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Thing is, Newt had been gone long before anyone had noticed he'd left.
Later, after he’d had enough of the celebrations, when he'd limped off to look for Newt, when he’s staring at Newt's (messy, empty, organ-strewn) side of the lab, Hermann tells himself he should’ve been the first to know; he’d Drifted with the man, for heaven’s sake, he should have felt it somehow. But mostly, he'd been angry he'd had to be told about it—Choi’s doing—and that he’d had to witness it alone, the empty space where Newt used to be, an afterthought, an echo, like he was never there.
Later, he theorizes this: the consequences of Drifting with a hivemind, albeit an underdeveloped one, is that it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when a part of that hivemind has removed itself from the immediate vicinity, on account of it not feeling like physical separation. It was as if Newt had been standing an arm's length from Hermann all evening, present in all things. And he had, for much of it, at least; getting hopelessly drunk, letting people take shots off of his stomach. It was simply that Hermann had not felt the disconnect when it had happened. He had not looked when Newt had stumbled away, and Newt had not looked back.
Perhaps Newt had been counting on that. No, Hermann thinks, as Tendo hauls him away to get checked out in medical; of course he had.
The Hong Kong Shatterdome is quickly converted into a memorial landmark. Artists are commissioned to create commemorative statues of the Kaidonovskys, the Weis, Chuck Hansen and Marshal Pentecost, all standing tall before one-sixteenth scale versions of their respective Jaegers. Even Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori are immortalized in bronze in before their Jaeger's empty hangar, standing strong, steady. In the heart of the Shatterdome, there's another memorial, a towering black monolith; a tribute to all those who had died in service of the PPDC. Nobody is sure what to do with the Jaegers. Eventually, the three remaining—the pieces of them, anyway—are painstakingly recovered and flown to Oblivion Bay to gather dust and bird shit. Hermann swallows his useless disappointment and moves on.
Cleanup is ongoing. Hermann estimates five years damage control rounding down in Hong Kong and Sydney on top of all the other recovering rim cities. PPDC employees and volunteers are all referred to federal and nonprofit disaster relief organizations while the UN argues about whether or not to spend more money on completing the Anti-Kaiju Wall or leaving it as-is, a symbol of their failed last-ditch defense effort. Lars Gottlieb steps down from the Pacific Perimeter Program’s executive panel, unwilling to cite the basis on which he made his decision. Hermann understands. It would be a substantial blow to the ego to admit publicly your son had been right all along, that the Wall of Life program had always been a crock of shit.
Hermann hasn’t spoken to his father in years.
He files his very last report and leaves for England.
He comes in for a mandatory neurological follow-up because they won't leave him alone about it. They check him out with a warning to take it easy the next couple weeks, keep himself away from stressors. His physical comes back more or less normal for a man his age in his profession—a little underweight, tense, dark circles under the eyes, BP a little high, the blood in his eye will go away in a few days' time. They ask about his hip, he tells them it’s fine. They X-ray it anyway; the pins and plates are still drilled in tight. They ask about Newt. They ask about the hivemind. See a psychiatrist, they say, helps with the nightmares.
Nightmares. They assume, they don’t know. Little firefly moments of lucid interpersonal clarity, horrific little things that can spring upon him like an avalanche of sensory bombardment. When he looks through a different pair of eyes. They’re not hallucinations. They're not. They suggest he see a psychiatrist because, in some Everett world interpretation where Newton Geiszler hadn’t performed a Drift twice, today, right now, everyone on the Pacific coast is dead.
He tells them no. He tells them no, I don’t need anyone in my head, thank you very much, and he leaves off the “else” for obvious reasons. Anyone else.
February, and the PPDC disbands as a military operation, coalesces, and rises again as the National Center for Drift Research. "Sharing the neural load" as Hermann had once put it has become less of an applied military strategy and more of a means to understand the complexities of neuroatypicality, and—he suspects, bitterly—less noble pursuits. Interrogation. Torture. Abuse. Nobody knows anything about the human brain. Scientists from the K-Science think tanks within the Lima, Anchorage, LA, Tokyo, Sydney, Panama City, and Vladivostok Shatterdomes, all of whom had worked to bring the Jaeger Program to fruition, are brought back on board to continue perfecting the volatile Drift technology in relocated D-Science labs, because that's where all the money went.
Caitlin Lightcap re-emerges to head the American NCDR division, whose headquarters now reside in Arlington, Virginia—occupying the newly minted Lightcap Building, just a stone's throw from the nation's capitol. Hermann is invited to come on as the Executive Director at one of the NCDR's biggest European outposts in Helsinki. He would be paid a substantial salary, allowed certain creative control within the research division—he would be one of the leading names in the business, in the world, promised fame and fortune and all the other despicably hyped-up rot designed for immediate compliance and subsequent disappointment. He turns it down.
He'll never be the rockstar Newton Geiszler always aspired to be. If Hermann Gottlieb is one side of that two-faced coin, then his side is firmly face-down in the dirt.
He still can't look at a Pons without feeling ill.
Things settle. Headaches begin. In early March, Hermann stops by a drug store on the way back to his flat for a bottle of painkillers and Vanessa calls him. “The ultrasound,” she tells him, and he feels his stomach twist up like a wet rag. “It’s a girl. I’m due in a week. I want you to be there when she comes.”
He and Vanessa had both moved to Alaska to work in the Icebox before the Wall of Life Program got its second wind. He'd loved her for not hating him, but that was all. He had never said, but she had known. They had both decided, after the Icebox had gone the way of almost every other Shatterdome, save one, that Hermann could not give the time to be an attentive father. Hermann would be in Hong Kong for the next eight months, too busy to get out of his own head. Hermann would be entombed; he could support her at a distance. He had never wanted to be neglectful, but he couldn’t change himself and he hadn't wanted to and could not care more than he was able.
He had not wanted to be a disappointment.
Vanessa had been more understanding about that than most people Hermann had met in his lifetime. He still has the ring she gave him.
“I,” he says, “of course,” he says, “of course. I’ll be there.”
“Hey,” she says. “You’ll be great. You saved the world.”
“I helped. Had—help, rather.”
The words sour in his mouth. He wonders what would have happened if he hadn't.
Vanessa says, “You can help me now," and hangs up.
A week and a half later at Providence Alaska Medical Center, Hermann holds Vanessa’s clammy hand in his. He watches as the doctors clean off the squealing infant and hand her to her mother, umbilical cord still wet and still ropily attached. Vanessa’s cheeks are salty from hours of pain, but she sobs oh look at you with happiness as her arms encircle her child, kissing her damp wrinkled pug forehead. Hermann raises his palm to cradle the soft skull, so small and tender under his fingers. His thumb brushes the sparse hairs just behind her ear and he smiles despite himself, smiles and feels his barriers crack right down the middle. His ribs ache with something unidentifiable. He finds Vanessa’s lips and presses his mouth to them and ignores the emptiness between his organs, doesn’t think about strangled kaiju fetuses with necklaces of cabled flesh.
Hermann Gottlieb is not a bad man. Hermann Gottlieb could be a good father. But not now.
Another week in Anchorage. On Friday, he catches the next flight out to Heathrow and returns to several missed calls from the NCDR and an empty flat; all the food he’d bought had gone bad. He considers a gap year and scowls at himself. He deletes the messages on his answerphone without listening to them. He restocks his fridge with bean sprouts and skim milk and baby carrots and his pantry with whole wheat bread thins and brews himself a cup of tea, chases it with naproxen, and falls asleep on the sofa with his glasses on his chest. The television rattles. Summit today at UN headquarters...
At first he guest lectures across Europe, just for a few months. In the fall, he accepts a position at the University of Cambridge as lecturer of physics in the DAMTP. He’d had his pick of universities, but he’d wanted a taste of home—his home away from home, away from Garmisch-Partenkirchen and TU Berlin and his unfortunate childhood. Not all of his work had been declassified, which was a shame, but he had more than enough to use; he could talk about it for hours, and does. Chalk dust makes a home on his fingers and nose and the flats of his shoulders, and he covers the scrolling blackboards in equations, and all the blackboards cover the walls floor-to-ceiling. He’s surrounded by numbers, all the time, and it helps.
It’s familiar. It’s not new. It’s not fresh—it’s all Lorentzian traversable wormholes and exotic matter, the same data he was working with a year ago in high-stress environment that wore him down to the very quick of his nature, the snappish insufferable whip of a man who’d had to share quarters with tattooed sandpaper. It’s hashing and rehashing and he’s struggling to find the answers he so desperately wants, because nothing is easy in physics, and knowing that things work doesn’t necessarily guarantee the how of their working.
There are moments when he looks over in the packed lecture hall and doesn’t see entrails sloppily thrown across the floor, flecks of blue blood and unidentifiable viscera, but feels them to be there, an after-image imprinted on top of reality. Then there are times he looks and sees a shadow of a man rushing behind a yellow-orange preservative tank, and hears the shrill echo of a rebuttal scratched into the air. Shut up, Hermann, Newt doesn’t yell, and Hermann’s fingers crack the stick of chalk against the board.
The headaches don't go away.
He gets flashes of things. They come when his defenses are down—on the cusp of sleep, usually, or when his leg flares up, or when he’s bone-tired at his desk, slumped over a lightly fizzing holographic terminal. Sometimes they come as dreams, but he has a difficult time remembering those. He doesn’t write them down.
He'll smell the sharp acridity of ammonia, or the sourness of city rain. He'll hear a sharp bark of laughter (deep, like a throaty grave)—the sounds of cars screeching in the street, mumbled voices in a soundproofed language he can't place. And then, sometimes, in a language he can; Verdammt! it says, and then: Jesus Christ, you IDIOT, nein, ich brauche das, fuck—tíng xiàlái!—
The images are tinged blue—sea-blue, Drift-blue. Hermann dreams in blue. There are times when he wakes shaking, drenched in a cold, shivery sweat; he doesn't thrash or kick, but he can't help small bursts of rough sound through clenched teeth. He imagines Vanessa to be there with a hand to his chest, calming the adrenaline-quick rabbity beats of his heart. He breathes, lulled back to sleep with the imaginary warmth of her palm against his sternum, forgets the image of Otachi’s tongue burned bright and noxious onto his retinas, forgets what it feels like to drown.
You dream of him. You’re not sure how you feel about that. You dream about them, and you’re not sure how you feel about that either. Each dream feels like a wound, fingers jammed between chunky flaps of flesh and digging in with jagged nails. In and in and in. Pushing in gravel and pushing out great rivers of blue blood. Sometimes it feels like the only thing you do is dream; in one reality, you are a beast, and in the other, you are a monster. You don’t like sleeping. You never liked sleeping. You don’t sleep.
But sometimes you get so tired you just wanna
The phone rings.
"Hello?"
“Hello, Dr. Gottlieb?”
Hermann puts down his pen. “Yes, how can I help you?”
“This is Dr. Sofie Haas, I'm from the National Center for Drift Research in Arlington. I’m very sorry to disturb you so late at night—”
Hermann glances at his watch. Eight-thirty. The lab is empty; computers offer a low buzzing hum under the lights, projecting drafts and parabolas. His colleagues had all left for home, for their wives and families and home-cooked dinners and pre-recorded television shows. Hermann had found he preferred to work late. He would take blessed silence where he could get it.
He sighs. Impolitely. “Well, get on with it.”
Dr. Haas pauses. Hermann hadn't kept quiet about his disdain for the NCDR; perhaps she just hadn't been listening to the news.
“Well, as you know, we are required to look over the medical files of every living Drift participant. We’ve just received your your Hong Kong EEG results from a few months ago, January 22nd? It shows marked electrical activity at the time of your discharge, which isn’t uncommon, but due to the nature of your Drift—well, we’d very much appreciate it if you could come in and provide us with a new reading so we can check for abnormal or extreme brain function. Sometimes it can be quite severe.”
“I’m very sorry,” Hermann says, not sounding sorry at all, “but I must decline.”
“Please, doctor, it’s for your health. You may be at more risk to suffer strokes or seizures than others who have Drifted—the neural link is is only supposed to remain between two people, and only for a short period of time. The addition of a hivemind element—”
“I feel quite fine, thank you, Dr. Haas,” Hermann lies, and feels a stab of anger that she even knows about the kaiju Drift.
Dr. Haas sounds frustrated. “You don’t have to like us, Dr. Gottlieb, but we’re only trying to help. I urge you to check in with your attending physician as soon as you can.”
“I assure you, there is nothing wrong with me.”
“Believing that doesn’t make it true—”
“Thank you,” Hermann snaps, and hangs up.
You are seriously out of your depth here, but you’re not about to admit that to anyone but yourself. You have an image to maintain—not that anyone cares about that image, but details—and you’re pretty sure showing weakness around these people is tantamount to signing your death warrant. As much as it seems like you’ve got a deathwish, you don’t actually want to die. That would suck.
You were once content with the ending that goes like: underground shelter, hole in the pavement, gaping mouth, fluorescent teeth, a million screaming minds at once, boiling sea of stomach acid.
Now you’re kind of stuck with the ending that goes like:
—Fuck it, you have no idea how this is supposed to end.
In October, Hermann is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Jasper Schoenfeld.
He sees—picks out—Raleigh Becket, Mako Mori, Tendo Choi, and Marshal Hansen in the crowd at Stockholm City Hall. He listens to his presentation speech and is unable to keep his chest from swelling with satisfaction. He sees his mother, his brothers and sister. He does not see his father. He does not see Vanessa. When he stands to accept the diploma and the medal from His Majesty the King, he sees no-one, but they’re all smiling and clapping for him—for him—and he isn’t a prideful man, only when he’s pushed to it (and he had been pushed), but he deserves this. He had been one of the very first to come on, after all, and the very last to leave. The very last.
Newt, who had been awarded the Prize in Physiology, doesn’t show. Not that Hermann had expected him too. Nobody had. Caitlin Lightcap is there to share the dual award; hers, for pioneering neural-overlay matrix technology and her continual efforts to improve humanity's grasp of their own brains, and Newt’s, for tremendous biological contributions to Kaijuology, groundbreaking strides in artificial tissue replication, and the invention of the Milking Machine.
Milking Machine, Hermann thinks. Atrocious.
At the banquet, Jasper finds him and shakes his hand. Hermann had met Jasper upon joining the Jaeger Academy, though their time together had been very short. Hermann had been twenty-six and sharp as a razor, elbow-deep in Mark I software engineering, and Jasper had been distracted with tests and prototypes. Now he looks how Hermann feels: old and exhausted.
“Long time,” Jasper tells him. “Good work, really good work.”
“Thank you, Dr. Schoenfeld,” Hermann says, because it bloody well was, wasn’t it.
He manages to avoid his family, for the most part. He should feel bad about that. He should feel guilty, but he doesn’t. They had made no effort to visit him when he was in Alaska; only the occasional phone call from Karla asking how he was and if he’d like her to send anything. He's not usually so petty, but he had not got along well with anyone after the accident, and he hadn't wanted—hadn't needed a shoulder to lean on. He had removed himself from his family because he had been steadfast in his self-sufficiency; he would survive on his own if it killed him. He had fought his way out. He still did not want to speak to his father.
It means sacrificing a chance to speak to Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket, but he would see them again. They had cheered for him, and he for them, at the world’s ending.
Marshal Hansen, world-weary even in a suit, catches him before he can leave.
“Dr. Gottlieb,” he says. “Could I have a word?”
“You can have many, Marshal,” Hermann says, his mouth falling into a stiff, lopsided smile. Herc mirrors it and pulls him off to the side. He looks more or less the same as when Hermann saw him last, but he can see the loss carved into his face. Hermann had never offered his condolences, but it would be inappropriate to offer them now. Max is nowhere to be seen.
“I know you’ve stepped back from all this,” Herc says. “I get that, I do. The PPDC’s fallen apart, there’s nothing left but the cleanup. We’re all trying to figure out what to do next. But we still need you on board, doctor. Without Dr. Geiszler, you’re our only resource.”
Resource. Hermann frowns. “I appreciate the sentiment, Marshal, but you have your pick of scientists.”
“We do, but that’s—not what I mean.”
Herc looks uncomfortable, moves so his back is to the crowd. He lowers his voice. “I mean, without Dr. Geiszler, you’re the only one who knows what it’s like to experience the kaiju hivemind. We don’t know if they’ll strike again—hell, we don’t know anything. But we do know—I know—that a neural link like that doesn’t just go away. If you can tell us anything about it—we need that information. We need to know. We need to be prepared.”
Hermann recalls his brief conversation with Dr. Sofie Haas.
“Ah, you want me for my brain, not necessarily my work.”
Herc looks pained, but doesn’t deny it. “We need you for both.”
Hermann doubts that.
Briskly, he says, “Marshal, the likelihood of opening another dimensional rift in that same small pocket of space-time is quite improbable—not to mention that a defeat of that magnitude would likely dissuade any conquering force for a very long time, at least until they have perfected their technology. It could very well take millions of years, perhaps a hundred million. You’ve read my report—we cannot be the only colonizable dimension in existence. We cannot be their only target.”
“It can’t just be 95%, it has to be a hundred. We can’t take that risk.”
“We can, and we are. The Jaeger Program is entirely defunct. The world has little interest in preventing future problems, only immediate ones. We have won, we have wars to wage and human beings to torture. Besides, I have no more connection to the hivemind than I do to an ant farm, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to help you. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
A hand wraps around his upper arm. Hermann jerks at the touch but doesn’t wrench away. Don't touch me. Get your hands off me, he doesn't say, don't.
“Maybe not the hivemind,” Herc says. His grip is steel. “But you shared your mind with someone. That connection will stay with you forever. If you can’t tell us anything more about the kaiju, maybe you can help us find the man who can.”
Herc lets go. “And for God’s sake, see a doctor. You look awful. The last thing we need is one of the most brilliant men on the face of the planet turning into a vegetable because he was too stubborn to admit he needed help.”
Hermann does not swallow, he does not cower. He straightens himself with all the cold, pompous bearing he learned to wear like armor.
“I can't help you any more than your son can, Marshal Hansen.” The words cut past his lips, frost the air, and Herc's face darkens. Hermann turns on his heel.
He can’t quantify the dull ache in his stomach, the twinge of nausea; he can’t put words to gut instinct. He would rather Newt suffer at the hands of his own ill-advised decisions than at the hands of people who don’t much care for individual autonomy. The kaiju had cemented one thing: humanity will do anything to ensure its continued survival.
Whoever gets their hands on Newton Geiszler gets their hands on a ticking time bomb.
Hermann pities whoever becomes ground zero.
The sum awarded with the diploma is enough to retire on, but Hermann doesn’t retire. Won’t ever retire, he’s only thirty-seven. He donates half of it to a disabilities charity and a good chunk is put into savings—Emmy’s college tuition, should she choose to attend one, in seventeen years, give or take, or less, if she's anything like her mother. The rest of it he uses on equipment and rent. It’s not PPDC-level stuff; they wouldn’t extract the computers before shutting down the facilities, but he’d been allowed to recover his research. Most of it belonged to the PPDC, and now the NCDR, but Hermann has copies of everything.
He buys a new holographic terminal and digs out old K-Science reports and his predictive models and lays them out in order, painstakingly neat and organized. The DAMTP labs are already home to a good amount of his Breach-related research and experiments, but the other half—the proofs—he can do those at home.
What Herc had said had got to him. Hermann knows what’s keeping him from working for the NCDR; he knows what’s driving him away. A mess of conflicts had made their home inside his head after the Breach had closed and he loathes that he can't solve them. He cannot operate as half a whole.
The truth is, it feels like someone’s blown a hole through your skull big enough to climb through. It feels like a piece of your brain is missing, like you got a lobotomy and didn’t realize it until you reached up and touched the blood. It’s a constant ache, this missing thing, this red on your fingers that says you’re not all there.
You’ve never felt empty before. Your head’s always been so full of shit that there was no room to breathe, and you liked it that way. You liked that you never let yourself stop. Stopping meant boredom, stopping meant weakness. If you weren’t proving yourself, you weren’t living.
You weren’t you.
You’re not you now, either. Sometimes, you're not sure who you are.
The most infuriating thing about feeling empty is—and this is the best part, you think, the irony always is—is knowing what’s missing, and knowing you can’t grasp it no matter how far you reach.
Most days see Hermann in his office or limping the corridors of the Centre for Mathematical Sciences to the nearest pen or paper or computer or chalkboard because he likes his work longhand sometimes. Days are fine. He doesn’t mind the quick and easy calculations, but the satisfaction one feels writing the proofs out oneself is almost as good as getting them published. The burn of muscle as it stretches in his arm as he reaches to fill that one gap up top the other white numbers have managed to fill, the trembling of his leg as it struggles to keep balance on the rickety ladder, the incessant pulsing behind your eye as it fills with blood, the screeching and honking of cars in the streets below, the great curve of a rib above—
Hermann shakes out of it, hisses through his teeth, wipes at his eye. Nothing’s bleeding, he’s not bleeding at all, but his hands have tremors, and the chalk is in pieces, lost to the floor below. He feels momentarily empty, like a parted sea, and then anger surges forward to fill the space left behind, the one that aches sometimes with a wanting like hunger. He climbs down the ladder with a hand to his leg and picks up his cane and walks a circuit of the Centre and comes back and sits down, because if he’s not thinking, it’s not him who’s thinking.
He picks up a pen and paper and writes down a thesis, two theses, scratches them out, starts again. His vision swims. Breathes for a minute, thinks about aerodynamics, the curve of a wing, of a hull, a Jaeger arm. All the little parts and big parts working together to form the whole, the massive whole, the body. Blueprints. Mass, thrust, fluid mechanics. Two hemispheres, coming together as one, shut up, Hermann. Breaking themselves down and putting themselves together, magnets repelling, attracting, jaws closing down, teeth fitting perfectly, zig-zagging, brains hemorrhaging with purple-dark blood, lit up with neon, splattered on rent skin, metal, water, fire, together, together.
Hermann wakes with his cheek saliva-stuck to paper, suddenly and completely.
He checks his watch. Nine o’clock. He stands unsteadily and glances down at his piano fingers stretched long over aborted draftwork; moves them aside to see. Stuttered diagrams of Kaiju musculature he didn’t draw. Anatomically perfect, down to the minutiae. The axe-skull of Trespasser, jaw hinged open in a soundless roar, and Hermann remembers San Francisco like a punch to the gut, even though he had never been there.
Nights are bad. Nights are Hermann tossing in his bed and twisting the sheets around himself and shouting out when his leg gets tangled in them, not waking up because nobody is there to shake his damp bony shoulders. He sleeps and breathes through it like he’s running flat-out across hard-packed ice. He dreams of skyscrapers falling beneath his clawed hands and howls in agony as the bones in his face break on impact. Dreams of Emmy, her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, lungs under-developed. Emmy, with a hinged jaw and a blue Throat. Crying in her mother’s arms, in her split belly. Humans crushed to sloppy pulp beneath his massive limbs. Follow the lights, so close, so close, up and up and up and out and fight and dead and dead and sulfur in the air like clouds of smoke. Shut up, Hermann, someone screams, God, just shut up!
The alarm blares. Hermann forces himself into the shower and shudders under the spray. His hip and thigh throb horribly. He blinks once and has one hand braced against the tiles, the other wrapped around himself, moving furiously under the water. He blinks again and he is swimming in the ocean and out of his mother’s womb. He leans. The light changes and they aren’t his hands. Hermann clutches at his leg in the shower and stays there for thirty minutes trying to make himself move.
You know what? You’re getting really fucking tired of hearing voices in your head.
New year, 2027, and everyone thinks Newt is dead. Thinks he threw his brain into the blender and pressed high and the blades were the Drift. How that might've triggered—something, might've suffered a seizure on the streets of Hong Kong, might've stroked out and lost the brilliance that had so propelled him to study the kaiju—how he might've been killed by the kaiju worshippers for daring to prevent their toxic warmongering monster gods from eradicating the earth's population. How, kids and conspiracy theorists say, he might’ve turned into a kaiju himself, living in the sewers and eating rats until he’s big enough to start eating people, some half-human monster, alone and hungry in the dark.
Rubbish. Rubbish. Hermann had clicked off the television in disgust countless times, angry at—everything. Angry at Newt, angry at the world, at wars that had momentarily been put on hold during the kaiju attacks that had begun once more in earnest. Another news outlet dishing false information for some kind of reaction, another ineffectual tactic to get Newt out of his gopher hole, to get the masses rumbling. Years of progress falling away like sheafs of dead skin.
Days go by, one by one by one. He knows they’re looking for Newt. They’re searching high and low, though perhaps not the lowest of the low, in the gutters, where they ought to.
Two years after the Drift. You run with a film of blurry bokeh over your eyes, with your hair plastered to your forehead and your lungs heaving. Your glasses are gone, you’ve gotta grab a new pair somewhere; you remember your prescription from a year ago like you just saw it on paper, but mostly you’ve gotta avoid these bastards running after you with guns and kaiju bone-knives, sharp fuckers, nicked you on the way out—shit, is that still bleeding? Shit, it’s still bleeding, that’s great, that’s just great—probably shouldn’t have stolen one of them too, but you figure you earned at least one memento. Should’ve snagged the glock instead. You hold a hand to your side as you slap slap slap with wet chucks down the busy streets trying to lose them, but it’s a little difficult when nobody wants to give you an inch of cover, and all the cars you run into don’t want to stop for shit. You’re a good hundred meters in front of them, so if you could just duck into an alley somewhere—
You don’t duck into an alley somewhere, in fact you duck into the opposite of an alley somewhere, and it’s bright and you still don’t really know where you are because your glasses are smashed on the marble floor about a mile back. There are people looking at you weird (you think; you can’t really see their faces) and if you had a dime for every time that happened you’d have just enough for a jar of dimes to heave over the edge of 388 Bridge Street back home just to watch it all shatter into pieces on the pavement below, but hey, it’s not like you’re bleeding and sucking up air like a hoover or anything, so the looks are probably deserved. You hear a snatch of something familiar—well, kinda familiar, you’re a little rusty with your Cantonese—but turn toward it before your brain can begin translating: on a something of mercy, come to free humanity from a something home; with something something, you stir our ocean and something our skies. Even these guys must have bathrooms, right? Or a back door, or a front door. You have no idea where you came in or how to get out.
You don’t pause to look because you’re pretty sure they’re still on your ass, so you jog down the massive hallways inside Reckoner’s skull, past the shrine, past the die-hard kaiju groupies, the real ones, knelt in lines in front of effigies of their gods. You have the briefest urge to join them—just a fleeting notion, maybe you can connect again, water, blue, Breach, GO—and then you’re out the back, through an alley, and Jesus your side hurts, ow, ow, but you can’t really stop, you could never really stop.
You hit a car—
You hit a car and you wake up before you even realize you’re awake; your eyes are open, but you don’t see until you blink and the word reforms back to a ceiling and walls the morning light streaming through the windows on the left. Your hip and knee are loci of pain where Hermann had been running with them all night—hadn’t been running at all—and it pulses up to his stomach enough that he doesn’t know who he is and he has to vomit over the side of the bed and into the wastebasket.
The lecture ends, and Hermann starts shoving papers into his briefcase. His throat is rubbed raw with all the screaming he hasn’t done. There’s a bottle of pain medication in the bottom of his briefcase that’ll rattle around if he moves from the lectern; he lays his hand on top of the cool leather to stifle it, just in case. He can stay on his feet a while longer. Just a little while longer. Just a minute more.
He says, “You’ve both come a very long way on very short notice.”
Raleigh shuffles awkwardly. “We have a conference in London tomorrow. Thought we’d stop by.”
He and Mako had slipped in at the back, had waited for the students to filter out of the lecture hall before coming down to see him. They’d tried to be inconspicuous, but some of the students had still stared. Rockstars, Newt had said. Still are.
“Hey,” Raleigh peers closely at him. “You don’t look so good.”
Hermann waves him off. “It’s nothing. A particularly meddlesome stomach bug. Miss Mori,” he says, and inclines his head to Mako. She offers him a small smile. He remembers her at thirteen, Anchorage Shatterdome, following Marshal Pentecost around like a baby duckling; he remembers her at eighteen, initiating her first simulated drop sequence. He remembers her nearly dying 35,755 ft under the Pacific ocean. She’d grown so much, and him, so little.
“We just wanted to know,” Raleigh says, hesitant. Rephrases. “We were wondering if you had reconsidered your position at all. About working with the NCDR.”
Hermann grips his cane. “Marshal Hansen sent you, I see.”
Mako looks apologetic, but her spine is straight, her shoulders set.
“We came on our own. We thought you might listen to us.”
“I am perfectly willing to listen, Miss Mori, but that is the only thing I am willing to do.”
“Why?” Raleigh asks. “I don’t understand. You helped us before. Why not help us now? It’s still the PPDC. I mean, it used to be. We’re still trying to do what’s best for humanity. We still have a lot to figure out. It’s not over.”
“Are they resurrecting the Jaeger Program?”
“No,” Raleigh says. A twinge of something indefinable in his face.
“Then it is over, Mr. Becket, for the time being.”
“How can you say that?”
“I doubt very much they care about the Breach reopening. The threat has been eliminated.”
“So what if they don’t care? Don’t you care?”
Hermann ignores him. “They are focused on Drift technology, and for that, they need Drift compatible minds. You are their poster children, not me.”
Raleigh looks affronted, but Mako just looks sad. Hermann breathes and steadies himself. “So if you would please—”
“I understand, Dr. Gottlieb,” Mako says. “But we are doing all we can do. We had hoped you would do the same.”
Hermann Gottlieb is a rough-edged, stubborn man, with steel walls built fifty feet high, but that stings a bit.
“They do not want me for the right reasons.”
“I know you miss him—”
“I do not,” Hermann spits, suddenly mutinous, but Mako just looks sympathetic. That, worst of all, worms into Hermann’s carefully constructed defenses and fastens its lamprey mouth right over his heart. A stab of dizziness lances through his head.
Raleigh makes an aborted movement, as if to reach out and grasp Hermann’s shoulder. He doesn’t. “We’re not the enemy,” he says instead. “You change your mind, you know where to find us.”
Hermann had once wondered what, to him, would be the right reasons, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to think about it more than he had to. He bids a stiff, formal goodbye to Raleigh and Mako and doesn’t get much sleep that night; he thinks, agrees, no, you are not the enemy.
He goes to the 37th annual National Neuroscience Conference in London, 2027. Raleigh and Mako perform a Drift with a BCI and modified Pons; Dr. Caitlin Lightcap is there to explain the process—simply, as much of the research is still classified. Hermann watches the split projection light up with colors and primitive video recordings of transferred shifting images. Hermann remembers: sweat, blood, vomit, the virulent smell of Kaiju Blue. Strands of DNA weaving together, the heaving of a massive wave. Water colliding against iron, the crunch of metal, dead Rangers torn apart by shrapnel and fire. He wonders if Mako and Raleigh ever feels the sharp tang of bile in the back of their throats every time they—
He feels sick, and leaves before the end. Nobody stops him.
Winter comes. The siphoned readings off the Breach site are still stable. Hermann wishes more than anything he could have taken readings off the Anteverse before the Throat closed. All of it is lost to him now, and he feels a pang of frustration that he had reached so far only to come up empty-handed. He can extrapolate from the remaining data; he can curse at the depths of the ocean and try to work around the water molecules. He can measure radiation levels and look between atoms, but it’s not enough.
Loathe as he was to use anything that had come out of Newt’s mouth, Hermann had still taken note of his testimony—he’d said the Triassic, couldn’t pinpoint an exact date—not a conducive atmosphere he’d said, too pure, too arid, too dry. Pangaea had been the ruling supercontinent; the Cimmerian plate subducting underneath Laurasia, the formation of the Tethys Ocean. Newt might have been too early. Not the Triassic, but the Jurassic, maybe the early Cretaceous—the Tethyan Trench, the weakest rift in the Earth’s crust. The thinnest sheet of reality between dimensions. The easiest to puncture. He can predict—
—I need more than a prediction—
—You see, he actually CAN’T give you more than a prediction—
Hermann looks at the mass of equations that wallpaper his life. He can’t give what he doesn’t have, can’t be entirely sure even if the math checks out, but he was right once before.
He shoves the train of thought aside.
Fortune does not favor the brave, on account of fortune not favoring anyone. Fortune is hard work and hard numbers. Nothing Newt has ever said can convince Hermann that fate has had a hand in his life. Fate is coincidence, coincidence is fundamentally more likely than miracles, supposed miracles are only math. Science is closer to explaining the machinations of the universe than superstition will ever be.
Hermann knows to the decimal the physics of fate. He knows, on average, the human body’s gravitational pull: g = Gm / r^2, where G is 6.673 * 10^-11, m is the object’s mass, and r, the distance away from its center of mass; he can guesstimate speed, distance over time; he can guesstimate his own mass, he can arrive at and approximation of how much, twenty years ago, the car had accelerated toward him due to his own gravitational field, how much it had fallen toward him in that last nanometer, like maybe it was in love. He can calculate an approximation of every force that he had acted upon and in turn acted upon him in that frozen moment, but he could not have stopped them from happening. He could not have stopped the shattering of his hip and femur and the agony that had followed, the days spent trying to push back the tortuous burning behind his eyes, the constant aching of his throat. Sometimes life isn’t fair, but at least its structure is more or less consistent.
He had been brave all his life, and still fortune never favored him.
Some people just get hurt more than others.
Some people.
“Surprise,” Newton Geiszler says, standing on Hermann Gottlieb's doorstep.
It's December and the rain is coming down in sheets. Hermann looks at him. Not dead. Not surprised. Full beard, glasses new, soaked to the bone. No tie, t-shirt, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, pale and shaking. All Hermann can think of are crumpled buildings and blue dreams; some memory that isn’t his flashes in front of his eyes. He tastes the sharp tang of ammonia on his tongue. He is suddenly and simultaneously furious and stutteringly relieved. All he wants is to reach out to Newt and touch him.
He doesn't. He says instead:
"You look terrible."
Newt lets out a strained bark of laughter. "Thanks, didn’t know that.”
Hermann's mouth twists. He stands with the door open for a moment longer, leaning heavily on his cane. He considers; smells the sharp tang of blood; reaches up to dab at his nose. His knuckles come away clean. Newt's nose is red with cold, and only cold, but there’s something old and crusting on the dark unknown leather of his jacket.
Newt raises his hands, palms up. He sounds as weary as Hermann feels.
"Look, I'm only gonna say this once, but I didn't know where else to go. As fun as this is, could you let me in, please? I’m freezing my ass off out here.”
Something in Hermann cracks like an egg. He feels vicious and caustic, a slow-acting poison, like he wouldn't mind adding to Newt's bruises and not stopping until he saw the meat of Newt's insides. A beat, and then courtesy wins over. He holds the door open and doesn’t look Newt in the eye.
Newt stumbles inside.
He goes immediately to Hermann’s shower, drops his duffel bag outside the oak door. He yells something shrill about a razor and Hermann pretends not to hear it over the sound of the water running and the electric kettle boiling and the ocean bubbling hot; he pretends not to hear the shout of pain when the old gauze comes off under the stinging spray, he pretends not to feel it when the phantom pain hits him. He’s on his second cup of Earl Grey when Newt emerges in cloud of steam in old boxer shorts and a ratty W:O:A t-shirt. Little scraps of tissue paper pepper his newly-shaven face, stuck to his jaw with dots of blood where he’d nicked himself with Hermann’s razor. An electric blue tendril curls up his jugular toward his left ear. He crosses to Hermann’s couch before Hermann can say anything, props his feet up on the coffee table and settles gingerly into the leather.
“Put your feet down,” Hermann snaps, and struggles to stand. He retrieves gauze and antibiotic cream from the medicine cabinet in the steamed-up bathroom. Newt stares blearily up at him when he comes back. “Lift your shirt.”
Hermann sits on the coffee table, hunched over like an old crone. Newt lifts his shirt and doesn't ask how Hermann knew.
The wound is long and slightly ragged, but shallow. It crosses Newt’s ribs and shears through the swirls of red water on his flank. It looks like Newt had done the stitches himself with floss and a local anesthetic; the top three had pulled slightly, but the rest are intact. No pus, no infection. The water had washed away the dirt and blood and drainage. Some bruising, hard to see under the ink.
“You bloody fool,” Hermann mutters.
“It’s not like I meant to get sliced open.”
Hermann lays his palm flat on Newt’s stomach. He cleans the wound with iodine on a cotton swab and Newt hisses at the burn. His hand comes to clutch painfully at Hermann’s thin shoulder.
“You suck at this. Don’t ever be a medical doctor.”
“Be quiet,” Hermann says. He applies the antibacterial cream with another cotton swab, puts band-aids on the ripped stitches and tapes fresh gauze on top of the wound. Then he stands and leaves Newt to roll his shirt back down. When he comes back from the kitchen with a glass of water, Newt is already asleep.
Hermann considers fishing out a blanket. He also considers pouring the remnants of his lukewarm tea down Newt’s front, but decides against it. He puts the water down on a coaster and leaves Newt to shiver.
There are things Newt now knows about Hermann that Hermann never wants to discuss. He’d had his mind flayed open and bared for a man he’d part-loathed, part-respected, and nothing he’d experienced in his life is now private. There were things he’d considered his to know and his alone; things he’d kept locked away in a little safe deep inside his ribcage, never to set foot on his sharp tongue. He gave Newt the key, because doing otherwise would end in extinction. He hates them both a little for that.
Then there are things Hermann knows about Newt that he’s not sure Newt ever planned on telling himself, let alone anyone else.
He knows the little things, too; he knows how to roll a joint. He knows how to play electric guitar and a little bit of bass guitar, and he knows how to bang on a set of drums until the neighbors bang on the door because it’s one in the morning, for fuck’s sake, shut your kid up. He knows how to take apart an electric guitar and a bass guitar. He knows how to build a soundboard from scratch, thanks Uncle Gunter. He knows how to yell at his absentee parents until his throat is hoarse. He knows how to drive stick shift. He knows what it’s like to be twenty years old and teaching people his age how to do shit he learned when he was twelve. He knows how to do that without making them hate him for it, too, but he doesn’t know how to be modest. Multiple doctorates just because he could; don’t you dare try to tell him that’s not badass.
He knows how to punch someone without seriously injuring his hand. He knows what it feels like to get punched, repeatedly, in the face, and how much he never wants to break his nose again, ever. He knows how it feels when the chemicals in his brain light his whole body up like fourth of July fireworks; he knows meds are probably better than nothing, but he can’t even begin to count the number of times he’s forgotten to take them.
He knows what it’s like to fuck women until they come hot and wet all over his dick and his fingers, and he knows he’s the perfect height for kneeling, even though he’s not the biggest fan of getting on his knees, and won’t do it for just anyone. He knows how to dissect animals with an uncanny precision, how to preserve a length of a pig’s fragile small intestine as it’s painstakingly drawn from its open abdominal cavity. (He also knows how to jump rope with a pig’s small intestine, but that was one time, never to be repeated.) He knows how to give himself tattoos; it’s a bitch. He knows what it feels like to get tattoos by a steady, professional hand, and that it’s worth the pain.
He knows what it feels like to argue with assholes who treat him like he’s no better than the dogshit on the bottom of their perfectly polished Oxfords. He knows how it is to not want to give that up for anything, because he knows what it’s like to love his job more than his own life. He knows what it's like to wonder what might happen if they don't win. He knows what it's like to feel utterly fucked.
Sometimes, if Hermann’s not careful, he forgets which memories are his and which ones are Newt’s.
He tries so hard to be careful.
Newt is still out cold when Hermann leaves in the morning for West Cambridge. He’d shifted in the night, curled into a ball against the armrest. Hermann rucks up his shirt to check the gauze and Newt doesn’t even stir. He writes a note on graph paper and places it on top of Newt’s thigh for when he wakes up.
Newton—
Do not touch my notes. Do not touch my equipment. Do not answer the phone. DO NOT go outside. You may help yourself to the refrigerator and pantry. Read a book. I’ll return around six o’clock.
A post-grad had asked he if was ill while he'd been crossing campus. You haven't been looking so great these past few weeks, Dr. Gottlieb, and Hermann had lied so easily that it had made him feel less sick, if only for a moment, and he'd limped away without looking back. He spends the day trying not to vomit and has to lean against a wall at three o'clock for ten minutes straight, certain that if he moved even a muscle, he'd fall unconcious. He downs painkillers and tries not to think about it; he comes back home to find that Newt’s motorcycle had been moved next to his bins, parked just out of sight.
He opens the door to his flat. Newt’s leather jacket—Hermann wouldn’t be surprised if it was kaiju hide—is tossed over his armchair. He hears Newt rifling through his kitchen and corners him there, ready to tear him limb from limb.
“I told you not to go out,” he says.
Newt turns. “Your fridge was full of rabbit food, what was I supposed to do?”
“You could have been seen.”
“Yeah, dodged a bullet there.” Newt shrugs. “It's not like they're gonna come in and take me away. You’re welcome, by the way. I got us beer and snacks for the long nights ahead. Sustenance. And a new razor, too, you’re still welcome, your old one was a little dull.”
Hermann bristles. “Excuse me?”
"New food, new razor, not hard to comprehend."
"There will be no long nights ahead."
Newt scoffs. “C’mon, dude, don’t play dumb. We’ve got work to do. Save the world take two.”
“The world does not need any more saving,” Hermann barks, and the air splits with it.
Newt startles and tries not to show it. He leans the small of his back against the kitchen counter and crosses his arms across his chest. Hermann can feel his blood begin to simmer; he's in no mood for a screaming match, but he won't back down from one, either.
“Said nobody, ever. What is wrong with you? Can't you feel them trying to get out? They want to come back, it's just a matter of how long."
(Hermann has felt it. He feels it every time he closes his eyes.)
"I didn’t come here to stare at air molecules all day. We’re not home free, we’re not even close.”
“I see,” Hermann agrees, glacially. “Do remind me, then: why did you come here?”
Newt just looks at him. "What happened to you, man?"
“Answer the question, Newton.”
"No you answer the question, Hermann!"
"Why are you here?"
“Because.”
"Because is not an answer."
"It is now."
Hermann's knuckles whiten. He can feel himself slipping. He and Newt had put themselves over the line more than once, but this is different. He hisses: "You panicked."
“I didn’t panic.”
“You ran.”
Newt doesn’t answer. Hermann’s lip curls.
“Pathetic.”
Newt snarls. “You ran too.”
“I was let go.”
“Bullshit.”
“They required nothing more from me—”
“Bullshit!” Newt shouts. “Oh my God, do you even hear yourself? Do you hear what is coming out of your mouth right now? I watch the news. They get the news in Hong Kong, that’s a thing there. You and I both know the Breach is still a potential problem, they’re not ignoring it, they’re trying to figure it out. You’re the guy they went to. You gave up the chance to help. You’re just lying to yourself like a chump—”
“It's nearly impossible for the Breach to open again in our lifetime—"
“Nearly impossible, so, like, one percent possible—"
“The chances are, by and large, quite infinitesimal—”
“But not nonexistent!”
“I said very nearly—”
“Dude! Why are you ignoring your own math?”
Newt grasps his hair by the roots and pulls, levels his gaze on Hermann like a pistol and squeezes the trigger. “Did you run because I did, or were you running from the Drift? Because I swear to freaking God almighty, Hermann, sometimes I can hear your thoughts so loud it’s like your hands are around my neck.”
A muscle in Hermann’s jaw goes. His skin is alive and thrumming with hate, with heat. He wants to make that come true, to press his thumbs into Newt’s throat. “I did not run. I thought—”
“You thought—”
“I—”
“Yes?”
“—I thought I could get rid of it.”
“You ran.”
“We both ran, you insufferable manchild, and you ran first.”
Newt yells unintelligibly up at the ceiling. “Well, you know what, Hermann? I’m tired of running away. Aren’t you?”
Hermann blinks black spots from his vision.
He is tired.
“Hermann?” Newt leans forward. “Oh, shit. Hermann. You got a little something. On. Your—”
Hermann reaches up to touch his nose. Then he slumps to the floor.
Newt’s face blurs in front of his, smears like water over glass. Hermann feels something dripping onto his face—a streak of red on Newt’s upper lip, Newt’s blood spattering on his cheek tip tip tip—he reaches up to grab vicious hold of the back of Newt’s neck, and then his eyes roll up into his head. Goes into paroxysms and thinks about crawling out of the Breach like it was a birthing canal. Pulsating walls and Emmy coming out of Vanessa and Vanessa a writhing amputated lump of severed flesh. Holes in the seabed, holes like slits like holes in the fabric of spacetime, whole other universes like surging wombs with life inside, whole other universes to be violated and colonized, and you, there, you are there, you are ready like a horse at the starting gate with all your muscles bunched.
“Hermann. Hermann.”
You’re slapping your own face, your fingers are slipping on Hermann’s pulse point, Newt’s fingers cradling Hermann’s jaw on a heap on the floor. Hermann comes back to himself in waves. Newt is saying something; Hermann lets him talk and waits for his muscles to stop spasming. He doesn’t realize his eyes are closed until he opens them and sees Newt above him, his mouth and chin slick with drippy red, his mouth open and his teeth pink. Fresh ring of blood in his eye.
“Stop,” Hermann slurs, clutching at Newt’s arm. “Stop.”
He remembers Newt clutching at him the same way two and a half years ago. Newt lays his cheek to the crown of Hermann’s head and holds him. “I can’t stop,” he says, tips of his fingers bright points of pressure on Hermann’s skull.
Five minutes resting there. Newt helps him to his feet.
Hermann dabs the crusty blood from his face with a hand towel and throws his shirt and jumper into the trash. He doesn't speak to Newt for the rest of the night, and Newt doesn't try him.
Wednesday.
“I can do this myself, you know.”
Hermann slaps Newt's hand away.
“What you can’t be trusted to do yourself numbers in the many thousands,” he mutters waspishly, stripping off the tape holding the gauze to Newt’s skin. He inspects the scab and the loose stitches, pushing his thumb gently against the pink of the wound. At least Newt had been careful with himself when he’d gone out.
He reaches for the first-aid kit and Newt watches him.
“So... are we gonna, you know,” Newt motions between the two of them, “talk at all?”
“I can’t imagine what about.”
“You can’t imagine a lot of shit, Hermann, but I’m pretty sure you know what I mean.”
Hermann applies the salve with his fingers this time. Newt’s stomach twitches under them, the muscles fluttering. “No, we are not going to talk about it.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Absolutely not.”
Newt seems to relax. “Well,” he says, “that’s a relief.”
Hermann frowns down at where the pads of his antibiotic cream-slicked fingers are sliding against the healing gash in Newt’s side. Newt leans his head back like he’s about to drift off; Hermann can’t see the furrow in his brow, but he knows it’s there, just like he knows Newt’s knee is about two seconds from starting up an involuntary nervous jitter. He reaches for a fresh pad of gauze and does not look at the way the cords in Newt’s neck tense up when he takes his hands away.
Hermann shudders awake in the middle of the night.
The bedsheets rustle. Hermann doesn’t pretend to be asleep, but he keeps his eyes closed. He jerks as Newt’s cold thighs brush the backs of his bare knees, his skin prickling. The touch is gone in a second, but electricity remains, crackling into the marrow of Hermann’s bones. Something behind his sternum slots into place. Newt doesn’t say anything, and Hermann is grateful for that.
They breathe in sync, Newt a heavy weight on Vanessa’s side of the bed. Minutes pass. Hermann drifts back into unconsciousness to the gentle rhythm of Newt’s snores. He dreams of being made.
Six o’clock and Hermann feels breath on the nape of his neck. Six-thirty and a hot palm on his hip, a line of heat against his spine. Six forty-five and he rolls out bed, away from the bed, into the shower, turns it cold. Bares his teeth at the sting, uses the chair. Ten minutes under the spray until he’s shivering.
Newt, where Hermann left him. Newt, sprawled, tousled, half-under the duvet. Newt, pretending to be asleep.
Hermann changes into wool trousers and buttons the top button on his shirt.
Before he leaves the room, Newt says, almost conversationally: "There's something really wrong with us."
Hermann pretends not to hear him. He goes to make himself breakfast.
On Thursday, he finds Newt making coffee at four o'clock in the morning.
"Were you aware that you have the shittiest coffee maker known to mankind?" Newt asks. “What is this, like, ten years old?”
Hermann surveys him shrewdly for a moment, leaning heavily on his cane, his other hand shoved deep into the pocket of his faded linen bathrobe. The veins on the backs of Newt’s hands are standing up sharp and blue as he grasps the pot and shoves it under the drip. The muscles in his forearms are tense. Yamarashi seems to move with them, its great maw yawning.
“Newton?”
Newt reaches over. "It's the weirdest shit, Hermann.” He opens the brown sugar, retrieves a spoon from the drawer. “You can get practically anything on the Hong Kong black market—literally, anything—but god forbid you need a fucking benzo.”
Hermann pauses.
“I have some diazepam.”
Newt shoots him a look over his shoulder. You. Diazepam. Hermann scowls.
“Later. I’m making coffee, I’ll ride this out.”
“Well,” Hermann snaps. “Ride it out quietly. Some of us are trying to sleep.”
Newt doesn’t ride it out quietly.
Newt spends the next four days in a state of constant agitation. Newt goes through two of Hermann’s legal pads and tosses crumpled up yellow paper into the garbage and won’t shut up. Newt plays Neue Deutsche Haerte when the silence gets to be too much. Hermann tries to sleep; his mind fills with racing thoughts that aren’t his own, thoughts that fly by too quickly to catch. He feels exhausted by the third day. Newt had slept a total of ten hours out of 72; Newt had caught Hermann’s wrist on his way past him to the living room and squeezed it like a sponge. He had touched Hermann too much. He had bent double over Hermann’s work table and hugged himself with one arm, feeling the scab pull across his ribs. He had laughed too hard at the veins in his own hands.
The last 24 hours are a nightmare. When Newt sleeps, Hermann dreams with technicolor livewires. He watches Newt stitch together ideas onstage, and him, in the wings. Newt doesn’t even need to write them down; he just plucks them out of the atmosphere and pieces them together like repairing broken glass. He thinks about flesh and how to replicate it. DNA strands pulse like twanging guitar strings, like a bundle of neurons. Hermann is ready to rip off his own skin.
“NEWTON!”
No answer. Hermann hobbles over to Newt’s laptop and shuts it with the rubber of his cane, cutting off the music pumping ear-splittingly loud through Newt’s headphones. Newt pushes them off his ears with an indignant shove.
“Hey! What gives?”
“My flat, my rules.” Hermann snaps his fingers next to Newt’s ear. “Look at me.”
“I am looking at you,” Newt says, not looking at him.
“Dr. Geiszler—”
“That is definitely my title and my last name.”
Hermann slams his hand down on the arm of the chair and raises his voice to glass-shattering volume. “Dr. Geiszler, for once in your puerile little life, LISTEN TO ME!”
Newt looks startled and pale and mean and there are smudges under his eyes that look like bruises. “Is this is this the talk you didn’t want to have? This is the talk you didn’t want to have. Here’s an idea: don’t have this talk.”
Hermann smooths his hair away from his damp forehead. “No, I’ve tolerated this for long enough. You—you are going to explain what you have done to me.”
Newt throws up his hands. “Done to you? I haven't done anything to you!”
“You most certainly have—”
“Why is this my fault? How is this my fault, I guess, would be the actual question, since I didn't make you do anything—”
Hermann’s cheek twitches. “I should have never offered to help you, I should have let you suffer the consequences of your witless actions—”
“What? Oh my God, you heartless bastard.” It sounds so light on the surface, but there’s a burning undercut to it, like nails hiding underneath a plastic sheet. “You’re saying you should’ve let me fry my brain? Jesus, you are such an asshole. You knew what you were getting into, don't pretend like you didn't."
Hermann takes a breath and tries to calm himself. It doesn't work.
"Tell me how to fix it."
"How the hell should I know?"
Hermann bares his teeth. "Isn't that your area of expertise? Utter insanity?"
Newt leans back to snarl up at him, looks feral, but doesn't raise his fists. “Fuck you, Hermann.”
“I think I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you,” Hermann spits, spins on his heel before Newt can get the considerable litany of curses out of his mouth and into Hermann’s ears.
Newt uses the sink after him and waits until all the lights are off, waits until Hermann can feign being asleep before sliding into his bed again. This time, Hermann rolls to face him—eyes shuttered—can’t see anything by a lump in the dark, a shadow against the opposite wall. He knows Newt is looking where he thinks Hermann’s face is. Hermann can feel the soft puffs of breath against his cheek and his anger softens. He pulls back a little, and their knees touch.
Newt twitches, presses forward. Hermann’s breath can’t get out his chest—it festers there for a minute, a whole minute of carbon dioxide sitting like a ball of barbed twine in his lungs. He lets Newt nudge his legs apart, lets him slide a knee between them, sets his jaw against the twinge of pain.
Newt stops when the weight of his leg is resting against the meat of Hermann’s inner thigh. The pain settles into a persistent ache. Closer. Newt presses forward again. Hermann tries to relax his muscles and can’t; Newt is too close, Newt is pushing it, Newt is pushing him. Newt’s too-warm fingers on his neck. Newt’s forehead against his, their brains only separated by centimeters of fragile skull and thin flesh, could be so much closer if they cut out little windows in their heads, slippery brain matter touching together like two magnets. Hermann can’t help the full-body shudder; he can hear Newt’s throat click as he swallows, feels Newt’s chest stutter under his t-shirt.
Newt whispers, “Together, that’s what you said. I tried to do this alone for two years and I can’t.”
Hermann isn't sure what makes him say it.
"No more running," he murmurs, and Newt says, "I know how to fix it."
They breathe together for a while and Hermann waits for the other shoe to drop. It doesn’t. He closes his eyes and exhales through his nose, closes his eyes and doesn’t think. This is right. This is right. We can’t stop. Maybe we can slow down. He doesn’t remember falling asleep.
He wakes up with his hips canted up against Newt’s thigh. He is surrounded by heat, a furnace of it, realizes Newt is curled into him like a dog, arm flung over his neck, lips against Hermann’s collarbone. The stick of saliva against his skin, the sweat of proximity. He stares at a point beyond Newt’s freckled shoulder, stares at the beams of sunlight sweeping down through cracks in the shades, stares up the Throat and into the ocean. He tries to disentangle himself and feels Newt’s hips push against his, feels him hard against his belly. Newt stirs and groans and the line of his shoulders goes taut; Hermann pulls away.
Newt rolls over without looking at him.
Hermann takes a shower. Feels at home in the water. Thinks about undulating upward, about Newt in his bed with his boxer shorts tented. He comes hard into his fist after seventeen slow, shaky strokes, leaning heavily against the wet tile.
Newt is the one who makes the call.
Hermann needles him relentlessly for it, digs his heels in and snaps and shouts no, this is terrible idea, but Newt slings an arm around his shoulders and tells him to shut up, no more running, you said, we’re not running, and Hermann lets himself be dragged behind Newt’s relentless eighteen-wheeler tenacity. They set up an appointment with Arlington HQ and fly to America the next day to do the tests. A flash hotel room in DC for the weekend and Newt wants to trash the place like Manson when they get there, but Hermann turns in early, spews a catalog of petty complaints, and refuses to allow room service.
Two beds, but they use one. They press their foreheads together in the dark and don't shake.
The next morning, Caitlin Lightcap is shaking their hands in the foyer of the NCDR’s primary research facility. She takes them up past security to the examination room herself, and it’s like stepping directly into a Conn-Pod. Hermann remembers all his model airplane kits, all his childhood dreams of becoming a pilot. Then, the bitter acceptance that he never would. This doesn’t make up for it, doesn’t even come close, but it’s cool salve on an old burn. Hermann is willing to pretend. Just for a fractured nanosecond.
There are a few differences. No suits, no HUDs, no external controls. Lightcap has them sign waiver forms and NDAs and helps buckle them into the machinery. She lowers the modified Pons to their skulls and Hermann fights back the nausea. “I’ll be with a team of neurologists watching the recording in the adjacent room,” she says. “We’re going to perform what we call a hemi-Drift. Your brain activity will be monitored in tandem to check for irregularities and shared at the lowest possible scale. No memories, no matrix overlay. Try to get comfortable.” She switches on the equipment and leaves them alone in the chamber. Hermann adjusts his weight on his leg and tries to prepare himself.
Newt grins over at him. “You comfy?”
“Hardly.”
The intercom crackles on. A tinny female voice echoes throughout the chamber. “Stay very still, please. Any movement may alter our results. Initiating hemi-Drift sequence in three, two...”
Whump whump whump. The machines thrum to life. Hermann is reminded of MRIs and tight, enclosed spaces. Eye exams and fitness tests and physical therapy and university applications. He closes his eyes. It will be over soon.
Whump whump whump whump a heartbeat in the deep, two heartbeats in sync. A sudden pulse of eagerness floods through him, every nerve sizzling with awareness. Newt beside him in a skinny white tie and skinny black jeans. This time feels different. Whump whump a giant rending in the electrical sky above him and a roar of parting water as he propels himself between molecules, as he’s shoved to all fours in a shitty underground bunker in Hong Kong. You can feel it coming for you, you can feel yourself going to him, you can FEEL HIM TINY ORGANIC STRUCTURE SO BREAKABLE MEAT AND BONE CRUSH HIM
“Dr. Geiszler, Dr. Gottlieb, are you feeling all right?”
Someone in the background says holy shit.
“Yes,” Newt grits out. Hermann doesn’t answer his Throat is dry he wants to SWALLOW HIM EAT HIM OPEN UP OPEN scrambling away in the dark looking for your glasses—
“The electrical activity in both of your brains is dangerously high, we’re seeing sharp waveforms—” Same guy says they’re seizing, Lightcap comes back on the intercom. “We’re seeing abnormal epileptiform activity, that means you should be experiencing a seizure.”
“We’re fine,” Newt hisses. “Keep going, keep it going. Hermann?”
Hermann can’t speak. His tongue feels leaden in his mouth. He is in in the ruins of Tokyo looking down at little Mako. He is going to get her. He is going to spear her right through the middle and cleave her small body in two.
A different voice, masculine: “We’re going to try and stabilize you two with a neural handshake. Hang tight.”
“Oh God,” Newt says to Hermann’s right. “Oh God.”
“In three, two—”
A black hole opens in Hermann’s mind and sucks him over the event horizon.
Newt’s newest memories slam into him like oncoming traffic. Don’t hang on, Hermann remembers. Just let go. He steps into the slipstream and doesn’t scrabble his fingers against the walls and welcomes Newt’s mind into himself one more time.
Leaving, running. Going somewhere else. Hannibal Chau yelling, Hannibal Chau not dead. Hannibal Chau directing tanks of preserved organs, and you, surrounded by non-government confiscated bits of your babies. You can almost pretend they’re still out there. Another tattoo, top of of your neck so it’ll peek out from under your collar, Otachi’s tongue. You got her baby on your thigh. Dreaming about the dead unborn fetus, vomiting in the dirty toilets without anyone there to put a hand on your back. Dreaming about the kaiju, always, dreaming about his daughter Emmy. Hannibal upping his prices and running out of product. You, plucking at the specimens until they’re all sold. Thinking about him. The bone powder almost gone, Hannibal grabbing your skull and kissing it, there’s a Kaiju-touched gold mine in there, don’t have no use for a biologist with nothing to study anyway, a man’s gotta make a living somehow. A knife grazing your side, bruises all up and down your arms. You, running the hell away, what were you thinking, working for people like that? A boat across the Pacific to the only person you trust, got his new digs from the website, don’t go near crowded places else they’ll try and cut your brain out again. His thin hands on you, his hands all over you in your dreams, your hand on yourself in reality. Shouting match and bleeding noses and fuck, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. Work work work work work breakthrough like popping a bottle of champagne and you’re both so fucked up, aren’t you, but you made it this far, and you made it together, and pieces form the whole. You make a phone call.
Hermann drops back into himself and feels Newt right there with him.
“Neural handshake complete,” a faraway voice says. “Beta waves normal, holding steady. Hemispheres in complete agreement.”
Later, when they’re sat at a table in a small waiting room somewhere, hands shaking around styrofoam cups of bland coffee, Hermann checks his watch. Half-hour long Drift, and during it, an absolute calm. It had felt like more than that—like he’d been adrift in a nameless sea for hours, or like he had been the sea, a shifting mass of tranquility. Hermann remembers their first Drift, the pain and the sickness that had come with it, and thinks—no, that’s never how it was supposed to go, and hates it.
Lightcap comes out of her office with their results and sits down with them. Newt abruptly asks for the Nobel Prize diploma he’d seen himself awarded in Hermann’s head, the one he never managed to pick up. Lightcap laughs. “I’ll phone the committee,” she promises. Slides them printouts of their recordings. “These copies are yours to keep.”
Hermann flips open the folder. Lightcap taps her finger on a mountainous wavelength. “Odd thing was, you were perfectly in sync before you Drifted, but you weren’t in sync with each other.”
“The hivemind,” Newt says, and immediately takes an inadvisably large sip of coffee.
“Drifting with each other—and only each other—seems to have considerably balanced your brain activity. No human will ever be Drift compatible with a kaiju, I’m surprised you two were even able to initiate a triple Drift without killing yourselves, so there’s some... neurological scarring, so to speak. I doubt you’ll ever get rid of the hivemind, but it should no longer cause any adverse health problems. My suggestion is to keep close proximity to each other for as long as possible. Physical distance only worsens the Drift side-effects, and from what I hear, you two have only been exacerbating the problem.”
Newt, to his credit, looks only vaguely guilty. Hermann restrains himself from a cutting comment.
“Any more nosebleeds or blackouts, call in. We’ll take a look at you. Otherwise, gentlemen—” Lightcap rises and shakes their hands. “Take care.”
Someone snaps a blurry photo of Newt and Hermann as they exit the Lightcap Building, exhausted and pale, but Hermann can’t bring himself to care.
Back at their hotel, he makes Newt sit on the lid of the toilet and kneels carefully on the bath mat. Newt had been doing his own dressings recently, but he lets Hermann shove up the hem of his shirt and peel away the gauze and palpate the wound slightly. The skin has sealed up and closed and the laceration is a long red line, and the streaks of ink on either side of it don’t line up perfectly. He touches it again and the muscles in Newt’s thighs jump. “Hermann—about earlier—”
Hermann’s long-fingered hand creeps down until the heel of his palm is against the buckle of Newt’s belt.
“Okay,” Newt says. “Or forget about earlier.”
Hermann thinks sod it, the world might end for the second time before he’s forty. He leans forward to mouth at Newt’s erection though the seam of his skinny jeans and Newt jerks against him, his guttural whine echoing in the too-large bathroom. He plants his heels wide. “Oh Jesus.” Hermann undoes Newt’s fly with precise hands and puts his lips and tongue to feverish skin. Newt touches the buzzed hairs on the back of Hermann’s neck, the hollow of Hermann’s cheek where his cock is pushing against it. He comes with a shudder.
Hermann struggles to his feet to spit in the sink. Wipes his mouth with the handkerchief in his back pocket and leaves Newt sprawled in a daze with his cock still poking pink and wet out of his trousers. Later, when Hermann slides into the hotel room bed, he lets Newt fuck him on his good side, coming into Newt's fist with a muffled shout, teeth catching on the fabric of the pillow.
When they press their foreheads together, Newt leans in the last inch and kisses him, slow and gentle and bright. Hermann has never before hated a human being so much that he loved them, completely and overpoweringly, but any good mathematician knows to make room for firsts.
Hermann turns thirty-nine that year.
Nights are still bad, but they’re muted now, covered with a embryonic film of suppression. He and Newt are unable to sleep separately. There are no more nosebleeds, no more blood in the sclera. No more convulsions in the dark with nobody there to soothe the shakes. You still dream together, the two of you, not sure who is who and not caring. Above your heads the Throat is closed and you’re yearning to peel it open. Not yet, not yet, but you need, and you need, and you're ready.
Hermann catches himself thinking about what it would be like to open up his own ribs like a long-toothed maw and welcome Newt inside, store him right in his abdominal cavity like an extra organ. Newt touches the ridges of his own ribs and Hermann knows he’s thought the same thing. There's only so close two people can get without opening up their skin for each other. Hermann wonders what his breaking point will be, or if he no longer has one.