The Heart of the Design

The elevator doors parted onto the twenty-eighth floor, and the world he’d been chasing since second-year studio unfolded in steel and light. Sina Architects wasn’t romantic. It was sharp, deliberate, aligned. Matte black ceilings, white oak floors, glass walls that made people and plans visible from every angle. Models hovered on concrete plinths like monuments to precision. He felt small and stubbornly excited.

Eren stepped onto the forgiving wood, his portfolio tucked under his arm, the weight of all-nighters and student juries still in the muscle memory of his shoulders. He felt the old prickle along the back of his neck—the one that preceded critique, competition, the sense that he had something inside him that didn’t shut up or slow down. He angled his chin up and took it in: the rows of drafting tables, the whisper of vellum, the soft staccato of keyboards, laser printers rocking out crisp sheets. Beyond the glass, the city was a layered section drawing—streets like arteries, facades stitching along the sky. He’d drawn cities like this since he was a kid, in the margins of math worksheets and on napkins that got thrown away.

A receptionist with a precise bob and a brass nameplate that said Petra smiled without warmth. “Eren Yeager?”

“Yeah,” he said, adjusting his tie. It wasn’t him, but Mikasa had insisted. “First day.”

She handed him a lanyard and a visitor badge until HR processed the real one. “Hange Zoë will show you around. Sit.”

He sat. He tried not to stare at the award shelf, but his eyes kept catching on the etched letters: AIA Gold. Pritzker shortlist. Ackerman, Levi—half the plaques had his name attached. The rumored tyrant. He’d rolled his eyes at the wiki pages and the interviews that said nothing in twice the words. Genius as branding. The work was what mattered. The work was always what mattered.

“Yeager!”

The voice came from somewhere to his left, bright and too loud for a Monday morning. He turned as a whirlwind in oversized glasses and a slightly stained white shirt that read geometry is sexy skidded to a stop in front of him, hand outstretched. “Hange. Senior designer. Occasional lunatic. You look like you slept, which means I don’t trust you yet.”

Eren grinned before he could help it. He shook their hand, firm. “Didn’t sleep much.”

“Better.” Hange dragged him up. “Come. Pet things. Smell things. Promise not to lick anything.”

They set a brisk pace. Eren tucked in at their shoulder, eyes scanning: project boards lined an entire wall, each a story mid-sentence; the central materials library sparkled—samples of concrete mixes labeled by aggregate size, translucent polycarbonate tiles stacked like lozenges, slabs of warm stone that made his fingers itch. Hange talked like their mouth had two speeds: fast and faster. “Research desk. Rendering den—these demons will make your fantasies photoreal in a day, but if you don’t give clear parameters they’ll make a nightmare and it’ll be your fault. Models—be nice to the interns, they bleed for those. Kitchen—caffeine temple. Restroom—where you cry. Just kidding. Mostly.”

“Mostly,” Eren echoed, smiling, but it felt real in his chest, grounded. He liked the speed and the edges.

They stopped at an open workstation with a view of the river. Hange’s desk was controlled chaos: stacks of sketchbooks, pens, mechanical pencils lined with military discipline, a small cactus in a geometric pot, and a tiny articulated wooden figure in a lewd pose. “Yours,” Hange announced, spinning a spare chair into place. “Until they shove you somewhere else.”

He ran his hand along the desk, liking the matte finish, the friction. He set his portfolio down, opened it to the last project he’d done for his thesis: a community center with a spine of green space and big stairs like the ones he’d loved sitting on as a kid. Human-centered was the polite way to say he wanted bodies in his buildings. Sweat. Breath. Laughter bouncing off surfaces designed to hold it and send it back. He wanted light that warmed skin, not just stone. He wanted handrails that felt good. He wanted mothers to push strollers into a lobby and feel safe.

“You prepared to work for a dragon?” Hange said casually, rummaging for a pen. “Spits fire. Eats hopes. Very clean.”

“I’m prepared to work,” Eren said.

Hange peered at him over their glasses. “Good answer. Wrong answer is ‘I don’t believe in dragons.’”

He couldn’t help glancing down the corridor that led to the corner glass box he knew was Levi Ackerman’s office—the one he’d seen in interviews, bare as a bone. “He that bad?”

“He’s that good,” Hange corrected, and their grin softened into something like respect. “Which is worse, for your sanity. You’ll figure it out. Or you won’t. Either way, show up, don’t lie, don’t half-ass. He hates crumbs on tables and sloppy line weights. He hates buzzwords. He hates when people think their gut is smarter than gravity. He doesn’t hate people, not exactly. Just… everything they do.”

Eren laughed. It came out a little tight. He pulled out a sketchbook and flipped to a clean page, pencil hovering. “I’m not here to be liked. I’m here to make something that matters.”

Hange’s eyebrows shot up. “Romantic. Dangerous. Drink this.” They handed Eren a mug that said this is where I’d put my award if i had one, filled with coffee that smelled like a black hole. “Let’s get you your logins. And then you can prove your worth by fetching a roll of trace and not cutting yourself on the dispenser, which has taken finer men than you.”

An hour later, Eren had a network password, a building security app, and a project ID number for something that told him nothing: S-2103. His inbox filled with welcome emails, compressed zips, a PDF of the firm style guide. He tapped his foot under the desk, forcing himself to read the typography section. He annotated a detail callout template like it was a sacred text. When Hange dropped a small bundle of task assignments on his desk, he inhaled like he’d been underwater.

“Start here,” they said. “Minor drafting on the Schulz Tower—stair handrail revisions, God help you. Then tag sheet updates for the Marcus Library. And—don’t skim—there’s a community project RFP floating. Not ours yet. But if you’ve got something, make me snoop.”

He locked on to the last words with a yank inside his chest. “I’ve got something.”

“Everyone’s got something,” Hange said, already backing away. “Most of it’s bad. Surprise me.”

He set his jaw and opened the Schulz Tower file. Blue lines populated his screen, measured and unyielding: landings, treads, risers, a spiral that arced like a disciplined muscle. He adjusted chamfers by half-millimeters, counted the rhythm of code-compliant heights under his breath. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was a pulse, a way into the bloodstream. He thought of the way a grandmother’s hand would glide along that rail, of a teenager sliding down it despite the sign, of a moment of pause at the midfloor landing where city met glass and made a kind of quiet.

He worked like that for hours, losing time, blending his line weights into the firm’s, resisting the itch to deviate. He ate a granola bar without tasting it. He answered two messages from Armin with a photo of his desk and the words i didn’t screw up yet. He learned the names of three people in his row and the sound of the plotter choking on a jam.

At noon, the office lights shifted subtly to a warmer tone that made the space feel less like a laboratory. Eren leaned back, rolled his shoulders, and looked over the top of his monitor. Across the room, a glass-walled conference room glowed. People gathered inside with tablets and stacks of drawings. The air changed. Heads turned.

Hange reappeared at his elbow like a magician. “Department meeting. Bring your brain. Hide your ego. Or don’t. Entertainment value matters.” They slung an arm around his shoulders for a second, squeezed, then steered him toward the glass.

Eren tucked his pencil behind his ear and followed, heart thumping. He wasn’t naïve about what it meant to be here. He wasn’t cowed either. He took his seat along the wall, the new kid, ribbon of energy tightening in his gut. He thought of his first building—his real one—standing in a place where people would live their lives through it. He thought of the names on the plaques, and of his own, blank and waiting.

He set his palms on his knees, steadying himself, and lifted his chin toward the door.

The door opened, and chatter flattened into something taut. Eren expected a spectacle; instead, a small, compact man in a charcoal suit stepped in with a leather folio and the kind of stillness that made everyone else awkward by comparison. Dark hair, precise. Eyes like a clean blade. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

Levi Ackerman moved to the head of the table and set down his folio. A senior architect was already presenting—slides on a massing concept, a ribbon of glass curling around a cube. Levi didn’t sit. He flipped through a set of printouts, eyes quick, mouth neutral. The presenter’s voice wavered. Eren watched Levi point to a joint in a corner detail without looking up.

“That’ll leak,” Levi said. “Your expansion gap is theater. The radius here isn’t holding your load path; you’re distributing stress into a brittle connection. Fix it. Also your section cut is lying.”

The room took a collective breath. The presenter began to explain. Levi didn’t blink. “Don’t explain why you didn’t do your job. Do your job. Next.”

It went like that for thirty minutes. No shouting. No theatrics. Just surgical notes that peeled back each drawing to its weakest assumption. He caught a misaligned datum line by eye from across the table, asked a single question that forced a whole diagram to unravel. He moved a red pen the way Eren had seen surgeons move scalpels in movies. It was brutal, yes, but it was exact. Eren felt his spine stiffen. He hated the chill that came with it. He also wanted, fiercely, to be safe from that pen.

When the meeting broke, Levi closed his folio and left before the scrape of chairs ended, like he had more rooms to drain of air. Conversations restarted in rushed whispers. Someone exhaled a “Jesus.” Hange leaned close, breath coffee-rich, glasses catching the light.

“Welcome to the aquarium. You just saw the shark.”

“He’s efficient,” Eren managed.

Hange barked a quiet laugh. “That’s one word. Another is demolitions. He’ll blow up anything unstable and make you thank him for the hole.”

They tugged him by the sleeve out of the room and into the corridor, letting a group of junior associates spill past. Hange’s grin dimmed down to something wry. “You should know what you’re walking into. This place—Sina—it’s a machine, polished and mean. But it runs because one person keeps tightening the screws until they sing.”

“Levi.”

“Levi,” Hange agreed. They steered Eren toward the materials library and planted him in front of a wall of wood samples. “He’s a genius. That overused word? It fits. He’ll see a flaw through ten layers of bullshit. He’ll shave a line weight until a drawing breathes. He’ll notice when a door swing is two degrees from ideal clearance and ask why you hate people in wheelchairs.”

Eren dragged a thumb along a strip of oak, grounding himself. “And the tyrant part?”

Hange’s mouth crooked. “All the usual myths are true. He likes things clean. He’ll throw your mug away if it’s chipped. He’ll ask you to show your references and he means the model and the math and the part of you that made the choice. If you bluff, he’ll gut you in front of everyone. He doesn’t tolerate lazy or pretty-for-pretty’s-sake. He doesn’t do empathy while you’re wasting his time.”

Eren felt the first ember of anger catch, stoked by humiliation that hadn’t even happened yet. “Sounds like he believes he’s the only one who cares.”

“He believes caring is measured in what you produce, not how nice you sound talking about it,” Hange said, not unkind. “He grew up proving things. He kept proving them until the proofs were buildings with names on plaques. And now he keeps proving them because if he stops, the world gets messy and he hates messy.”

They led him around a table of stone, fingers tapping a Carrara slab. “You saw him in there. He’s cold. He’s also right, most of the time. The part that hurts is he isn’t always right, and he will cut your good idea off at the knees if you don’t pin it to the ground with facts.”

“Is he fair?” Eren asked, surprising himself with how much it mattered.

Hange considered. “He’s consistent. He’ll skewer a partner the way he skewers an intern, which is why the partners keep him and the interns don’t quit. He remembers your work. He won’t forget your errors. He also won’t forget if you save his ass with a detail nobody else caught. He’ll never call it kindness. He’ll call it competence. Which, from him, is intimacy.”

Eren snorted. “That’s depressing.”

“It’s survivable.” Hange bumped his shoulder. “Here’s how you don’t drown. Do your drawings like you mean them. Be ready to throw away your favorite thing when it breaks the job. Don’t let him make you small. Argue when you’re right. Take the hit when you’re wrong. Keep your desk clean or he’ll clean it for you and you won’t like how it feels to have your chaos touched.”

Eren swallowed, thinking of his own desk already sprouting a little nest of pens and scraps. “He actually cleans other people’s desks?”

“Once threw a keyboard into a trashcan because the owner ate over it. Crumbs.” Hange shuddered theatrically. “But he took that kid to site the next week because she outdrew everyone on a facade study. He’ll torture you and then turn around and hand you a razor and tell you he expects straight lines.”

Hange’s gaze softened behind the lenses. “You’re already bristling. Good. You don’t want to be the kind of person who adapts by flattening out. He’s not here to teach you courtesy. He’s here to test your spine.”

Eren bit the inside of his cheek. “I’m not scared of him.”

“You’re not scared yet,” Hange corrected. “Also, don’t fangirl. He hates that. And don’t quote his interviews at him. He hates that more.”

“I don’t read interviews,” Eren lied. He’d read them, watched them, hated the parts where Levi said things Eren had thought in the dark.

Hange snorted like they could hear the false note. They leaned in. “The trick? He’s not God. He’s a human with a streak of obsession and the grossest tea habit. You can work with him. You can even make him better. But only if you’re not trying to impress him. Impress the building. He notices when you do.”

Eren looked past Hange down the corridor toward the glass box of Levi’s office. It sat like an exhibit: the shelves, perfectly spaced; the desk, clean enough to reflect the ceiling lights; the chair pushed in. He imagined stepping into that space with his loud heart and his too-many pencils. He imagined being told, in front of strangers, that he was small.

He took a breath until it pressed against his ribs. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Hange echoed. They clapped him on the back. “Come on. We’ll feed you to smaller wolves first. Then you can swim with the shark.” They pointed to his inbox notification pinging. “And for the love of all things right-angled, use the firm’s line weights. He will know. He always knows.”

The next meeting was for the mid-rise civic complex, the kind that would live in press releases and city council minutes. Eren took a place along the far wall, behind a planter that turned out to be real; the dirt smell cut through the faint chemical bite of marker ink and glass cleaner.

Levi stepped in again, that same quiet that made everyone recalibrate to him. He didn’t look around to see who was there. He cut a glance at the screen where a senior architect—Marlo, Eren caught the name—clicked through a pristine deck. The first slide was a render: a glossy, ribboned facade, sunlight sliding off a curve like oil. Eren had seen a hundred of them in school crits. He’d liked some. He thought he liked this, until Levi moved.

He didn’t sit. He set his folio down, took a pen—black, not red this time—and drew a small line across the edge of one of Marlo’s printouts. “Your facade is performing on Instagram,” Levi said, low. “But your section’s lying to your MEP. Your mechanical distribution here—where is it? You’re pretending it fits in a 250 mm plenum.” He tapped. “It doesn’t.”

Marlo swallowed. “We modeled a lower-profile duct.”

“No, you drew a lower-profile duct,” Levi corrected. “You didn’t ask whether your ceiling height can lose thirty millimeters in the corridors without turning them into coffins.” He flipped to a structural page. “And your column grid—why are you misaligning the bays with the primary program break? The lobby wants a clear span. You gave it a forest of columns because the grid looks pretty from the roof plan.”

Marlo’s cursor wobbled on the screen. “We thought the rhythm—”

“Buildings aren’t songs,” Levi said. “Or if they are, this is off-key because you can’t count. Your egress stairs,” he went on, flipping again, “are dimensioned to a hundredth of a millimeter, which tells me you copy-pasted, and your landing width fails code by eighty millimeters because you didn’t add the handrail intrusion.”

He looked at Marlo, not cruel, just exact. “Why do you hate firefighters? Why do you hate people who can’t run down a narrow stair with others shoving behind them?”

No one answered. Eren felt the heat rise from his neck to his ears. He wanted to tell Marlo to fight. He wanted to tell Levi to slow down. He also wanted Levi to keep talking because it was like watching a building get x-rayed in real time; every hollow lit up.

Levi slid the page back. “Your GFRC panel clips are detailed with three different manufacturers’ systems mashed together. You even kept the wrong part numbers in the notes. That’s not ambitious. It’s lazy. If you want this thinness, you need to design the back of the facade first, not last.” He placed two fingers on the print at a reveal between panels. “You’re going to get thermal bridging here. You’ll have condensation. That pretty ribbon will stain with tear tracks in six months. Who’s cleaning it? How? Don’t tell me a swing stage. Your roof edge detail doesn’t support it.”

Hange, two chairs down, made a small, appreciative noise and then hid their grin in a notebook. Marlo looked like he wanted to sink through the floor. Eren’s pulse thudded in his throat. He had hated people who tore for the satisfaction of tearing. Levi wasn’t doing that. He was cutting because he saw the structure underneath and wanted it to bear weight.

“Program,” Levi said, the way other people said please. “You pushed the community clinic into the back, down a corridor with no windows. Your daylight analysis—” He flipped to the chart. “—uses average illuminance numbers, which are meaningless if you don’t show the glare control at the windows in the reading rooms. And the south elevation shows shading that doesn’t exist in the detail. So which is it? A fiction on the render or a fiction in the detail?”

“It’s a concept package,” Marlo tried. “We were going to develop the—”

“Concepts aren’t an excuse to lie to yourself,” Levi said, cutting clean through. He slid the print back to him. “If you want the public to feel welcome, you don’t hide the most human part of the building in a dark box. Put the clinic where grandmothers know how to find it without reading a plan. Put a bench where tired legs can sit while a kid looks at a mural.”

Eren’s chest tightened at the sudden pivot. It was the first time something like softness entered the cadence of Levi’s critique. It wasn’t sentiment. It was geometry turned toward a person.

Levi capped his pen and finally sat. “You have a month before this goes to committee. Fix your grid. Fix your section. Redo your daylight analysis with real devices. If your ribbon survives after you honor the body inside the skin, keep it. If it dies, kill it yourself. Don’t make me do it for you.”

Silence fell, thick and total. Even the HVAC seemed to hold its breath. Marlo nodded once, eyes down, face pale.

The chair at the end of the table cleared his throat and asked about scheduling. Someone else mentioned budget contingencies. The meeting moved on as if they hadn’t all just had their foundations shaken. Eren stared at the black line Levi had drawn on the edge of the paper earlier, the tiny stroke that meant nothing in itself and absolutely everything as a pointer to what mattered.

He was angry. It was pure, clean, and familiar—the kind of anger that felt like bracing against a wave. Who was he to reduce someone’s months of work to a handful of cutting sentences? Who was he to make a room full of people shrink because he’d decided their care didn’t meet his standard?

He was also, God help him, impressed. He’d never seen anyone see so fast. He’d been so sure that his own attention to human spaces made him special, different from the cold technicians he imagined built glass armor and called it architecture. Levi had said bench, grandmother, kid, and it wasn’t a performance. It was an order backed by a diagram.

Eren’s knee bounced under the table, his heel thudding once against the chair leg before he stilled it. Levi was the shark, fine. Eren felt the answering heat of wanting to meet a predator with teeth. Let him try that on me, Eren thought, steady and bright. I won’t fold.

Levi didn’t look at him once, not even as he collected the scattered prints at the end and stacked them into a neat, insultingly perfect pile. The room emptied around Eren, the murmur of voices spreading back into the bullpen. Hange caught his eye and mouthed, You okay?

Eren nodded without believing it. The meeting had planted two truths in his bones: he wanted to win, and he wanted to be right in a way that could stand next to that blade of a man and not cut himself to pieces. He slid out of his chair, palms dry and sure, and followed the crowd back into the humming core of the office, the afterimage of Levi’s pen strokes still slicing through his head.

The hum of the bullpen felt louder when he returned to his desk, every keystroke around him pricking his skin. Hange dropped a folder onto his workspace, sticky notes like flags bristling from the edges.

“Congratulations, new kid. You’ve been blessed with boilerplate,” they said cheerfully. “Detail updates for the Northside Library addition. Window head sections, door schedules, ADA restroom clearances—glamorous stuff. Finish the markups, update the sheets, publish by six. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use the firm standards.” They waggled their brows and drifted away.

Eren flipped open the folder. The library project wasn’t glamorous, but it was solid—brick infill tying to an existing 1950s municipal shell. He scanned the drawing index, found the sheets with the tabbed notes, and brought up the BIM model. The controls felt familiar, his hands falling into practiced motion. He zoomed in on a window head detail, the callout circled in Hange’s chaotic scrawl—adjust insulation thickness at parapet tie-in. He corrected the note, checked the associated detail bubble, updated the key. The work steadied him.

Piece by piece, he worked down the list, cross-referencing sheets, tightening dimensions. He reviewed the restroom layout against ADA clearances, nudging the partition six inches to meet required turning radii, updating the fixture schedule accordingly. He cleaned up a section cut through the new stair, adjusting the nosing profile to match the specified anti-slip metal. He caught a mismatch between plan and elevation on the east facade—three lites in elevation, two in plan—and fixed it. It was small stuff, but it mattered, the way a shoe fits matters on the third day of walking.

He paused over the overall plan, eyes tracing the connection between old and new. The addition’s main circulation ran like a spine along the north wall, a straight shot from the original entry to the new reading room. In plan, it worked cleanly. But the elevation of the new facade, with its rigid rhythm of equally spaced, equally sized windows, felt stifled. The note called for standard aluminum mullions, no variation. He thought of Levi’s bench, grandmother, kid. He thought of light—not averaged, but moving, alive.

He checked the render. The consultant had slapped sunlight on a uniform grid, making even the afternoon feel static. Eren’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. Don’t reinvent the wheel, Hange had said. But he wasn’t laying out a new facade. He was looking at a line of windows and seeing a missed breath.

At the junction where the addition met the old brick, the corridor widened into a kind of threshold space that wasn’t labeled as anything. In his head, he could see it—a place where light changed, where a glass bay could soften the seam, not a grand gesture, just a shift in cadence.

He opened a new layer in the model and adjusted the mullion spacing on three bays along that threshold, widening one vertical interval to create a subtle, asymmetrical rhythm. He dropped the sill on the middle pair by eight inches, turning the windows into low reading ledges a kid could climb up to. He kept the head heights aligned with the rest to maintain the datum, kept the structural grid intact so the lintels would still catch, and updated the detail tags accordingly. It was an aesthetic adjustment nested inside existing parameters. No program change, no new structure. It would change sightlines, light patterns, the way the corridor felt under a winter sky. It would invite someone to pause.

He knew the standards. He called up the firm’s window head detail, edited the sections to match the new sill height condition, added a flashing note, extended the waterproofing membrane, and added an annotation to coordinate with the millwork team in case the sills became benches. He updated the legend to include a “Type B-Alt” window, with a note: “Asymmetric vertical rhythm at connection zone to mediate old/new facade. Lowered sill at central pair—see detail 7/A8.12.” He flagged it with a small triangle for reviewer attention.

It wasn’t reckless. It was considered. He ran the impact check. No clashes. He printed the two affected sheets, annotated the change clouds, and wrote a calm description in the revision block: “Adjusted mullion spacing and sill height at connector bay to enhance natural light quality and user interaction along primary circulation. Coordinated with head/sill details.”

His heart beat faster anyway. He saw Levi’s hand tapping a reveal on a render. He saw those eyes cut through a lie. He wasn’t lying. He was making a seam breathe.

He carried the packet to the large-format printer and watched the machine feed sheet after sheet, the smell of toner and heat curling up. He stacked the prints, slipped them into the folder, and brought it back to Hange’s desk. Hange wasn’t there. Their desk was, characteristically, a nest of samples and LEDs and a potted plant that looked like it had survived a war.

Eren wrote a note and clipped it to the top: “All markups addressed. See Sheet A8.12 + A3.04 for mullion/sill adjustment at connector bay—rev block flagged. Rationale annotated.”

He returned to his desk and uploaded the updated sheets to the project’s shared drive, wrote a brief summary in the team channel, and cc’d the project manager, Moblit, with a restrained email. He reread it twice, cutting any adjective that sounded like he was defending himself. He didn’t apologize for the change. He didn’t grandstand. He clicked send.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. The office hummed and clicked, and across the floor someone laughed too loudly at something on their monitor before smothering it. Eren opened his notebook and sketched the corridor as he saw it now, the thin widen at the seam, the lowered sill catching a small shoulder, a stacked pair of hands smudging the glass. He wrote “Grandmother. Bench,” in the margin and then scribbled it out, irritated at himself.

His inbox pinged. Moblit: “Got your updates. Reviewing. Thanks.” Another ping: Hange, in all caps: “YOU DID A THING. Meet me after five.” A third ping, austere as a scalpel: L. Ackerman—no subject. He stared at the single new line in the preview. His throat tightened and he clicked it open.

There was no message. Just a calendar invitation attached, labeled, “Northside Library—detail review. 17:30. My office.”

Levi’s office was brighter than the rest of the floor, an aquarium of glass and discipline. The blinds were set to a perfect angle, diffusing afternoon light into a clean wash that made the polished concrete look clinical. The desk was empty except for a pen aligned with a notebook, a tray with three stacked folders, and a single ceramic cup that looked unused. The chairs were exactly spaced, none of them bearing the stray scuff of a dragged foot. Eren knocked once and entered at 17:30 on the dot.

Levi didn’t look up. “Close the door.”

Eren obeyed. Three people already stood against the glass wall, as if they’d been arranged there: Petra from interiors, skin tight across her cheekbones; Oluo from QA/QC, jaw set; and Moblit, watching Eren with something like apology. Hange slipped in a second later, eyebrows up, mouth a straight line.

Levi flipped open one of the folders. The prints Eren had sent—A8.12 and A3.04—were clipped on top, change clouds circled in fine red ink. Levi’s fingers were clean and precise on the paper, lifting the corner like it could smudge him.

“Yeager,” he said, finally looking at him. His eyes were colorless in this light. “Explain this.”

Eren’s throat was dry. He kept his arms at his sides, shoulders back. “The connector corridor is a seam between old and new. The existing facade is heavy; the addition is lighter. The uniform mullion rhythm made that seam feel dead. I widened one vertical interval across three bays, and dropped the sill on the central pair to create a low ledge. It invites pause. It draws light deeper into the spine. I coordinated the head and sill details to maintain continuity, and I flagged the change for review.”

Levi let the silence stretch, then set the sheets down with a soft, aggressive care. “You were assigned markups. You were not asked to redesign anything.”

“I didn’t redesign. It’s within the structural grid. It doesn’t alter program.”

Levi stood. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “You altered the implied facade module on a permitted set. You changed sightlines without consulting interiors. You created a new sill condition without verifying thermal break continuity with envelopes. You introduced a variable light condition along primary circulation without consulting with the lighting plan. You wrote a romantic note in the revision block about ‘user interaction’ as if that substitutes for discipline.”

Petra’s eyes slid to the lowered sill detail. “We weren’t looped in,” she said, almost to herself.

“I flagged it for review,” Eren repeated, heat rising under his collar. “It’s not published.”

Levi leaned one palm on the desk. “You’re junior. You don’t touch facade rhythm on your first week. You don’t ‘invite pause’ in a fire-rated corridor without running it by life safety, and you don’t lower sills near a kid-height bench without a guardrail detail. Did you coordinate with code? Did you check fall protection? Or did you think ‘a kid could climb up’ was a charming image worth a lawsuit?”

Eren’s jaw clenched. “I updated the head and sill details. I noted waterproofing. It’s not impulsive.”

Levi’s mouth didn’t change, but his eyes sharpened. “It is exactly impulsive. It’s the kind of aesthetic tinkering that wastes everyone’s time. It reads as amateur. It reads as, ‘I learned a new trick in school and I want to see it in the wild.’” He turned the sheet so the room saw the red-clouded bay. “Look at the note,” he said to Oluo. “‘Asymmetric vertical rhythm at connection zone.’ What does that mean to a contractor? Nothing. It’s contentless. It’s ego dressed like clarity.”

Oluo grunted. “Contractor’s going to call and ask what the hell we want.”

“Exactly,” Levi said. He looked back at Eren. “If you had a thought, you bring it to me. You don’t sneak it into a live set and hope someone applauds your sensitivity. We don’t do sentiment. We do function, performance, and then we make it beautiful within the parameters. You don’t know the parameters.”

Eren could feel Hange’s attention like a hand pressed to his spine. He swallowed down the urge to argue his way through. “I didn’t sneak. I documented it clearly.”

Levi’s laugh had no humor. “You documented your mistake clearly. Congratulations.” He tapped the revision block with a fingernail. “You want lowered sills? Write a code brief. Draw the guardrail. Coordinate with Petra on millwork and with MEP on radiator placement so we don’t blow warm air against glass in winter. Call lighting and adjust the photometrics for variable mullion spacing so we don’t end up with a zebra hallway. Then maybe we talk about whether the corridor needs to ‘breathe.’ Until then, you stick to your list.”

A flush burned through Eren’s chest. “You talk about benches and grandmothers in a meeting like it’s gospel,” he said, the words out before he could swallow them, “and I try to—”

Levi’s gaze went flat. “Don’t quote me. You don’t get to use my words to justify sloppy work.” He picked up the pen and circled the lowered sill condition again, harder, the toner almost tearing. “Hange, you’re responsible for the north addition coordination. Keep your strays on a leash.”

Hange’s voice was mild. “Noted.”

Levi slid the sheets into a new folder and clipped them. “The changes are rejected. Revert to standard. Publish the corrected set by nineteen hundred. Yeager, you’ll also write a brief on why you thought this was acceptable and include three built precedent examples with proper detailing for lowered sills in rated corridors. Due on my desk tomorrow at eight.”

Eren’s jaw hurt. “Understood,” he said, because there was nothing else he could say that wouldn’t turn this into a worse scene.

Levi nodded once, like that settled physics. “One more thing,” he added, and his voice lowered, even colder. “If you want to make a name here, do it by not making avoidable errors. Passion without control is noise. I don’t tolerate noise.”

He didn’t dismiss the group, exactly; he just looked back down at his notebook in a way that made the rest of them start to move. Petra and Oluo slipped out. Moblit caught Eren’s eye and offered half a grimace before following. Hange lingered half a second, as if about to say something, then didn’t.

Eren’s hand was on the door when Levi said, without looking up, “And Yeager?”

He turned. “What.”

Levi’s pen paused. “Don’t touch my sets without permission again.”

The hallway outside felt colder. The glass of Levi’s office reflected Eren back at himself—jaw tight, eyes bright with humiliation and a fury that tasted clean and metallic. A couple of heads lifted from desks as he passed, curiosity sparking and then darting away. He walked to his station without seeing, pulled up the model, and started reversing his change with movements that were rock steady.

He fixed the mullions back to their uniform rhythm. He raised the sills. He deleted the alt type and scrubbed the legend. He restored the static render he hated. He ran the publish and watched the status bar inch along. His breath came shallow and even, each click a small act of control.

Hange slid into the chair beside him, silent. They didn’t touch him. They didn’t joke. After a minute, they murmured, “You’ll write your brief. You’ll pull the precedents. And you’ll out-design him where it counts.”

Eren kept his eyes on the screen. “He called it amateur.”

Hange exhaled. “He calls most things amateur. He’s not wrong about process. He is wrong if it makes you small.”

Eren nodded once, sharp. The publish hit 100%. He sent the notification to the team, cc’d Levi, and closed his eyes for a second.

Fine. If Levi wanted control, he would learn exactly how Eren looked when he stopped asking for permission and started earning the right to be in the room. The anger settled into something cleaner and colder. He opened a blank document and typed: “Lowered Sills in Rated Corridors: Code Implications and Precedent.” He didn’t write a single flourish. He wrote like he was sharpening a knife.