The Wings of Truth

1.

Mornings were always quiet before the sun's bright rays could reach above the walls that kept the threat of titans at bay from the resting place of all that remained of humanity as far as those within the walls were aware. They did not ignore the possibility of settlements outside the walls, but they believed them to be unlikely that there were well off with such exposure to the titans. After Wall Maria fell to the Colossal Titan and the Armoured Titan damaged the Trost District gate, the residents of Maria had to move to the inner wall of Rose. The old Survey Corps Headquarters had been in Maria inside a large military base that was created especially for them ever since it's foundation. It was set up the way a military base should, but it was abandoned when the wall fell and it was no longer safe to live there. The corps, as of the year 850, had relocated to a new base that was once an old castle out in the less developed part of Rose. The castle was built before the walls and the corps had taken to dividing the kinds of rooms and locations to mimic a military base, but there was no way to make it an appropriate base. The best they could make it was a military dorm. They had refurnished and repurposed the entire building within the seven years that they had been occupying the space.

Once the corps had settled into the building, a lab was built for Hanji, but it laid three kilometers away from the main building since she would be detaining titans and testing new kinds of maneuver gear outside the lab and running tests and creating information files and theories inside the lab. Then, the inevitable happened. Levi grabbed every free hand in the corps and had them clean up one day, and he went and cleaned Hanji's lab up. Her lab was a disaster zone and he was disgusted. Within the two hours that she was in a meeting with Erwin about her responsibility on getting the paperwork and permissions signed and approved for food ration, Levi had disrupted the chaotic system that Hanji had created. She knew where everything is exactly when she needed it, but when she returned and saw all her counters and shelves cleaned and void of her usual spread of manila folders, files, colorful sticky notes with annotations, messages, or notes on them, and documents or specimens, she freaked out because she had no idea where Levi had put her research, food ration approval form, or her samples of plants from beyond the walls. He'd tossed so much in the trash and filed her current documents when they weren't completed. The end result was that they had to learn the hard way that Petra was allergic to lavender, all of Hanji's sticky notes with her scrawlings of theories were gone, and the corps went without their usual spare winter rations that year. It didn't take long for a rule to be set in place that every corps member was not to alter another's workspace. If a member put something in a certain way in their workspace, then you do not move it. Since the rule was put in place, Levi has not gone inside Hanji's lab even if he stood outside while she ran tests on Eren inside. Levi always said the same thing when asked about his adamant avoidance of the lab's interior; "Out of sight, out of mind. If I don't have to see that Shitty Glasses' mess of a laboratory, then I won't be tempted to clean it. She's got some kind of fucking controlled chaos in that room and I'm not messing with it again." It was comedic at times for the members of the corps with how Levi would become a cleaning machine, but the minute he went near Hanji's lab or room, he would just drop from cleaning mode in an instant. With her lab, it was just too important for her to maintain that organized madness for Levi to clean it, and with her room, he'd never admit it, but her room was comforting in it's own way. The mess of her room wasn't horrible, and rather than triggering him to want to clean it, it made him comfortable and calm.

Her room was the only in the corps that was a mess and in the end, that made her room the only one to feel lived in. It felt like life resided in it. The room felt comfortable with how it was left after use. Hanji was notorious for using little, colorful sticky notes to write everything down and that applied the same to her room, certain types in certain areas such as a reminder of when her next date with Erwin or her next day off was stuck to her mirror and things about meetings were stuck to the back of her door so she saw them whenever she left her room, drilling the reminder into her subconscious. Levi often found some amusement by looking over all her little yellow sticky notes plastered everywhere. In her lab, there were sticky notes of all colors posted everywhere, but there was only yellow in her room. The last time that she had a different color sticky note in her room, it was a reminder for her day of leave for personal time off. The sticky note had been burned into Levi's mind.

The paper was red and she wrote in a silver ink of her own creation. Her normally neat or messy scrawl was shaky and poor whereas even her messy scrawls were still quite pretty. These words however, were not pretty. The words shook and had odd bumps and wobbly lines in the letters, and, with what those words said, it was clear that she was crying when she wrote it.

"Year 850, Fall 7th. Dad's funeral. Wall Sina, Clairian Area. Meet Mom @ home."

While the majority of the Survey Corps no longer had families, Hanji still did. Her parents lived inside Wall Sina where she grew up. In her years in the corps, she hadn't thought that her dad would die of disease, but he had contracted tuberculosis and Erwin gave her time off to visit him, but the time was too short and a month later, the news came by messenger that Mr. Zoë had died of his ailment in the late hours of the night. It was that night, while no one knew of her relation to the innermost wall, that she and Levi had their first fight where Levi walked away feeling completely in the wrong.