Blue ( levi X reader )

Chapter 21

"You look like you've been run over by a speeding wagon two fold," Hange commented , face stuffed with rice porridge and egg. Y/N lifted her head from the table, the dark circles under her eyes, a clear indication of her lack of sleep.

She had spent the last three days gathering intel and organising her notes all day and night, only stopping to rest for an hour or two for a nap. Her brain wouldn't allow her to sleep for more than that, knowing her father was coming after her was like rubbing salt into an open wound; her nightmares were worse than ever and her constant anxiety around everyone made her feel crazy. It upset and bothered her that she felt like all the progress she had made to heal her mind came crashing down because of one unexpected event.

It made her feel like a failure. To feel better about herself she out in twice the effort and work to find out something useful to the investigation.

After obtaining the list of newer recruits in a not so formal way, she managed to narrow down her list of suspects. Over the course of the threr days she had broken into their rooms looking for anything that connected those people to her father.

She was stressed. Too stressed. She was worried about the report she had to write up. Three days into her investigation and still there was barely anything viable to report. There was so much to do, so little time.

Her search had come up fruitless. It made her feel like she was wasting her time. However, she still had 2 more rooms she had yet to search, she only need Hange to whisk away her Squad on some pointless patrol tomorrow morning where it gave her a good working timeframe to search the rooms of the two people left on her list.

In the meantime, she was racking her brain for to come up with some bullshit to put on that report. It was much easier said than done.

"Is it that bad?" she asked Hange and her group of friends.

"You look horrible," Petra reaffirmed. "Did you not get any sleep last night? Let me rephrase that, did you get any sleep at all?"

Y/N pulled her body up in a stretch, ignoring the stinging pain behind her eyes and the muffled thumps of her heartbeat. She yawned. "I did get some sleep." Well, an hour to be exact. "I've been busy."

"You know your brain works much slower when you don't get enough sleep? I guarantee you, if you sleep tonight, you'd be able to finish up whatever you're doing at twice the speed tomorrow." Hange explained to her friend, who looked completely out of it.

"I'll be fine," Y/N, ironically, brushed off, "I've got a lot to do tonight and I need to keep on schedule in order to to hold the group back from tomorrow's patrol."

"Agh," Hange waved her off, dropping her spoon into the empty metal bowl, "Relax, it's just a patrol. I have a whole roster of people to pick from to fill up your space. Don't you overfill your plate with unnecessary work. Take a break, tomorrow."

Y/N smiled to herself— yet another,  small victory. The three days she spent manipulating duty rosters paid off. With Moblit mysteriously in the hospital for a bad case of food poisoning, Hange had only two people who's schedules were free enough to join the the patrol party. It was all going as she had planned. "Thank you, Hange. I appreciate it."

"Don't worry about it. I got your back," Hange, more so, reminded. Having gotten closer to Y/N, she had noticed that her friend very rarely asked for help. She ought to remind her from time to time that asking for help wasn't burdensome thing and that it was okay to do so. Some people just needed that extra encouragement.

Though she saw Y/N briefly nod in reply, Hange knew her words hadn't really gone through Y/N's thick, stubborn skull. With that, she excused herself from dinner, making a quick pit stop at Levi's study before she gathering her people to give a briefing about tomorrow's patrol.