Commander," the woman who had brought Levi in before said with glee. The man she had called Pieter stood on one side, the man from the hospital named Koslow on the other. There were two more male officers and a female scribe watching.

Quite the party, Mikasa mused, staring steadily ahead. One or ten or ten thousand, it did not matter. They would not waver. They could never make them betray their homeland.

"You're awake, finally," the enemy Commander said. He nudged Levi with his foot, but the latter simply relaxed into his restraints and gave him his most unimpressed look. It was, in all seriousness, quite unimpressed. He had always had her grudging admiration for that.

"At your service," Levi replied. Lack of sleep did not seem to affect his ability to give attitude. Lack of sleep did not seem to bother him period.

"Their island is starting to grow on me," Koslow chimed in. "We leave them alone for few hours and come back to find him with his dick out and the belt on her side of the room. If that's how your women are," he suddenly came up close to Levi's face, "I want to visit."

"You can visit when you grow some more hair," Levi said, kick-starting their beating with aplomb.

A/N 1: Thank you, Glitterskyy, for having an early look through this chapter and checking for errors.

A/N 2: Big thanks to you, reviewers, followers, and silent and brooding readers who are here for the continuation of this tale.

A/N 3: I wanted to name this chapter "in which she takes off his pants" but that would have been a bad spoiler and a bad Marilena.