Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The world changed, and Hermann Gottlieb changed with it. 

After they’d cancelled the apocalypse, things didn’t go back to normal. No, there would never be normal again, never a world like that before K-Day, and there would never be a world like that from the years between K-Day and Operation Pitfall.

But that was okay, because Hermann was used to picking up the pieces left behind in the wake of disaster. He was an expert at getting up, moving on, and not looking back.

Hermann knew that some pieces would be left over from before, if not always then at least for the foreseeable future: the massive Kaiju corpses littering the coastlines up and down the Pacific, the now permanently decommissioned Jaegers, and, of course, the nightmares he and Newton Geiszler shared.

Those nightmares - of the world on the other side of the Breach, of the Kaiju brain they’d drifted with, of the worst memories each of them had - were not the only thing he and Newton shared. They still shared a lab, but not in the Shatterdome anymore, and their research had less of an urgency to it and more of a carefulness, a genuine curiosity - a side effect of hindsight, and of not having to constantly look over your shoulder. And, they were considering sharing a PPDC-owned apartment, but neither of them was sure where they wanted to go with that notion yet, because they also shared enough thoughts and memories that they knew that could easily lead to more than they were ready for.

So they shared nearly every aspect of life except for those which remained within the home and within the heart, and even though things would never go back to normal, they had reached a new equilibrium at which they were content.

Hermann was not a chemist or a physicist, but he knew enough about the subjects to know that a system at equilibrium will have to keep changing, keep reaching new equilibriums, every time a new stressor is introduced. If Hermann and Newton’s relationship was a system, then it couldn’t move throughout life without new stressors coming in every once in a while, and if that were the case, then it certainly couldn’t stay the same forever.

This time, the stressor came in the form of an alien. Or, more precisely, a multitude of aliens.

If you asked Hermann, the alien containment aquarium was a mistake.

It was a refurbished storage room by their lab, filled with tanks all reinforced glass and steel and just like the standing tanks they kept the Kaiju parts in, except with fewer deadly chemicals and less of a yellow tint to the water.

Also, the things in the alien containment tanks were still alive, and most of them didn’t seem to be too happy about their predicament, or at least that’s how it seemed to Hermann. He was a mathematician, though, so he could only say so much.

Newt, on the other hand, five feet seven inches of manic energy and anxiety, the interdisciplinary man who specialized in xenobiology, insisted that the tank was fine, really not much more than a normal aquarium. 

“Yes,” Hermann had said, “because normal aquariums absolutely contain mutant fish we know next to nothing about.”

“Hermann, have you ever been to Woods Hole? It’s in Massachusetts. I used to work at the institute there, and they had this wicked huge aquarium,” Newt had replied, removing one arm from a neon blue gland of some sort to gesture wildly with his gloved hand. “A whole bunch of tanks, and they all had fish, plants, invertebrates, all the weird and cool stuff they found down in the deep blue Atlantic. This was a couple years before K-Day, alright, man? Half of these things had never been classified before.”

“Yes, but those creatures evolved on Earth, not in another universe.”

“So did these,” Newt had fired back at Hermann without even a touch of malice, nodding towards a blueprint of the containment tank (Newt had designed it himself, with Hermann helping far more than he would have liked to admit) tacked onto a wall side-by-side with photos of some of the choice alien specimens in the tank. “They just got mutated by the chemicals the Kaiju released into the Pacific Ocean. It’s kinda like the wolves in Chernobyl, d’you know about them?”

“I know about the wolves in Chernobyl,” Hermann had deadpanned back at Newt, sighing. He already knew where this was going, and as much as he hated to admit it, Newt was right, more or less. According to him, the cause of the mutations was the Kaiju Blue―the Kaiju blood, basically―and it had mostly dissipated like radiation after the breach was closed. It had also only affected a portion of the population of each species in its range, and seemed to have changed those creatures who didn't immediately die from its effects drastically enough to have jumpstarted the process of speciation in many of them, letting them split off from the rest of their original species.

And Newt had grinned, a fascinated glint in his green eyes, and Hermann had let Newt's words wash over him as the biologist ranted about how these new subspecies―or were they entirely new species?―would add so much to the theory of evolution and would change all the ecosystems they came from, but also how hardly any of them had established populations in the Atlantic Ocean and that had new implications for breeding and biodiversity and so on. Hermann wouldn’t admit it, but he actually thought this was fascinating despite only understanding bits and pieces of it. Some part of him wanted to join Newt on those weekly expeditions out into the ocean to take samples and to listen, forever, and some part of him also wanted to keep putting up his walls. Although, the mutant version of the electric eel was terrifying, and that was a point Hermann refused to have his mind changed about.

Eventually, Hermann started to grow used to the aquarium’s constant presence in his life, and the gradual replacement of preserved Kaiju organs on Newt’s side of the lab with live (or at least substantially fresher) specimens of various flora and fauna. It was far safer than dealing with the Kaiju, that was for sure. He even started to accompany his lab partner on expeditions to various beaches, out on boats, a submarine once, everything but the scuba diving. Hermann wasn’t sure he wanted to risk scuba diving with his conditions (there were two things, to be exact, but Newt only needed to know about one of them right now and probably ever).

On one such trip, the two of them had been dropped off at a remote, slightly rocky beach, not too difficult to navigate but also not quite idyllic enough to be a vacation destination.

Then again, barely any part of the Pacific Rim had been much of a vacation destination since before K-Day, and the beaches would probably be empty for a while still.

Today, the sky was grey with a slight bit of sun poking through the cloud cover, and the air was warm, like a rather dreary greenhouse. The beach was empty save for Newt, lugging a bag of his field equipment, and Hermann, limping along somewhat stiffly with a field notebook and a small volume of a mathematics journal in one hand. 

Newt had switched out his usual outfit for what was essentially the warm-weather version: a hideous short-sleeved black button-up with little red dinosaurs in the style of Jurassic Park patterned on it, black cargo shorts, and his beat-up hiking boots. Hermann, of course, was dressed in his usual outfit with the only modification being that he‘d replaced his usual loafers with shoes more suitable for this excursion: slacks, dark button-down, sweater vest. One thing he’d learned over the years was that vests were very, very effective at hiding any abnormalities in one’s chest size, effectively slimming down and flattening the wearer’s appearance. Which Newt didn’t need to know about. 

The two of them reached a section of the beach that was covered in flotsam―driftwood, seaweed, bones, more trash than was advisable, but hey, humans never really had the best self-preservation and this was near a densely populated area―and Newt dropped his backpack on the sand and squatted to start setting up. Just a little further down the beach was a rocky area―Hermann already resigned himself to the fact that he wouldn’t be able to accompany Newt over there―that appeared to contain tidal pools and a healthy colony of barnacles, and Newt immediately pointed it out as his next destination.

“Alright,” he said as he laid down a small tarp, weighted the corners with some rocks, and began to lay out sample jars and other equipment. “Unless we find something really cool, we’re just collecting small stuff today. Mostly plants. I’ve got an old field guide on my tablet so we can compare anything we find to the last known versions of species found here, and I put together a rudimentary guide to everything we’ve logged so far. No need to mess up the environment by taking more samples than we need.”

Hermann seated himself on a large rock and opened the field notebook. “Alright. I suppose you’d like me to make a log of everything we collect?” 

“Yeah, Herms, that’d be great, thanks,” Newt said absentmindedly as he put on a pair of nitrile gloves and picked up what appeared to be a comically large set of pliers. This was followed by normal-size pliers, jewelry pliers, and numerous ziploc bags; how Newton had acquired all this and everything else in his bag, Hermann wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Even in the aftermath of Operation Pitfall, Hong Kong―and East Asia as a whole―still had heavy rebuilding to do, and sometimes it really just wasn’t worth it to order expensive scientific equipment from inland Europe and wait for it to be flown in. 

Although, as long as Hermann could still have a good supply of decent food, tea, and his hormones, he didn’t really mind. And so he sat on the rock, letting the warm ocean breeze and the smell of salt wash over him, watching Newt carefully pluck neon blue kelp and other strange items out of the debris the tide had washed in. Sometimes, Newt would find trash and bag it like the millennial treehugger he was (not that Hermann was complaining, he wasn’t above that either), and as he trekked between piles of flotsam and his little tarp setup, he would call out the names or approximate descriptions of the things he found, and Hermann would jot everything down in the notebook in his cramped, immaculate writing.

Eventually, the second, smaller bag that Newt had pulled out of his big bag and opened up was full of glass canisters, wet and sandy Ziploc bags, and other things Newt had collected. Hermann had filled up nearly four pages in the pocket-sized notebook, and his hand was beginning to get a bit cramped. Newt made his way back to the tarp, cleared a space to sit, and laid down with his arms crossed behind his head.

“That was good,” he said. He rolled over, getting sand all over his bare legs and in his hair in the process, and tugged a water bottle out of his bag. “You want some?” he asked Hermann after taking a hearty swig, and Hermann snorted. “Not with your spit on that bottle. You’ve probably got all kinds of Kaiju diseases.”

Newt gasped in mock offense, wiping the rim of the bottle on his shirt. “Come on, Herms, buddy! Why would you say that?”

Hermann rolled his eyes and gave in, taking the bottle from Newt. “Fine, but I’m only doing this because I’m dehydrated and sweating bullets.” He wasn’t sure whether he was trying to convince Newt or himself of that.

Newt cracked his neck and undid the top button of his shirt, exposing a smidge of the colorful tattoos that undoubtedly stretched all the way up to the base of his neck―Hermann had never seen anything past his arms. “Then take your shirt off, or at least that stupid sweater vest. I dunno why you even wear those things, because a, they make you look like a grandpa, and b, they’ve gotta be hot as all hell.”

“This is coming from the man who wore a denim vest for his entire undergrad degree when the weather allowed it. You showed me the pictures yourself.”

“Dude, I was a teenager for, like, three-quarters of that. I was allowed to have bad fashion taste. You’re thirty-six.”

The sun peeked out from behind the clouds just then, and Hermann had to admit that it was beautiful, but mein Gott it was hot. Newton was, scientifically speaking, correct: it would be prudent for Hermann to take off a layer or two before they made the trek back to where Newt had parked the beat-up Jeep he’d bullied someone at PPDC into letting him borrow.

“I am not taking off my shirt, Doctor Geiszler.”

“Not even the vest? The grandpa vest?” Or you could wear just the vest and no shirt, that’d be a whole-ass look.”

“No!” Hermann snapped, and instantly felt a pang in his chest as Newton recoiled a little.

“Sorry, man,” Newt tried. He looked at the ground for a moment. “I’m not going to press, if you have any, like, personal reasons or anything, but you don’t have to be insecure around me. If it’s about like, body image or something. I dunno. Like, I’m pretty chubby, so I get it. That’s none of my business anyways. And I, I guess I...” His voice was starting to raise in pitch and volume.

“Newton―“

Newt stood suddenly, spraying sand everywhere. “You know what, forget I said anything, okay? Nevermind!” He laughed, and it sounded so forced that Hermann wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he said what he was going to say. Or until Hermann felt comfortable enough to say what he wanted to say. Hermann silently capped the water bottle and leaned down to set it on the tarp as Newt hurriedly packed up the rest of his things with jerky, tense movements. 

They didn’t talk to each other the whole way back to the Jeep, or the ride back to the Shatterdome, or when Hermann left the lab before dinner to go to his room.

Chapter Text

The clock read 22:34 and the heavy guitar from the mix of demonic sludge “music” that Newt was blasting was starting to blur together as he feverishly worked to make sure all of his samples went where they belonged: in safe containment tanks or in a fridge until he had more time to figure out a situation for them. Even though it was mostly plants and invertebrates, Newt still didn’t want anything dying or rotting on him, because that would mean another trip to the beach and he was limiting himself to two a week maximum and also he didn’t want to bother Hermann to go collect more of the same stuff. 

Speaking of Hermann…

Newt peeled off his gloves and shut off the music from his vintage iPhone―heavily modded to still be functioning so long after he’d bought it, and it was one of the last models Apple made before they had to cease production when most of their factories in China got destroyed by the Kaiju―and his ears almost rung with the silence. 

“ Scheiße ,” he said to himself, because he had the whole lab to himself and Hermann was not there to throw a book at him. And then, “ 他妈的 ,” in the spirit of being able to say something Hermann wouldn’t understand. Just because. He wondered if Hermann had thought Newt hadn’t seen him slip out unusually early, and then Newt felt bad about that. He felt bad about earlier, too. He’d almost outed himself, and it had looked like he was on the verge of getting some terrifying secret about Hermann’s battle scars or something before Newt had shut himself up. 

Oh, right, and he had originally been thinking of Hermann because he realized that Hermann still had the fucking field notebook on him or had maybe left it on his side of the lab (yes, they still split their lab in two like the stubborn idiots they were), but there was no way Newt was going to go digging around in Hermann’s stuff; no matter how much he really didn’t want to deal with the other man right now, seeing him face-to-face now would definitely be preferable to facing his wrath if Newt messed up his stuff. Newt rubbed his temples, tried to remember if he’d taken his meds this morning (he had) and when the last time he’d eaten was (around noon) and when he next needed to give himself a T shot (in two days).

He decided to just go to bed. He could sleep almost anything off, and he’d deal with this in the morning.

Going to sleep lasted for approximately four blissful hours, and then the ghost drift took ahold of Newt, and he immediately sensed that Hermann was seeing the same blue-tinged dream he was. It was some of the same things they always saw, the things they saw the first time they drifted―the hivemind, the Breach, bits and pieces of their respective childhoods―but this time there was something else pressing at the front of Newt’s mind, urging him to open up and let his secret out. 

People who are drift compatible don’t keep secrets from each other; they can’t. It eats them up until it starts to hurt the other person, and it can break them both , he remembered Marshal Pentecost telling him when he’d asked, years ago, about the psychological and social impacts of drifting.

It’s been too long , Newt decided, thought vividly, and he turned Pentecost’s words over in his mind like a candy rolling around on his tongue. He let his mind go to ocean-colored memories of denim-vest-clad Newt in college, and then back before that―to high school senior Newt who was the youngest in his grade and had switched schools to start hormones and because of the bullying when he came out, and then forward again to fresh-out-of-high-school Newt who was young to be going to college and young to be getting his top surgery, and then to K-Day, when he got the first Kaiju painted on his body and the tattoo artist had rolled up their sleeve to show a tattoo of the symbol that meant transgender , colored just like the flag, and Newt had gone back to that same parlor for every single tattoo since. 

And then Newt saw someone else injecting themself with a needle from a bottle labeled testosterone , and that same someone with a binder pulled over their pale, tattoo-free shoulders, and it looked suspiciously like Hermann but that was impossible, it couldn’t be real, and maybe he was mixing up his memories with Hermann’s? 

Confusion swelled up in Newt’s chest and turned to fear as he saw the kaiju storming Hong Kong, and Hermann’s calculations predicting a triple event, and the one time in both of their lives that they’d been angry their theories turned out to be right, and then Newt snapped awake. It was two in the morning, and he was already forgetting parts of the dream, but that last bit stayed with him, even more so than the kaiju and the things that usually scared him, and he found himself getting out of bed, finding his glasses, and putting on an old T-shirt― Jurassic Park , of course―so he wasn’t just wearing his suspiciously flat and baggy boxers (he would normally cover his obvious lack of a dick with sweatpants, but he had a feeling that that wasn’t going to matter in a few minutes).

When he came to Hermann’s door, Hermann opened on the second knock. His eyes were red-rimmed as if he’d been crying, and he looked more than a little unsettled.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Newton,” he snapped, looking like he very much wanted to talk about it but was scared of the outcome. Newt could relate, so he stepped forward, Hermann’s tall and scrawny matching-silk-pajamas-clad frame looming over him like some kind of angry tree frog. 

“What part of it? I was the one bringing new memories into the drift.”

“You what ?” Hermann said, tilting his head in confusion. “I was under the impression that I was projecting my own memories onto you.”

“Wait, hold on, after I shared my memories, I thought I was projecting onto you .”

They stared at each other in confusion, definitely not on the same page.

Hermann finally sighed, and stepped aside. “Come in, Newton. It seems we have a great deal to talk about.”

Newt unceremoniously flopped down on Hermann’s bed and was met with a brief annoyed stare as Hermann sat down stiffly in his desk chair and glared menacingly at Newt over the rims of his glasses. Newt narrowed his eyes and glared back. “I am so fucking confused right now, Hermann.”

Hermann sighed again and waved his hand in the air in a gesture of resignment. “That makes two of us.”

They lapsed back into that uncomfortable silence, both of them debating whether to speak or not, and Newt, always the ballsy and impulsive one, decided to speak first.

“Pentecost told me, back when I first joined PPDC, that drift partners can’t keep secrets, because it hurts both of them and it can seriously mess up drift compatibility.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that before. Drift science isn’t my specialty, but I suppose it makes sense.” Hermann crossed his arms.

“And I realized after yesterday that I’ve been keeping a big secret from you for too long.”

“Newton, our drift was unique. We drifted with a kaiju, which is now dead, and we only did it once.”

“Yeah, and clearly it’s still affecting us, because we’ve both been having shared nightmares and memories and all the usual stuff.”

“Fine. Continue.”

“My point is,” Newt started, “when I was talking about you taking your shirt off I didn’t want to pry, so I stopped, but then it made me think about my secret, and I decided you should know so I tried to share it through the ghost drift, but then I saw my memories, except they were yours. Does that make any sense?”

Hermann tilted his head. “Vaguely. You thought you were projecting your memories onto my body, perhaps? That’s probably possible, from what I’ve heard―and experienced―about the blurring of identity and sense of self between drift partners.” There was a certain tension in his voice, like he was walking a tightrope trying to avoid saying something particular.

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but this was different. More vivid. But my memories were so... specific , they had to be mine alone unless…”

“Newton, I was trying to share something in the dream as well. And when I saw your memories, I thought the same thing, that I was projecting onto you. But if I may be so bold, we may have more in common than either of us have thought.” He said the last part so softly, it changed Newt’s mind about everything, and he gave up trying to skirt around secrets.

No more hiding , Newt thought.

He stood up slowly. Put his hands on the neckline of his shirt. Looked Hermann in the eyes. “If I’m wrong about this, please just...don’t let it change anything.”

Hermann didn’t break eye contact, didn’t say anything, didn’t indicate that Newt should stop.

Newt pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor. Standing in front of Hermann like this, he felt naked, exposed, and not just because he was almost naked. 

Newt was sharing something about himself that he hadn’t shared with anyone in years. The folks at medical knew, Marshal Pentecost had known, Mako had been bound to find out eventually with all the time he had spent more or less babysitting her, but that was it.

“You good, Hermann?” Newt asked slowly, carefully, and Hermann’s gaze went down to Newt’s chest, to the scars visible through his tattoos―he’d asked his tattoo artist to make it that way, because he hadn’t wanted to hide any more than he already was, and they’d known exactly what he meant―and then back up to Newt’s eyes. 

Hermann stood too, and pulled down the neckline of his own shirt, just enough to show a tight sports bra constricting his chest. And now that Newt knew what to look for, he could make out the faint outline of the bra beneath Hermann’s probably custom-fitted sleep shirt, he could see the slight protrusion of Hermann’s chest.

This would change everything.

They stared at each other in silence for a few more seconds, Hermann’s arms back at his sides, and then Newt stepped forward and pulled the other man into a hug.

“Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me this, Newton. It truly means a lot,” Hermann said softly into Newt’s shoulder, sending a chill down his spine. 

Newt swallowed. “Nah, dude, I should be saying that to you,” he said as he pulled away from Hermann. “You know, when we get out of here, we should go to Boston. It’s great, lots of academic types, and the Atlantic Ocean barely got touched by the whole Kaiju mess. I could find you a top surgeon there, if you wanted. Mine’s still probably there.”

Hermann was silent for just long enough that Newt wondered if he’d overstepped his boundaries, but then he nodded and smiled softly at Newt. “You would do that for me?”

Newt started to laugh as Hermann spoke again. 

“You would do that with me?” they both said at the same time, Hermann terribly mimicking Newt’s scratchy voice.

“Of course I would,” Newt said, and he pulled Hermann in for another hug.