Archive of Our Own ^beta

The world didn’t end. 

Their world didn’t end.

Hermann pointedly tries not to think about the countless worlds that did. The worlds just like theirs– ones where he was a coward. The ones where he wasn’t but it didn’t matter. The ones where he never even existed at all, or existed so differently as to be insignificant. His eyes drifted with the dust in the air and he thought that maybe they were a singularity, and in that one vertiginous moment when the breach blew, they were the only quantum outcome in which the world didn’t end– and then it all split in infinite little ways from there.

But that’s impossible.

The ever-ticking of the war clock stopped and Newton promptly forgot he was a man quickly approaching middle aged and picked Hermann up and spun him around and hurt his back with an ominous crick . Confetti and glitter in Hermann’s hair. Someone spilt a drink on him but with the state he was in it might’ve honestly made him cleaner. Hermann has his rules about public displays of affection but he supposes rules are made to be broken. Or maybe Newton is just rubbing off on him.

“I fucking adore you, man,” Newt had said, sleep still in his eyes and the weepy wound on his forehead trying to stick to Hermann’s pillow. Hermann felt a little like he could just– float away and burn up in the atmosphere. A falling satellite. Asteroid debris. The drift was almost pliable in the air, a buzzing thing so taut and keen between them, like the string between two cups pulled tight. He could feel the other man’s breath in his lungs so acutely he forgot to breathe himself. He could feel him in the labored, arrhythmic ba-bump in his chest, in the tightness holding in tears of relief. In the throb around his temples and at the base of his skull, the ends of his body and start of his brain. 

He doesn’t remember who kissed who but he does remember that they blurred together at the edges when they did. Strange experience, that. Kissing yourself by proxy. Knowing how your mouth tastes from another person’s perspective. Copper and paraffin swapped for axons and sheaths of myelin relaying thoughts and emotion instead of acoustic energy, vibrations between them. Onion skin of emotion expanding exponentially outwards as it bounces back and forth and back and forth and back and Hermann thinks he might’ve cried. Everything felt so intangible and unreal, then.

It was, he supposes. Intangible and unreal. He knew what they had wouldn’t last forever– he knows that statistically, almost all relationships end in breakups, but the lovestruck fool in him thought for one sweet, naive little moment that maybe they had something different. Something odd-defying. (They’d saved the world together. What could they possibly not overcome after that?)

It lasted 11 months.

They lasted 11 months.

(Not even a year.)

11 months of celebrating the salvation of the human race, being dragged from neurology appointment to tabloid interview to talk show to international press conference and all the while thinking if it would really be all that detrimental to superglue his and Newton’s hands together. Save him having to hold it all the time. Waking up at midday with the other man beside him, hair an absolute mess from the too many harsh chemicals and too much cheap shampoo, eyes hazy and unfocused as they wander across his face and say, quietly, ‘hey’. Whispered I love you’s in to the crook between shoulder and neck. Sly hand touches by water coolers. Newton looking at him with soft, half-lidded eyes while Hermann yells at him about whatever the fuck he’s done wrong this time. It wasn’t just love drunkenness, it was love alcoholism. He was gone. It was perfect. Having Newton in his life like that filled a hole in his head that he didn’t even know was there. (He wonders, often, if the drift is like that for everyone, or if the inclusion of an alien collective consciousness complicated some things.)

Every little anxious cell in his body screamed that it was too good to be true.

He should’ve listened to them.

(Was he not grateful enough?)

They don’t even drift apart. They don’t fall out of love. They have heated disagreements daily, sure, but they don’t fight, not in any justifiably heartbreaking way. Hermann doesn’t know what it is, and if it is something, Hermann doesn’t notice it. (Maybe that’s his problem. Maybe he doesn’t notice). Newton just doesn’t come home, one day. A cold afternoon at the brink of the first holiday season spent without the threat of total planetary destruction looming over them. Hermann doesn't know where he goes but he leaves the same way they met. In the rain and without saying goodbye and breaking Hermann's heart the whole while.

Fool him twice.

He analyzes the months before Newton left over and over and over again like they are an equation and he knows something is wrong but he can't for the life of him work out where. Hermann is no stranger to working late, but when there's late nights to be had and no work to be done, he can't cope. It ruins him, a little. Wears the edges of him down like sand refined in crashing waves. He starts drinking a glass of burning amber anything every night before bed. To help him sleep, he says. To calm his nerves, he says. One turns into two. Two turns into three. Three never turns into four because looking for answers in bottles like they're model ships and drinking himself into blubbering oblivion over a man is not something Hermann fucking Gottlieb will be doing.

The PPDC never officially laid him off, but his duties are still on hold until further notice from the United Nations board so Hermann goes there and he finds work, like he used to before his only goal became 'save the world, no matter what'.

He probably should've been surprised when Mako told him that Newt had left all his remaining specimens behind without so much as a clenched jaw or a curse word. Not even a phone call. Or a goddamned invoice. 

He supposes that makes them his specimens, now.

(How queer.)

His sister tells him– late one night because the 7 hour time difference between Hong Kong and Munich is a hard one to work around– that loss never really gets any smaller, you're he one who gets bigger around it, because she's always been good at spewing that kind of Pinterest-quote bullshit that somehow makes him feel better. He doesn't even tell her that anything's wrong, at first. She just knows, acutely, like she always has with him.

Hermann misses Newton. He misses him like there's an alarm in his head constantly ringing and pinging and screeching out and Newton is the only one with the override key. It was a relatively easy thing for him to come to terms with, missing someone like that– but, when it comes down to it, he can't help but think that his feelings are illegitimate.

He shouldn't be allowed to miss him. To feel like this.

Every time his chest aches with that cold-fire of loss, the thing that burns all of the oxygen in his lungs as fuel, his thoughts drift away. To Mako, to Herc Hansen, to Ranger Becket, to the families and friends of the Kaidonovskys' and the Weis'. To everyone who lost someone to the kaiju. To everyone who lost someone to the crushing pressure of war. And he remembers, that whatever pain he feels is frankly insignificant in comparison to that.

He can't let himself feel it because it just doesn't matter. It's trivial, in the scheme of things.

He should be grateful for what he has.

For what he still has. 

For how little he's lost.

It all just makes him feel worse.

(If he feels this bad, over this little, how could they possibly be feeling?)

A part of his brain went missing the day Newton disappeared and now he can't think in straight lines and some days he can't even think in circles. 

(This is nothing compared to what they've gone through. Are still going through.)

There is a photo in his desk drawer.

It's a photo of his sister's wedding. He's in it, on the very end of the Gottlieb family lineup, all stood back-breakingly straight and black and white like dominoes. He's wearing this awful tie. Blue-on-blue paisely.

He doesn't remember being there, and he doesn't remember picking out that tie. He doesn't own that tie. He never bought it. (He is thankful, at least, to remember the name of Karla's spouse.)

It's a tiny little memory that he's lost. A crayfish stuck in Newton's lobster-trap of a mind. He can feel it there, if he concentrates– because in its place is a song. Opera. A dramatic mezzo-soprano, with downward lilts that make his stomach sink. He's tried to google it, but despite him knowing they're in German he can't make out the words. Maybe he could, once, but the memory is far too old and faded around the edges for him to recall. He's too scared to dig any deeper. He doesn't want to know what else he might be missing.

He doesn't want to find out what else he might've gained.

(He's lived through a war, but he struggles with this? With a bad breakup?)

Hermann's handwriting gets worse. He used to be so proud of it, his ability to hold his hand so steady. Now it's a scrawling chicken scratch thing that slants off to the side. He starts to talk to himself, finds it easier to organize all the thoughts that swirl and bubble inside his head when they're in the air around him, or laid out in front of him. He stops ironing his clothes. Some days he drinks tea for breakfast and coffee for dinner. The scissors behind his ear at the barbershop remind him of the visceral, flesh-wrought Anteverse machines that sewed alien sinew together so he stops going. He starts to fidget and shake his good leg and drum his fingers and it annoys the shit out of him.

He constantly feels like he's forgetting his keys even though he can hear them jangling away in his pocket. 

(Hermann Gottlieb needs to get the fuck over it.)

2026 is the worst. (Or, at least, from the point of view of an outsider looking in, 2026 is the worst. In reality, it's the beginning of a major fall of quite biblical proportions– but the moments leading up to the drop are always the most gut-churning. Hermann gets worse, but he learns to live with being worse, after '26.)

No matter how often he calls, the police haven't found Newton. He calls hospitals and morgues and prisons. It's not that he doesn't trust the man, wherever he is, whatever he's doing, but there's a strange blue fear and a stranger bluer emptiness that hums in the grooves of Hermann's brain. The feeling is both new and terrifying.

He spends the year quietly believing that Newton Geiszler has died. He doesn't voice the thought, no, he doesn't even dare to think the thought. He just lets it brew and broil and he will never fully scrape the black of it off the bottom of his saucepan-skull. He spends the nights mapping the constellations of his stucco ceiling and convincing himself that Newt had fallen victim to a kaiju cultist, or that he'd been knocked off by those black market folks. That he'd slipped in the bath, hit by a car, heart attack– he'd thought Newton had killed himself. Occam's razor, and all that.

The strain of drifting twice with the kaiju collective had simply been too much. Losing his life's purpose had been the cherry on top. He hadn't told Hermann because he didn't want him to worry. He'd left so that Hermann didn't have to see it happen. One last mess that he wouldn't have had to clean up after him. It was the kindest explanation. The most selfish.

Hermann stops doing interviews with whoever wants to throw money and publicity at him and some rumors start spreading like a venereal disease through the particularly cheap or raunchy tabloids. Most of them involve the, unfortunately, very public and very controversial issue of their drift– before, their full scrutiny of what he'd done had been dampened by the fact that they'd just saved the world (and that, when put onto a podium or couch next to Newton, he appeared relatively sound-minded and well-put-together), and pushed most of the wilder and more fantastical theories onto his partner. Now, he can't walk past a magazine display rack without seeing something that makes his mouth taste like stomach acid. The fact that it's all untrue doesn't stop people from talking about it, though. Checking his neglected social media accounts is like navigating a minefield. Even people at the Shatterdome start to lose that sparkle in their eye when they look at him.

Hermann buries himself in his work in lieu of burying himself in anything else. He does all the work he can do towards the mass-manufacturing of Jaegers and their automation– refines the conn-pod down to an in-built AI that can react to limited external stimuli– and then he does all the work that Newton should've done as well. He starts to sleep on the lab couch despite how much his GP would absolutely tell him not to– the apartment is just there to fall back on when he gets ordered to go home. He gets used to the feel of kaiju gut and gunk in his hands, the smell of blue caustic and sharp in his nostrils. He learns how to taper the decomposition of specimens by way of ammonia baths but still messes up the neutralization and burns himself so often that not even his most expensive colognes can hide the fuel-stink of petroleum jelly that sticks to his skin. He'll never be as good as Newton, but he's still the best the PPDC has, for now.

Newton isn't dead.

He hasn't been murdered or struck by lightning or fucking killed himself. His picture is in some paywalled news article and he's clean-shaven and wearing blue-tinted aviators and a suit that looks like it could cost either 10 plus shipping or 10'000 dollars. Hermann will fervently deny having google alerts on for the man's name, expecting an obituary, but he sees the email and drops his spoon into his meager bowl of puffed wheat.

He pays the damn $10.99 to read the article.

Shao Industries.

Independent robotics start-up out of Shanghai. Focus on the development of new Jaeger tech. He's assuming they're using Newton and his self-proclaimed 'rockstar' status as a poster boy because Newton doesn't know shit about Jaeger tech. Maybe that assumption's an incorrect one because Hermann doesn't know shit about xenobiology but he's still the Defense Corps' resident xenobiologist. 

He searches for Shao Industries and calls the number that shows up there without even thinking about what he's going to say. He asks the receptionist– who thankfully answers in English, because Hermann's Mandarin is terrible on a good day– if he can speak to Dr. Geiszler. They say he's busy.

He tells them he's from the PPDC and it's of utmost importance that he speak to Dr. Geiszler.

They say he's busy.

He stresses once again how urgent it is that he be put through to Newton.

The hang-up tone says he's busy.

Hermann doesn't call again.

The nightmares get worse, after that. They were bad before, but Hermann's never remembered his dreams after he wakes. Ever since childhood, he'd wake up in the pitch-black of night, hands gripped so tightly to the bedclothes that he couldn't unclench his fists from the strain– knuckles a mosaic of blotchy red and white, eyes stinging with unshed tears and an ache in his teeth and he'd have no idea why he was so terrified. Just that he was terrified. That he should be terrified.

Hermann wakes with a scream caught by the tail between his teeth and realizes he remembers this one.

He knows how it feels to claw his way out of sopping pools of liquid ammonia and have his skin shuck off and corrode away with it. Silicon rots away with a stench like no stench has ever before stunk and Hermann’s room smells like it always does, like a whole lot of nothing, cucumber and eucalyptus, but it smells so bad that Hermann’s mouth tastes like bile. He sees flashes of dead things, hears single notes of alien screams like they’re keys on a piano, the voice in his ears that is less a voice and more a whirlwind of noise that sets his world spinning in the wake of it. Sharpened click of the biomachine that’s piecing him together like he is nothing but a gun on an assembly line, a killer concoction of pre-made parts. Beep of a heart rate monitor. Children’s strawberry-scented nitrous oxide. Celloweave blankets itchy and uncomfortable under his palms. Needles hitting nerves and not being allowed to shake with the biblical pain of it because they need him to keep still or the lines will come out crooked. He feels himself forming and reforming and becoming something that is not him. 

Cannot be him. 

He will not let it be him. 

He feels himself not being able to think straight because something hidden away in the smallest nooks in the most nondescript wrinkles on the surface of his brain doesn’t want him to think straight.

He has memories of emotion and sensation and sight that are so utterly alien he has no words for them. He’d be better off describing them with a series of guttural sounds than any meaningless string of letters.

Hermann tries to get up, to make a cup of tea and turn all the lights on, close all the curtains, to do anything, but even his good leg doesn’t want to move for him and he sinks himself down to the floor beside the bed without a sound. He wants to cry. He wants to tell himself he’s being ridiculous. It was just a bad dream. How old is he? Too old for this pathetic behavior. It’s not real, it can’t be real, but it felt so real and besides– speech is so far from him that he can’t even remember how.

So, Hermann just sits there and lets the tears run down his face in a bubble of unbroken silence. He clenches and unclenches his aching fists in the ends of the bedsheets on the floor beside him. Breathes in, out. In. Out. Watches his chest rise and fall in the faint street-light and relives the screaming, swirling blue mess of it all over and over and fucking over. 

Thankfully he’s home, rather than in the lab, surrounded by what’s left of those things . He doesn’t quite know what he’d do if he was. He doesn’t think he’d destroy them. He thinks he might do something worse. He doesn’t even know what that could be.

The shutter blinds in his bedroom window clatter together ever so gently with the breeze. If he focuses, he can hear cars outside. Further than that, the faintest hint of an ocean barrage. There are other people, out there, starting and ending commutes, living their night lives, asleep in their beds. They are not him. He is not alone. He is not sitting alone in his little box at the end of the world.

His alarm goes off, eventually, cutting through the gloom and the dust that floats in the streams of hazy blue-grey 5:30 sun and the sound of his heartbeat in his ears. Daylight brings courage, and once Hermann’s got his bearings back about himself and stopped feeling like his teeth don’t fit right in his mouth, he calls in sick. Just this once. They tell him he has literally no obligation to come in today, and that he has near 13 years’ worth of paid leave saved up. They tell him to take a break, but Hermann’s already broken enough.

Safe to say, Hermann doesn’t get over it, but he sure as hell gets used to it. Hermann enjoys routine, even if that routine now primarily consists of waking up with his teeth clenched so hard his gums are bleeding after dreaming about horrors that are only just beyond his comprehension and essentially cyberstalking a man through mentions of his name on Twitter. Hermann adjusts. He starts wearing darker button-ups so the stains from the daily nosebleeds don’t stand out as much. He changes his tea preference to chamomile to try and combat the ever-present, jitter-inducing anxiety and his coffee preference to black triple-shot for the times when he feels like a globular mass of useless electrified meat that can’t move or speak or do anything in any way that matters. (Newton was in his head like a whisk in cream and the physical repercussions make him unable to pretend that he wasn’t). He’s constantly trying to balance his mood like it’s a pH but the only options are 1 or 14 and he just has to bounce between the two to feel any sort of normal, any sort of okay. He doesn’t see doctors or psychiatrists because he doesn’t want to walk out of an office with another diagnosis and a scientific breakthrough about the sharing of mental illness through drift.

This is his new normal. He’s trying his hardest to be normal. To not totally turn into a reclusive freak who never sees the sun. 

He tries to ignore the feeling that he is too small. That his body is pulled taut at his shoulders. Like his skeleton would shift into a different, unrecognizable shape if only he would let it. 

Like he’s a universe in a box.

He tries to ignore that he can hear things, when he perks his ears just right an evening. Things that his brain doesn’t understand but his body does, in the primordial pits of himself. Things that make him want to stick his hand inside that dry and frozen sample of dead kaiju brain that’s in the lab’s walk-in-freezer and rife around in there like there’s something to find that isn’t a whole lot of freeze-artifacted alien neocortex.

He tries to ignore the scalding hot want in his veins to do it again. To drift with one of those awful things again. There is a voice, or maybe an instinct, somewhere deep and primal in the core of him, that tells him the kaiju could be the caulk to fill the little holes in his head. He wants someone to ask him. For research. For science. For mankind. Hermann would never volunteer to do it himself, he just doesn’t have the stones for it– so instead he prays, and he froths at the mouth with want, and he is slack-shittingly terrified that they’ll ask him to do it again.

Do it again, they say in his dreams, a thing shrouded in palest blues, a hollow ghost of Stacker Pentecost’s voice. “Do it again,” they say in the dark, when there’s no-one around to say it but him. He doesn’t want to. He wants so badly. He misses them. He’s never missed anything less. He misses both of them.

Thankfully, Hermann is very good at repression. 

In late 2027, Shao Industries approaches the PPDC with an offer. A remote piloting system for the Jaegers, which are now mostly defunct aside from the occasional coastal patrol or gaudy event. With their technology, the machines could be controlled from anywhere big and capable enough to store the servers (e.g., the Hong Kong Shatterdome, or the Shao headquarters in Shanghai), with minimal prospect for loss of life, and considerably less loss of functionality when compared to full automation. An offer that renders all of Hermann’s hard work these past two years completely irrelevant and an utter waste of research grants.

(Why didn’t he bloody well think of that.)

(It’s like they’re trying to crush his ambitions.)

Liwen Shao herself cuts an imposing figure of angular silk suits and heels with a sharpened click. She exudes an aura of cocksure authority that makes Hermann’s arms twitch with an urge to salute her just on sight. Hermann sees him from behind, that memorized set of his shoulders and curve of his neck up to his ear, and his gut starts to churn like it’s making butter in there. He smells the so-cold-it-burns spearmint stink of the drift in his nose and watches the man prickle with the acute awareness that he’s there. That his eyes are on him.

There is a moment where time, space and everything give way to infectious points of seeping blues. They are almost an emotion. Almost a memory. Almost the feeling of fingertips brushing the back of his knuckles.

And all at once it’s gone, and they’re continuing down the steel and grey hallway towards LOCCENT with only the echo of Shao’s footsteps and a hollow ringing in Hermann’s ears left behind. 

Hermann goes back to the lab he doesn’t share with feathers thoroughly ruffled. He stuffs a tissue up his nose and ignores the very uncharacteristic urge to set all his paperwork on fire and wipe his blackboards clean of what little breach physics remain on them. Instead he makes a cup of chamomile, and counts the bobs of the teabag out to a nice, round number as it steeps. The steam condensates warmly against his cheeks, a memory of hot breath. He braces himself every time someone walks past and triggers the door’s motion sensor, but by the time that they’ve even slid open with that high-pitched metal-on-rubber whine, he knows that it isn’t Newton. The man has no reason to be here.

That said– neither does Hermann, really.

By ‘28, the deal with Shao has progressed, but they’ve yet to fully come to an agreement on something that Hermann isn’t nosy enough to be privy to (but he’s assuming involves many, many zeroes and a dollar sign). Hermann has stopped keeping track of their visits, though the proximity-based drift side-effects do not; it takes every inch left of Hermann’s dignity and self-control to not start plotting his nosebleeds like data points, so he can time a trip down the hall and manufacture an excuse for conversation.

They shake on it in February, though each side surely has their compromises, and by June the Moyulan Shatterdome is built and established as the new base of operations for the PPDC, leaving Hong Kong at the will and whims of Shao’s technology. Hermann doesn’t get a lab in Moyulan. He gets a pokey office next to a lab, that he shares with other people, which he should probably be more grateful for. What remains of the more promising kaiju specimens get shipped off to universities and better-equipped research facilities and Thermo fucking Fisher. They leave him the crumbs, and Hermann feels like that one elderly coworker that refuses to retire– that everyone praises and pats on the back for his hard work and devotion and achievements but they ultimately work around, instead of with. He knows he’s hired out of respect, and nothing else.

Hermann accepts his shitty little out-of-the-way office with a smile and a nod and not a single complaint. He’s lucky to have it, after all.

He’s unpacking his meager few boxes (which contain startlingly more kaiju figurines than he ever saw himself becoming the de facto owner of), when Newton walks in.

(He didn’t even feel him coming. No bloody nose, no headache, no burst capillaries in his eyes. No weird, floaty feelings like he is a clump of collagen fibers floating in vitreous humor. No vision blue-outs. No freezer-burn smell. Nothing.)

“Hey, Hermann!” the man says, chipper as ever. He’s perched just so that the automatic door’s sensors go haywire, unable to work out if someone’s there. The thing half-closes and half-opens over and over with an awful, squelch-screeching racket.

Hermann drops the mug he was holding and curses under his breath and it shatters into a hundred tiny, off-white pieces at his feet. He supposes he should be glad it was only the one he uses to hold stationery, rather than the half-full one of tea he’d just set down. He reaches out and braces himself awkwardly against the counter behind him, cane just out of reach across the sea of ceramic white-caps. He swallows. Heartbeat, one, two, three, four. “Newton,” he says back, more of a breath out than anything.

“Long time no see! How’ve you been?”

Hermann just stares, wide-eyed, at him, unable to think of a way he could even possibly begin to answer that question within the limited timeframe of awkward small talk. He can’t even begin to fathom why he’s here. He wants to pinch himself. He must look like he’s seen a ghost.

“That’s good, man,” Newt replies anyway, with an artificially-white smirk that’s trying badly to pass itself off as a friendly grin.

He looks awful, Hermann thinks. “You look awful,” he says, because he apparently dropped his brain-to-mouth filter along with the mug. He looks the way the Hermann from 2013 wished his brilliant, prestigious penpal Newton Geiszler looked. A late-blooming teenage fantasy of a man who doesn’t exist. His shirt is properly tailored to fit him, with the slyest hint of Yamarashi peeking out from between the buttons on the cuff, and there isn’t an ink or kaiju blue or Monster Energy stain in sight. He’s traded in the boots for leather oxfords and lost an inch and a half in the process. He’s wearing a waistcoat. Truth be told, he’s gone well past ‘presentable’ and just looks bloody ridiculous. Like a try-hard wanker. (He’d say he looks like a child trying to dress like his father, but even Hermann can recognize that's hypocritical of him to say.)

There’s genuine offense in the barely-there tightness around Newton’s eyebrows. “And you look just great, Hermann.”

(Hermann’s shirt, however, has both ink and kaiju blue stains on it.)

(He’s getting used to becoming the least presentable person in any given room.)

He sweeps aside some of the broken mug with his foot, trying to gather up the courage to move lest the mirage in front of him begin to dissolve away, like an oasis. “W-why are you here, Newton?” It comes to him too late, that they probably shouldn’t be on first name basis, not anymore.

Newton shrugs. He still hasn’t moved out of the doorway. They’re just speaking over the noise of it. It’s almost cartoonishly obnoxious. “Do I need a reason? Can’t a guy visit his friend?” 

Hermann, as someone who’s been mocked and made fun of and bullied since 1989, doesn’t like the emphasis he puts on the word ‘friend’. He steps forward and swipes his cane from where it’s leant against his desk, the familiar weight of it only somewhat reassuring in his palm. “You can, but if you’ll allow me to be frank– I doubt that you have.”

Newton just stares at him for a long, agonizing moment over his blue-tinted lenses. Hermann keeps his eyes locked on the mess at his feet, because meeting Newton’s gaze right now would break down the last of his straw walls. He counts the shards, eyeballs the angles at which their edges broke. Acute. Obtuse. He can hear the hammering of his heart, a loud and unwelcome presence in his ears. Ba-bump, it says. Ba-bump. 

“Do you still have my old kaiju specimens?” Newton says after a fucking eternity, with an intensity in his voice that Hermann’s never heard before, and Newt had a propensity for being intense. This is a demand in question’s clothing.

The noise of the door is grating on his fractally-frayed nerves. He is agonizingly aware of it and it feels like Newton knows that and is standing right on that invisible line on purpose.

“Step out of the godforsaken doorway, Dr. Geiszler,” he doesn’t snap; he says it calmly. Collectedly. Newton raises his eyebrows but steps forwards with his hands raised palm-side-out in truce anyway. Hermann takes a moment to appreciate the silence, to try and mentally map out where the broom closets are in this place. He doesn’t quite know what comes over him when he asks, “What do you need them for?”

Newton’s jaw sets tight. “They’re mine, Hermann–”

“Legally, they belong to the PPDC’s K-science department. I think you’ll find that I am the resident head of that department.” Hermann walks the few feet over to the desk in the middle of the room and lets the ceramic crunch and crack under his soles. He pulls out the chair there and sits. He feels… strangely possessive. A bowerbird hoarding blue things. “Besides, what with your new connections and all, I’m sure you’d have no trouble acquiring other specimens.”

Newton gives him a long, scrutinizing look. Like he’s torn between throwing a tantrum and calling Hermann a catalogue of rude words on his way out or actually having a civilized conversation with him. The latter wins out, amazingly, and he pushes his sunglasses (which are unnecessary this deep into the Shatterdome, really) up onto his forehead, saying, matter-of-factly: “I want to clone a kaiju.”

Hermann’s lucky he’s sitting down. There’s a spike of something right at the back of his skull, something sharp and urgent and freezing and sounding like a pot boiling over. A distant crash of a lonely wave. His sinuses stink of iron. 

And then Newt laughs. It’s a bark of a thing. “I’m joking, Hermann, keep your pants on. I’ve got a hypothesis about attaching metal-organic frameworks to nanomachines to try and clean up kaiju blue. I have no actual way of testing this without samples. Happy?"

Hermann swallows around the lump in his throat. Of course he was joking. Of course. “That… That doesn’t explain why you’ve come to me rather than simply requesting them from your boss.”

“Y’know, I could lie, but honestly–” The other man crosses his arms. “Shao doesn’t do anything unless she knows for sure that it’s gonna be a worthwhile investment. A hypothesis doesn’t mean shit to her. I need positive results before she’ll even consider it. So here I am. Asking for help. From my friend.” 

Hermann bites down hard on any comments he may or may not have about Newton crawling back to the PPDC. Crawling back to him. 

He raises his hand to his nose and it comes back bloody.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

(If one of the remaining kaiju blue samples goes missing from the lab’s ultra-low freezer that afternoon, no-one seems to notice– which is both a concerning failure on the PPDC’s behalf, and a scandalous wink from Lady Luck for Hermann.)

Hermann thinks about him a lot.

The version of Hermann Gottlieb that exists just a few universes over. He wonders if he’s happy. He’s sure he must be.

He’s probably accepted a teaching position at some big-name university. Probably MIT, not that America is his first choice for anything, but it is for Newton, and that matters more to him than his ‘delicate’ cultural sensitivities and a lack of good Indian restaurants. Astrophysics II. Algebraic Geometry I-II. Introduction to Breach Physics. His students will hate him like they always have because it’s a trans-universal constant that Hermann is a good teacher, not a kind one. They probably catch the bus every morning because neither of them drive, or maybe this is a universe where Newton actually sat the driver’s ed exam instead of just hooning around illegally as a teenager, or maybe even one where Hermann’s leg lets him put enough pressure on the accelerator to go further than a few blocks. They probably catch the bus, though, from some average but not shitty 1-bedder that they share. After twelve years spent in pokey Shatterdome living compartments they both don’t know what they’d do with more space and the constant noise of the city is more of a comfort than a hindrance. It reminds him of dripping foil ventilation tubes and the blaring hiss of industrial stick welders and kaiju alarms and the quiet is just too much, after that. Maybe they’re married by now. Maybe they just exist in parallel to one another, never to meet in any government-acknowledgeable way. He doesn’t care either way. He still gets to hear that sleep-rough and weary I love you whispered against his cheek in the morning. Newton probably wakes up earlier than him most mornings because the man’s anxiety crows with the roosters. He’ll watch 4 a.m. Deep Space Nine reruns until Hermann straggles out with sleep still in his eyes and complains for tea or coffee, or on his worse days, hot chocolate. In their free time, Newt probably takes up cooking, because it’s the layman’s science, and Hermann will begrudgingly help him, if only to avoid setting the kitchen alight. Newt is an excellent scientist but he is an awful cook; he thinks ‘about that much’ is a precise measurement and ‘whatever’ a comprehensible amount. Hermann is functionally better but all his food tastes awful because love is the secret ingredient and there’s no love in the instructions on the side of a Martha White Apple & Cinnamon Muffin Mix. They probably burn the muffins. They definitely burn the muffins.

But Hermann is not that Hermann. 

Hermann is this Hermann, and he doesn’t live in America teaching undergraduates and cooking awful food with the man he loves. He lives in Moyulan in an apartment that came fully-furnished and he never swept the dust off of. His cupboards are empty and his bathroom the slightly-grotty bleakness of a man who lives alone, and his bed is never made because no-one else ever sees it. He wakes up to nosebleeds and nightmares and alarms set to 5:30. He only sees Newton when he needs something, and it’s never the thing that Hermann wants him to need from him. Only slied specimens and cross-references and red-pen notes in the margins of documents. There is no warm apple-cinnamon smell. There is only stale air, here.

They don’t burn the muffins.

But it doesn’t stop Hermann from thinking about it anyway.

In 2030, Lars Gottlieb suffers a stroke on his way up the stairs and dies of a broken neck. 

Hermann tries to give a shit, really.

His elder brother gives him an odd side-eye when he shows up to the funeral in slacks and a black cardigan, but he ultimately decides their father’s death simply must’ve affected him more than they thought it would. His mother tells him she’s worried about him, and pushes the hair out of his eyes. His sister recommends him to a counselor she knows who specializes in grief and loss. Hermann just nods and throws the business card she gave him in the trash. He thinks she might even see him do it.

By now the tabloids have stopped talking about him and no-one remembers his name unless they’re particularly interested in the more fantastical edge of the hard sciences or, worse, someone who’s just a little too interested in war. There’ll be headlines and articles about Lars for the next week, he can see the few paparazzi skirting the edge of the graveyard even now, because everyone remembers the goddamn Coastal Wall and the goddamn false hope it gave them all. Those articles don’t mention him, or if they do, never by name, and Hermann is grateful for it. It almost feels like 2012, again. Almost.

The funeral is bleak and appropriately overcast, rain threatening to split through the clouds with a dismal rumble at any moment. Gottliebs are not the type to wear their emotions on their sleeves, or even on their fucking faces where they belong, so the proceedings are mostly silent, and seem cold and uncaring, maybe even outrightly disdainful, to an outside observer. They are not a group of people in mourning, but a group of people in obligation. (Lars was a respected man, not a beloved one. Tears are a sign of weakness. Of fragility. Of a lack of control. Father wouldn’t have wanted them. Father wouldn’t have accepted them. Father would’ve beat them out of you.)

Hermann stays after everyone else has gone back to their respective homes or hotels. Watches rain dampen the earth in which his father is now buried. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t, for a moment, consider spitting on it– he doesn’t, of course, even if he is more impulsive than he used to be.

He has an umbrella, but the rain is almost falling horizontal, so his fringe drips with it and sticks cold to his forehead anyway. If he catches cold, he knows it wouldn’t be the ghost of his father come back to haunt him, at least. 

He doesn’t know how long he stands there, but his jumper is drenched through and stretching at the seams, making it even more ill-fitting, like anything knitted does when it’s wet. The whole place smells like wet flowers and sodden soil and the headiness of ozone and you really realize the weight behind the statement of ‘when we die, worms eat our eyeballs’ when you’re at a graveyard in the rain. The regenwürmer flail at his feet. He tries to think, about how he should react to this situation. What the normal reaction would be. The bell-curve of socially acceptable emotional responses to your fathers untimely death and subsequent funeral. How much standard deviation from the norm he could afford. How the Hermann of 2012 would react. How that Hermann a few universes over is probably reacting, right now.

He wishes he could ask him. Pop his head through the fabric of the universe and say ‘Tell me how to feel’. But no amount of best guesses and fermi estimates can help him understand the ways emotions should work.

In the end, he just can’t shake the apathy. If he really tries, he can pretend the rain on his face is tears.

He calls an UberX back to Flughafen Hamburg and tries not to look at the cost.

“Heard about your dad,” Newt says on one of his freak visits to Hermann’s office, because of course has. He scared the shit out of Hermann– didn’t knock or call out, and Hermann was too absorbed in whatever article about the emerging long-term effects of drifting (nothing fatal, thankfully; mostly psychological– an increased risk of psychogenic amnesia, dissociation and depersonalization) he was reading to hear the rubbery slide of the door. Looked up to see Newton leaning against the desk, absentmindedly arranging an articulated Otachi into a more terrifying pose, and almost fell right off his chair with a rather loud and uncouth exclamation of oh fucking hell. 

He should really start locking that door, but he’s worried that any physical barriers will stop Newt from visiting him entirely. (That, and a smaller part of him is not entirely convinced that the man’s not a figment of his imagination. What with the long term side effects and all. He doesn’t want to lock the door and find that Newt still appears unannounced.)

He’s almost dressed for the occasion, too. Which is to say, he’s dressed normally , and not like your capitalist cartoon villain-of-the-week. White button-up, black pants. No sunglasses, or embroidered floral vests. Just a bright fucking blue paisley tie.

Hermann still doesn’t remember well enough to say whether, for some inexplicable reason, he’d borrowed that tie off Newton for the wedding, if it had been his tie before conveniently finding itself in Newton’s sock drawer, or if the man had simply liked the tie from his new memory so badly he purchased an identical one. Either way, it makes him uncomfortable. The patterns seem to shift and aberrate in the lonely light of his holoprojector. 

“Sorry for your loss,” Newt says flippantly, bending the rubbery tongue of the plastic kaiju into an S-shape.

Hermann almost slaps him.

Not for the hypocrisy, but because that’s not something Newt Geiszler would ever say about Lars Gottlieb. Even before they drifted– Newt’s first contact with Hermann was via calling his father’s visions for the original Jaegers (back when they were known as ‘the future of world war’ and not ‘the hope for humanity’) a quote-unquote load of flaming dogshit and a walking fucking cytotoxin, and the man himself a cocksucking warmongering cunt. (Hermann, the bucketload of late-onset angst and rebellion that he was, found it rather charming). Anyone who knows the details of Hermann’s relationship with his father would consider the man’s death more of a blessing than a curse. For Newton, a man who’s been inside his head and is intimately familiar with that relationship, to say that is just–

He was joking. He must’ve been.

He’s always just joking.

He’s always joking and Hermann doesn’t slap him because Hermann wouldn’t hurt him with his life on the line and he just says nothing. Hums vaguely, avoidantly, so that Newt can decipher whatever response he wants out of the sound. His coffee’s gone cold. He grabs his cane and goes to pour himself a new mug of it.

The silence is tense, but it always is between them. Hermann’s favorite coffee mug has a chip out of it, just above the handle, and it annoys the shit out of him and he says he hasn’t fixed it as a valuable lesson in something-or-other, but really, he’s just been lazy. (It's a very human experience, ignoring a problem for so long that the fact you've ignored it starts to eclipse the problem itself). He’s in a room with a man he knows every shining facet and matte tumble of and has so many questions for and so many things he wants to tell him and so many things to yell at him about but he can’t think of a single one of them. He just feels all hollow inside. There are holes in him. He is woodworm-eaten. Cerebral earwig. 

He manages to stop pouring the coffee before it overflows and burns his fingers again, at least.

And then:

“Do you… do you dream about them, Hermann?” The other man’s voice sounds small, all of a sudden. Like he is holding it, precious and fragile and wounded at the back of his mouth. His shoulders have an odd, almost pained set to them. Trying to fold in on himself, protect all the soft, vulnerable parts. It is the hunch of a fearful animal.

Hermann doesn’t even consider lying. What would be the point? “Often,” he says into his coffee, sombre brown surface rippling with the words.

Newt huffs out a humorless laugh, hand toying nervously with the curling hairs at the nape of his neck. His sleeves are rolled down, tonight; Hermann can see hints of color where the fabric of his shirt is tightest against his skin. “Fuck.” The shadows around his eyes are over-pronounced in the dimness. Wartime trenches carved into his skin. He looks older, like this, whatever youthfulness he still retains gone with the sun. He looks tired. Newt looks over at him with such an emotion in his eyes that Hermann has no idea what emotion it even is. He can’t even guess. He’s reminded of late nights in Hong Kong where the losses were too great, the weight too heavy, and the unbelievable hopelessness they felt then was conveyed through fleeting glances across a crowded room, because there’s no words for feelings like that. No words except for ‘fuck’. Nothing but eyes red with anxiety and half-suppressed fear– a glance trying to communicate years’ worth of thrumming migraines and caffeine chest-pains and sweat-soaked sheets from stress dreams in something as small as an eye movement. Newt’s looking at him like that and Hermann’s mind is alight with old memories seen through warped azurine faces and it’s not until he feels the tell-tale pain in the back of his nostrils, the pressure in his face that he realizes the ghost drift is still very much beating like a thing alive between them.

Wind whistles through the holes in him.

Newt glances erratically from Hermann’s eyes down to his hand where it’s sat beside his mug and back again. “Hermann, I…” Panic flashes across his face, the swell of a wave that only just breaks into whitecaps, the set of his jaw tightens perceptively. As though his teeth don’t want to let the words out of his mouth. “I need you to–”

He sucks a jittery breath in between his front teeth. There’s a heartbeat hammering in Hermann’s ears that isn’t his own, a cacophonous song of disturbed blood– whatever emotion Hermann is feeling, it’s fringing on worry– and then it passes. Just like that. Newt’s face relaxes as he lets the breath back out, like the strings holding his skin taut have snapped in unison. His eyebrows and lips quirk up into a smile that Hermann would almost call sleazy. There’s a hand on Hermann’s own. It’s rough and work-worn and dotted with barely-there scalpel scars and it is, for once, out of place.

“I need you to come for dinner, sometime,” Newton says. “My wife would love to meet you.”

Hermann snatches his hand away. It catches the handle of his mug on the way and the thing lilts dangerously but doesn’t spill. He almost says ‘Goodnight, Dr. Geiszler,’ and makes to leave dramatically, but a little lightbulb– or, more accurately, an instinctual alarm bell– goes off in his mind and he catches himself before he lets the words slip out. No matter what, he doesn’t want to leave Newton unsupervised in his lab.

Which is ridiculous, he’ll think later tonight, curled up in the center of a bed that feels achingly too large, because the man is more responsible than he once seemed, professional when he needs to be, and there are two security cameras in this room alone, not to mention that the specimen fridges require an authorized I.D. card to access (a card that Hermann keeps on his person at all times). But, strangely enough– in this moment, Hermann is absolutely sure that, if he were to leave now, he would find the lab empty come morning and all his research into breach manufacturing unfortunately compromised by a series of targeted cyberattacks and another series of targeted dry erasers. 

So instead, he says, simply:

“Get out.”

And Newton gets out.

Hermann finally snaps and sees a therapist, after that. He says it’s in response to his father’s death, but he knows it’s a lie and from the look she gives him, so does she. 

She’s a lovely woman, and Hermann’s trying to see the best in this whole situation, really, but she’s lovely in the way that feels offensive, like most therapists are. Like behind her warm smile and the splotches of apricot-colored blush on her round cheeks, she’s judging him. But he’s sure it’s just his newfound knack for bouts of paranoia kicking in and tries to make himself comfortable on the Klippan (impossible).

She talks to him about Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief, and how it’s kind of a bullshit model. There’s no predicting the colorful palette of human emotion– there’s only best preparing for it.

He tells her he isn’t grieving, because he isn’t , and she just looks at him with that judgment caked over with so many layers of set-powder sympathy.

“Grief isn’t just something that arises from losing something tangible, Dr. Gottlieb,” she says, rollerball pen held like a smoker. “It’s very possible to mourn possibilities.”

Hermann has had quite a bit of grief in his 41 years. He’s seen so many professionals he has therapist-specific prosopagnosia. He knows this. He knows he needs to let himself process all these messy human emotions in a messy human way. But there’s a finality in hearing it aloud. A fearfulness.

It’s times like these when Hermann wishes he really were a machine, the way his peers used to taunt him about when he was young. That he could just run a command for getting the bloody hell over it. That he could see all of himself spread out in neat little lines of pixels and fix his litany of mistakes with simple backspaces and Find+Replace’s. That his emotions were linear and predictable and never-changing. But he isn’t. So instead he’s at therapy, mourning for things that happen one universe over, mourning for versions of himself that don’t exist. Mourning the loss of a man who doesn’t love him.

He leaves the office with a prescription for meds he will not take, a business card with his next appointment scrawled on it in a rounded, sort of immature script, and a determination to at least pretend that he can be better. 

He will lie to himself until it chrysalises and emerges a truth. 

By 2035, nothing has changed in any fundamental, earth-shattering way, but it is better. There are no monsters coming out of the ocean, the only major threat to humankind’s continued survival is itself, and the Pan Pacific Defense Corps has experienced a bit of a tonal shift. The UN, having assessed the possibility for rebreach after this long as minimal, officially enlisted the use of Jaeger tech for public security– which lead to a bit of an uproar from certain groups and certain people, as well as the new facet of Hermann’s personality that he’s learnt dislikes establishment, though he was quick to suppress any opinions he might have (his father would be proud, were he alive to see it). Hercules Hansen officially resigned from his position upon learning the PPDC was now a de facto authoritarian force, and the title of Marshal floundered between various incompetent balding men in suits before finally settling on the shoulders of the ever-capable Mako Mori. Shao Industries’ developments into the cleanup of kaiju blue was majorly successful, and scattered tourism has even returned to some pacific-bordering beaches.

Hermann speaks to his therapist once a month, and the visits get shorter every time– this month, he only has a phone appointment. He talks to his sister on the regular and actually knows the names of (some of) his colleagues in the K-science division. He even went for drinks with the friendlier of them on New Year’s. He’s been on a handful of Tinder dates, most of which were pleasant but ultimately rather banal (he seems to attract the type of man who lets his last name or the thickness of his wallet speak for him, and also fill the holes in his personality), and had one very unfortunate Grindr hookup that he’d rather not think about, thank you very much. He’s adopted a fat shelter cat named Junior that he pretends to be peeved with but would honestly die for.

He still gets nightmares, and nosebleeds, and angry blue-outs when he stands up too fast or hears any song off So Fresh: The Hits of Summer 2005. He still doesn’t sleep most nights, and when he does, he wakes up in the washed-out blue-yellow dawn with a carnal ache in his throat and a feeling like he should have wings. He still has things he doesn’t remember, and things he shouldn’t remember, and things he doesn’t want to. He still loves Newton and he still misses Newton but he also loves his cat, and he loves putting those tiny marshmallows in hot chocolate, and he loves his disastrous attempts at cooking without following the recipe on the packet and it’s so easy to love something when you don’t have to miss it in parallel. He talks to himself constantly because he’s quite good conversation, actually, and he’s discovered Spotify, and his father would be bloody disgusted at his taste in music but fuck that guy. His office is a mess and his hair is constantly in his eyes and people are more worried about him than ever.

He is getting bigger around it all. He is expanding outwards from a singular point. He is the accretion disk around a black hole. He is a premature little universe.

He still gets visits from Newton when he least expects it, but they’re few and far between, and they mostly just talk about the weather, and, yes, Dr. Geiszler is different, but who is he to talk about changing? Honestly, he thinks that, somewhere amongst all those tangled-up coils of complicated emotion he feels for the man, he might actually be happy for him. Though Hermann had his doubts, Newton seems to have genuinely found his niche in the world with this Alice woman. Hermann recognizes the way he glows with a gold adoration at the mention of her, and it’s an infectious kind of love. He’d love an explanation from him, or anything by way of closure, really, but seeing Newton like this– he thinks it might be more than he could’ve given him. He thinks it might just be worth it.

But he still doesn’t go for dinner.

(He almost did. Once. He had business in Shanghai. He was in the foyer of Newton’s building. His finger was on the elevator button. His nose had bled down the front of his nice white shirt like a warning. Red as the sky that sailor's fear. He’d turned around and left.)

He still thinks about other Hermanns in other universes, but it’s less of a longing, less of a mourning, and more of a thought process. A nice little fantasy to fill his mind with while he lays in bed, consumed by a hungry insomnia.

Ultimately, Hermann’s still working like the threat of interdimensional war could return at any time, because it honestly could and he’s tired of everyone pretending it couldn’t (and war is a lot like emotion– another thing that you can’t predict, only best prepare for). He’s shifted his focus towards making the small fleet of Jaegers still retained for true combat as prepared as possible if that were to occur– he tries to predict what phenotypic adaptations the precursors would throw at them, like Leatherback’s electric pulse, and develop countermeasures based off those predictions accordingly. From the sample size the war gave them, the monsters are largely inhibited by their lack of speed, as a result of their immense size; their Jaegers need to be ready to not just combat, but overshadow whatever advancements might occur to the movement speed of any future kaiju. The problem with that is that society’s aversion to fossil fuels prevents him from using traditional rocket fuels to power thrusters, and liquid hydrogen is too dense to be efficient in regards to weight, drag and fuel mass fraction. He has an idea, though.

The words ‘I want to clone a kaiju’ echo tantalizingly in his ears.

Maybe…

He really does need to speak to Dr. Geiszler.

Hermann wonders if Newt ever saw himself on the opposite side of the scientific equation like this. Pinned to a board and poked and prodded at and electric shocked. Like a lab rat.

He looks a bit like one, cuffed in that chair, bruised an ugly, amaranthine purple around the wrists and throat where he’s struggled. Primed for the scalpel. Through the glass, Hermann can see his jaw work as he grinds his teeth back and forth. Back and forth. He blinks in a repeating pattern, staring with cadaver’s eyes at fuck all.

They’re the only repetitive movements he can make in his bound state. They’ve settled on sedating him, Ranger Pentecost said, at least for the sake of Newt’s teeth. Hermann suspects that ‘sedate’ and ‘knock out by force’ are used interchangeably here– he doesn’t think the blood running down Newt’s upper lip and chin is just from the pressure of having a very angry and very genocidal alien stuffed inside his skull like wet newspaper stretching a small shoe until it fits. 

The man’s head turns towards the glass, very slowly. Hermann imagines his neck creaks with the motion like it’s made of old, brittle wood. It– not he, never he– stares directly at him.

“It’s one sided,” Ranger Pentecost (‘please, just Jake is fine’) points out helpfully. “He can’t see you.”

Judging by the feeling like the tug of peeling skin at the very base of his skull and that spearmint stink that only he’s smelling, Hermann thinks it can. Maybe not see him, per se, but it definitely knows he’s there. He makes a point of not mentioning it, though. He doesn’t doubt Ranger Pentecost’s hair-trigger propensity to put him in a very similar chair in a very similar cell very far away from here, if he did.

Hermann’s knuckles have flushed a painful white where they grip his cane.

“You don’t have to do this, you know?” Pentecost says tentatively, all the while trying to gauge his reaction. The Ranger’s intimidated by him, he realizes with a start, and what a thought that is. The man who helped save the world, daunted by a washed-up old scientist? (Hermann starts again when he remembers that he, too, is a man who helped save the world, twice, and maybe the Ranger’s unnerve is well-placed.)

“I’m quite aware, thank you,” he says half-heartedly, and it’s a lie. He has to do this. He’s never been more sure of anything, and Hermann’s line of work means he’s spent a lot of time being sure of things.

The door slides open with a squeal. There is a yellow line on the floor separating the observation room and the cell. Hermann hopes God’s getting a damn good laugh out of that one.

He steps over the line.

(

It is 2035. Newton’s hands are around his neck. His thumbnails dig crude appropriations of oceanic trenches into the soft flesh around his windpipe. His eyes are so shot from his nightly escapades into the Anteverse that the red has started to bleed into the green of his irises, making them look not entirely circular at first glance. It is truly Newton, this time, not the alien masquerading around in his skin. He looks utterly destroyed.

In this moment, struggling for breath, Hermann thinks he might die. He comes to terms with it rather easily. Death is not as terrifying a concept to him as it perhaps once was, and most certainly not as distant of one. He tries, pathetically, to claw at Newton’s arms, but his nails are bitten too short to even leave a mark.

Hermann wouldn’t say his life flashes before his eyes, exactly, but he would say he has a great many thoughts, seeing his suffocating face reflected back at him in the mucus layer across Newt’s eyes. He’s glad he can’t speak, because some of those thoughts make him feel filthy and like he deserves this horrible, painful end for daring to even think them. Thoughts he prays the precursors planted in his mind to tempt him, but that he knows deep down are his own.

Mostly, though, the thought is that he loves him. Still, with the man’s fingers drawing blood at his throat and his lungs feeling like they’re being scrunched tight like balls of alfoil, he loves him. He will love Newton until he dies, and then after that he’ll love him as a red stain on the rubble crushed under a kaiju’s foot and he’ll love him when he is cleaned away and dissolved by the biomechanical horrors of the Anteverse. He’ll love him in the ground beside his father in that damp cemetery in Hamburg and he’ll love him when all that’s left of him is engorged worms and nutrient-rich soil. He’ll love him however their specific future splits from here, forever, a single warm spot on a cold, dead earth.

“I’m sorry, Hermann,” the man says, the words thick, an audible struggle for him to say, sludge in his mouth. They are summoned up from the very, very back of his throat. “They’re in my head.”

And Hermann’s shattered little heart breaks a bit more, somehow.

A shot.

He hits the ground.

He really should’ve noticed.

)

“Dr. Gottlieb!” the bloody thing says and Hermann’s almost sick right then and there. It sounds disgusting in that voice, his voice– he knows the formality is just to piss him off even more. Maybe he can’t do this. He should leave. His throat hurts. He hears the door, sliding back into place– the familiar, steadying sound of worn rubber and the very beginnings of rust dragging against each other. He takes a deep breath, in through his nose so as not to be apparent. “How’ve you been, buddy?”

They’ve dragged in a cheap, stainless-steel table in the center of the room. Hermann sits at it and the chair feels like it wants to murder his arse as much as the thing (he refuses to call it Newton, even inside his head, because it isn’t, and he won’t grant it the privilege of a name, not anymore) across from him.

It decides to ramble on, almost mindlessly, head lolling about where it isn’t secured down. The expression on its face never quite matches the tone of its voice, like it’s given up on even trying to appear remotely human. “I’m great, y’know, this place– this place is awesome. Love the room service. They helped me redecorate, actually.” It nods towards a splatter of oxidized blood by the foot of the chair. “Thought some color would really liven up the place.”

Hermann just stares at it, straight on. He can feel the pressure of a nosebleed coming on, but wills it back. He can feel the throb of his heartbeat in the tender skin around his neck– almost unnoticeable, the faint yellow discoloration of aging bruises, the red moon of a fingernail puncture that hasn’t healed over yet because he's picked at it.

The thing grinds its teeth with a morbid crunch. “Wonderful weather we’re hav–”

“Spare me the act,” Hermann interjects at last, sharp on his tongue. “I’m not here to chit-chat, I’m afraid.”

Its expression changes. A gradual shift under the skin. It’s not surprising that Hermann can’t place whatever emotion it’s trying to convey. “That’s such a shame. You know how thrilling you are at small talk.” Its voice sounds sarcastic, at odds with the strange sincerity in the downturn of its brows, the hard set of its jaw. There’s a tightness at the corners of its mouth. Hermann feels his heart clench, just once, and then tips whatever empathy is boiling away in the witch’s cauldron in his head right in the bloody rubbish.

It locks eyes with him. Hermann prides himself on not looking away from the grisly sight. The scleras are so bloodshot it looks like the irises never end. Red ink feathering out from a felt pen held against tissue paper. He supposes that being unable to renew the drift connection between Newton’s body and the brain, the stress of keeping them together is piling up. Building like a gradual increase of internal pressure before it finally explodes. But it’s just that– a supposition. (He wonders if it feels it, the withdrawals, or if Newton feels it for the both of them. Probably the latter. He doesn’t take the kaiju overlords for having a masochistic streak. But then again…)

“Why didn’t you ever come for dinner, Hermann?” it says suddenly, with distinct curiosity. “He invited you so many times. You could finally meet Alice.”

The thing smiles, but it isn’t a smile. It’s a baring of teeth.

Hermann’s mouth goes dry. He doesn’t let it show on his face, which is a habit he never thought any good would come of. Why didn’t he ever come for dinner. He knows exactly why, and it keeps him up at night. It kept him up at night before he knew Alice was less woman, more globular mass of displaced alien nerve-fibers suspended in formaldehyde. Jealousy. Hot-cold, menthol under the skin. Cowardice. Like his stomach is dissolving like an Aspro-Clear. Fear. The ache in his not-enough teeth. He tries to reassure himself that, if he had taken Newton up on his offer– if he had gotten in the elevator that day, he’d be dead. The thing would’ve killed him like it planned, and Liwen Shao wouldn’t have been there to shoot wide. He wouldn’t have been able to decode Mako’s message, or to complete the kaiju blood thrusters, or to help save the world. (It doesn’t convince him. He still lies awake, regretting it, imagining improbable scenarios where he met Newton that night and survived, every night since the world didn’t end again.)

“Thanks for that, by the way. Not showing up.” Right for the jugular it goes. It sounds so much like him that if Hermann closed his eyes, he could pretend this conversation is the closure he never got. It’s altogether too bad that he’s here for a different type of closure. “Made everything a whole lot easier for us. He hates you for it, Her–”

“In ten minutes, they’re incinerating Alice.”

Every muscle in the thing’s– in Newton’s body goes rigid. He sees the blood drain from skin that doesn’t belong to it, teeth clack uncomfortably together like little keratin pool balls. The blood in his sinuses aches and stings.

(

It’s 2035. They’re in the Shao Industries elevator. Newton has just bludgeoned a man with his own gun and laughed about it. It is not Newton, but Hermann wants it to be.

The elevator dings and Hermann is feeling so many emotions all at once that he has no idea what to do with himself. Newt throws his broken glasses god-knows-where and Hermann is having trouble getting breath into his lungs and his heart is a snare, his ribs the wires in his chest and Hermann just sort of looks at him and a great many things go through his mind at that moment and he can’t pick one so he just picks all of them and hugs him.

He wants it to be him so goddamn badly. 

The man stiffens underneath him almost imperceptibly. A tightening of muscles. An unwelcomeness. A don’t-fucking-touch-me.

He smells like a sea-salt candle. Something that wants to smell like the ocean, but without the sulfide stink of bacterial digestion, dictyopterenes and marine worm bromophenols, the disgusting things that salt water has no fragrance without. The ocean as an abstract concept. Something that only wants to be the idea of something else.

Someone that only wants to be the idea of someone else.

He really should’ve noticed.

)

Hermann hums, skeptically. “Oh, please. Don’t be so dramatic.”

The thing’s hands grip the arms of the chair so tightly that Hermann sees its already-bloody nails splinter. “You’ll kill him, Hermann,” it says, level, matter-of-fact.

“So will you.” And it’s true; Newton is sitting here, in this chair, in this cell, slowly dying from the strain of keeping an immense alien consciousness holed up inside his skull. There are a series of white electrode squares stuck at various points across his forehead. Somewhere far from here (but perhaps not far enough), there are wires poked into the gelatinous surface of a kaiju brain. The readings are identical– Newton’s a sea of abnormal, non-epileptiform peaks and interrupted curves, Alice’s completely unlike the activity monitored from Kodachi and the fragment of Mutavore’s brains recovered by the PPDC in the past. A human’s brain trying to accommodate kaiju thought, and a kaiju brain trying to operate within the realms of human possibility. Identical waveforms on separate screens. A synchronization of consciousness– exactly the same phenomenon encountered between partners in drift.

Destroying the brain will kill Newton in unison, but sooner or later he will die from cerebral hemorrhage and heightened intracranial pressure anyway. It’s unfortunate, but Hermann might as well put all the cards on the table.

“What do you want?” it hisses out, eyeing him with an incredulous squint. “Because that’s it, isn’t it? You want something from us.”

Hermann crosses his hands over one another on the cold steel of the shitty table and lets out a short huff of breath. He feels like a house made of straw, every flaxen strand stood precariously on end and bent into woody shapes of shoulders, a ribcage, a head. Like a breeze could pick him up and blow him away. “I am here,” he says, very deliberately. “To ask you to kindly vacate my friend’s mind.”

A beat.

“That’s it?” The precursor breathes out, staring holes through Hermann’s forehead in disbelief. “You’re just going to– to ask nicely?” 

“Yes.” Hermann gives the thing something stuck halfway between a shrug and a nod.

It bucks against the cuffs that keep it restrained. Hermann once again studies the dark, ruddy purple blooms on its neck and wrists and surely ankles, too, from continuous collision with the unbreakable strips of duralumin that hold it. It lurches its head forward the centimeter or two it can afford, entire body held taught. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” When it speaks, it almost sounds like two voices of varyingly different pitch have been layered upon one another to resemble a singular speaker, but Hermann knows that’s just in his head.

“I love him. I don’t want to watch him die,” Hermann explains, pointedly, trying not to twist and tap and wring his hands together in fruitless anxiety. “And, excuse me for being presumptuous, but– I don’t think you do either.”

The thing goes limp all at once, slumped low against its bonds. “Get out,” it says, and grinds its teeth. It’s observing Hermann keenly– predatorily. He realizes all at once that they have regressed what was once an advanced, hubristic being into nothing but a caged animal.

“You haven’t killed him. You could do it so easily, but you haven’t.” Hermann shakes his head, just a little, as he says that. He hopes his face looks surer than he feels; that the square set of his shoulders conveys confidence, and not the trembling fear he is only just managing to suppress, holding it tightly between the ever-thinning layers of his skin. “And I think I know why.”

Its nose begins to bleed. A laborious, painful thing, wandering the stubbled topography of Newt’s already red-stained upper lip. “You come in here and you presume you know things about us–”

“You’re a species that thrives on conquest. On proving that it’s better than everything else. Surely you have things to do, worlds to dominate, but a part of you is just– just sitting in a cell, doing nothing. Surely you know your chances of escape are negligible, if they exist at all. Your mission has failed, utterly. And yet here you remain. It doesn’t make sense.” Hermann feels adrenaline run through him like a fucking corporeal high, a rush of something frigid and thrill-seeking. His lungs ache in the arch of his ribs’ embrace and the oxygen he breathes in feels cooler, fresher, for some reason. The alien across from him is not something accustomed to considering the opinions of lifeforms inferior and other to itself, and it despises having no choice but to listen to him almost as much as it despises him– he can feel it in the air. A primeval, yet nurtured, hatred. He’s sure that were the circumstances any different, he would’ve been killed without a second thought. Hermann is so frightened that he’s almost amused by it.

He frankly doubts that many others, no matter the universe, have ever had the privilege of experiencing a creature that has spent eons preening an ego of total supremacy stooping so low as to be intimidated. 

“We don’t want you here,” it drawls, sounding like its throat is a beehive in the twisting passages of Hermann’s ears. Blood dribbles down its chin and smears across its mouth. “We don’t want you. We’ve never wanted you.”

Hermann ignores it. “How long did you play house with Newton? Eight years? Nine? You put on such a show of pretending to be human. Built yourself a nice little life.”

He imagines, then, how this almighty creature must’ve felt doing such mundane, pitifully human things to keep Newton alive this past decade. Succumbing to hunger, succumbing to sleep, watching him age, even, the things it surely considers mankind weak for not overcoming.

“Leave. Leave or we’ll kill him.”

“No you won’t. You love him too much.”

For once, the precursor is silent.

(

It’s 2032. They’re in Hermann’s office. He’s tried to cover up the smell of kaiju blue and chemical rot by making another pot of coffee. It isn’t working, half because his coffee is the cheapest money can buy at the Family Mart and half because the stink has just permeated into everything, now.

Newton is with him. He isn’t Newton, but Hermann still thinks he is. He’s wearing light blue aviators that surely hide away drift-stained eyes.

They’re talking about Shao’s latest voyage into single-pilot ConnPod systems and the eventual eradication of drifts between compatible pilots.

“They’re taking all the emotion out of it,” Newton says with a flick of his wrist in distaste. “Sure, the two-pilot system might’ve been rudimentary, but you can’t deny that it was romantic as fuck. Loving someone so much that you can change the world for them. With them,” the man quickly amends.

Hermann clears his throat awkwardly.

“Not that I’d know, though. Considering what we did was, uh. Y’know.” Newt’s voice trails off.

“ No, I don’t know, Dr. Geiszler.”

“I mean, it’s not like we were compatible, Hermann, c’mon. It was a– a…” he flounders with his hands for a moment, searching for the word, juggling invisible beanbags. He finally clicks his fingers in Hermann’s direction with an obnoxious grin. “A drift of convenience!”

“Mm,” says Hermann, whose heart is just powder stuck on the sides of a mortar and pestle. But he’s learnt by now to keep any emotions Newton might stir up in him in a little locked box in his head until he gets home in the evenings. “It was rather convenient.”

He really should’ve noticed.

)

He blinks the blue away. 

“The drift works both ways, doesn’t it, Dr. Geiszler? It’s a give and a take,” he says, wistful. The alien once again has all its muscles held tense; it’s stretched out in whatever ways it can afford without being able to move freely. It’s deimatic behavior– a bird erecting its feathers to appear larger. A spider rearing its pedipalps and fangs. It’s perceiving him as a threat. A part of Hermann wishes he could take notes, morbid as that may be. “I know what cross-species drifting can do to someone. Bloody hell, I’ve lived it. It’s confusing, and it’s terrifying, and your brain wasn’t designed to understand all these new things but it does– it does, because they’re you , now. You can’t get rid of them. You just have to get used to them.”

It licks its bloody lips. Hermann scrubs a hand down his face.

“I have to say… it’s rather pathetic.” He doesn’t spit the words out with any venom or vitriol to them. He just states them outright, a fact. “Such an all-powerful species. How many universes have you destroyed for your own betterment? How many sentient races have you sent extinct? To be done in by love, of all things.”

The precursor still doesn’t speak. It just stares, red-shot eyes wide like fucking nebulae. It’s feeling an emotion that Hermann, or maybe humankind in general, doesn’t have a word to describe, and probably never will. Hermann knows because he feels it as well. It crawls, under and beneath the layers of his skin, like it could flay him from the inside out. Like there are ants in him. It is like a shiver that never breaks the surface, an increase in the tightness of him. It is a fear– of perception, of being known, of being weak, all at once. It is an utterly alien feeling.

Hermann lets out a long-suffering breath from shaky lungs and weaves his fingers between the gaps in one another. “And so, I offer you an ultimatum. You can do nothing, and in five minutes we will destroy the brain and Newton will die. Or, you could kindly do as I ask and let him go.”

“You wouldn’t,” it says. It is small. It has never been small before.

“Wouldn’t what, exactly?”

“Kill him.”

“Why not?”

“You’re the same.” It is almost mumbling. It's voice squeaks. “You can’t. You can’t.”

“We are not the same. And besides…” Hermann stares it down, heart in his throat. “I have nothing to lose.”

(If Newton dies today, Hermann Gottlieb’s life will be exactly the same tomorrow as it was yesterday. He will mourn the man, yes. He will mourn the endless futures in which the precursor across from him chooses to surrender him peacefully, certainly. It will wrack the foundations of what little place in the world he’s made for himself these past 5 years. But Hermann knows himself, better than he once did, and he knows now that he will move on. He will get bigger around it, in the aftermath of it all. Hermann will go home, to his cluttered apartment and his stupid cat and his chipped novelty mugs and his streaming services, and smother himself in faux-mink blankets, and cry, and then hand in that report on the optimization of cloned kaiju blood’s fuel mass fraction by midnight, like he’s supposed to. A routine which has already been Hermann’s normal for a long time. Ultimately, he’ll just have another wretched fantasy in his before-bed repertoire.)

(Hermann has nothing to lose, but he stands to gain everything. )

“Regardless, I am not the one giving the orders. The higher-ups were reluctant that I inform you of the destruction at all. Fortunately, however, Dr. Geiszler’s brain is too valuable an asset for them not to at least attempt to recover it, even in whatever state you might leave him,” Hermann explains, inflectionless. “And so– here I am. Asking nicely.”

A drop of viscous scarlet hits the floor with a loud plip. His ears start to ring.

“He is ours,” the thing says. “He belongs to us.”

“He doesn’t–”

“We will take him with us.” It sounds like noise and tinnitus and amp feedback all compressed haphazardly into a crude outline of words.

“You can’t,” Hermann insists. “You can’t just keep him like a bloody ornament. He won’t survive.”

The ringing reaches a mordant crescendo. “It is where he belongs,” it says. The words have been spoken directly into Hermann’s head, this time. A beaming electric impulse sent straight into all 25’000 sensitive little nerve endings there.

Hermann looks down. His shirtfront is stained with blotchy rosaceas of brown, pink and red. It sticks uncomfortably to his skin. There is a metallic tang on his tongue. It hurts to breathe. “No, it isn’t.”

There is a moment, then. The split second between a glass hitting the ground and shattering, in which it refuses to let the fractured pieces of itself go. A heartbeat. A blink. A rush of blood through the narrowed vessels on his aching forehead.

“We love him,” it says, the sound of a match striking.

He feels the wave of dizzying, encroaching blue before he sees it, this time.

(

It eats at him like a cerulean rot; at his fingertips, up his ankles, eyelids. A fungal colony hiding under his sweater and shirt. He is prematurely putrefying. 

He sees a single cell amongst many. The cell is wrong. It is incorrect. This cell is like a cancer. A single inherent mutation that will be inflamed and destroyed by T-cells upon detection. It needs to be purged. For the good of the hive. To protect them. To keep them clean. Perfect. Superior. Unfeeling.

It doesn’t want to be purged.

Which is just another way it is wrong. It should only want what they want. But it wants what it wants. 

The cell doesn’t let itself multiply. It isolates itself, away, in the furthest reaches of fucking anywhere. It lies. To them. To itself. To him. It is alone for a purpose, it lies. It is infiltrating, it lies. It is doing this to help them, it lies (and when did it stop being ‘us’ and become ‘them’?). But it knows, even when it doesn’t, that it is being selfish, and selfishness is at times a new emotion, and at times the oldest emotion. It is with him because it wants to be. It is with him because it wants. 

The cell was not created this way. To feel this way. It did not bud from the first precursor, an exact copy, incorrectly. It was infected with it. The wrong. A little man crawled into them and left the wrong behind, a parasitic part of himself. Contagious feeling. Some ghosts of memories and moments and impulses and concepts.

It understands them all. It doesn’t understand a thing. It was not put together in this way. 

It knows what a Compaq Presario CDS510 is and exactly how to disassemble and reassemble one. 

It hates it all. 

It has always hated everything and now it does not and it hates that it doesn’t hate everything  and it hates what it doesn’t hate, too. It hates itself. It hates them. It hates him. It hates the separateness of those things. It wants to be one. It wants him as a part of himself and as a part of them all. It hates the feeling that feels like it is decaying and crumbling away into nothing. It hates the forlorn ache it has in the parts of itself that don’t exist.

It loves.

Despite everything, it loves. 

The rot of want squirms inside it.

Ten years is a long time for a human. It is longer for something that has never experienced the passing of it before. It forgets, oh so occasionally, that it is not a ‘he’. That despite the food it eats and the conversations it has and the work it does and the functions it goes to and the pretending it does, it is not human. That, despite what the humans and the ID cards and the reflection in the mirror might say, it does not have that oneness with him it so primordially desires. That it is not Newton Geiszler.

That he doesn’t love it back.

It gives him money and fame and love and all the things it’s learnt that humans want. He responds with scrawling cries for help on the backs of important blueprints when it isn’t looking and making their chest hurt for the rest of the day because he didn’t let them breathe for 3 minutes. (It doubts their separateness, sometimes, because when he hurts himself, it hurts too). 

It will end the world for him. With him. 

Because it loves like a cancer loves. By destroying. Carcinogenic closeness. It is what it was created for. Its purpose. It’s the only thing it knows. This is it devoting its everything to him. It will destroy everything else and then he will have no choice but to love it because it will be all that is left. He will see.

He will see.

But then it fails, doesn’t it?

)

“I know,” Hermann says. “So do I.”

His voice is husky and cracked with the way his throat has clammed up. He wipes his face on his sleeve, and doesn’t look down for fear of seeing his reflection in the table’s surface. He must look like someone at the end of a horror film. Risking a stiff glance at the wrist watch he doesn’t usually wear– “You have 3 minutes and 40 seconds.”

Hermann is a realist at heart but by god, in this moment, in this room, with this thing, does he feel conflicting equal parts optimism and pessimism. His throat is achingly dry with unease and he knows intimately that these monsters don’t string thoughts together the same way a human would, that they don’t have the same approach to reason and rationality. None of the emotion that would drive a man’s actions. That in human terms, they are a new definition of sociopathic. While he might have more of an insight into their inner workings than any other person on earth sans one, he can’t pretend that he can predict this. He can only best prepare for it. He is in here armed with nothing– no numbers, no facts, no surety in anything, only a reckless spark of hope that maybe, maybe – 

Maybe this one will be different.

(What was it?)

(Same thing, over and over and over, hoping for a different result.)

Look at him, the once-almighty man, the believer in only absolutes, he who built machines because he found their predictability comforting, him and his ‘numbers are the closest we get to the handwriting of God’, the man that wished he were made of stringed-up code so he could cast aside the inconvenience of having feelings– sat here praying against all odds, all information, for an alien to feel just enough of a messy little human emotion to spare a man’s life. 

What has he become?

(Not what. Who.)

(A strange sort of kinship boils away in him.)

(The drift is not primarily a give and take. It is, more importantly, a sharing of things.)

(And it had to get it from somewhere.)

He looks over at Newton’s shaking, bloody form– careful to avoid meeting the eyes, wide as plates, that still stare, hauntingly, unblinkingly, at him, drilling industrial boreholes through his skull, and the mouth that gapes with its torn-up gums and chewed-raw lips. He doesn’t want that to be the last he sees of Newton Geiszler. He tries to remember the man, for what he was, before all this. For what he knows he still is, underneath all these layers of extra-terrestrial duct tape.

(

It is 2025. The world didn’t end yesterday. Hermann quickly shuts the Chrome tab he had open, casually browsing rental lists for nearby real estates with only half-deliberated intent. He can feel Newt approaching acutely, like his brain is a dowsing rod trained to pick up his specific electromagnetic field. If he unfocuses his eyes, he can almost see the Shatterdome hallway as Newt is seeing it now, layered nauseatingly on top of everything else.

The man enters the lab with 5 bright white sutures on the expanse of forehead above his eyebrow. The skin around them is red and mildly irritated, but so long as Newt doesn’t pick mindlessly at the wound, the scar left should be naught but a small line of discoloration.

“Hello, Newt–”

“Hey, Herms–”

they say at the same time. Newt chuckles, and then winces as the movement of his brow shifts the stitches. Hermann’s eyes crinkle. He feels unbelievably smitten. Like his chest is full of cotton wool, or downy feathers waiting to be coughed up in a disgusting clump. He almost can’t breathe through it. He stands, hobbles the few steps between them and places his cold hands (his circulation has always been rubbish) on each of the man’s rough-with-stubble cheeks. He looks so young, in this memory. Atlas has temporarily lifted the world from his shoulders after a long stint of lugging it around. There is a tiredness in the purple-green hyperpigmentation around his eyes, an exhaustion in the slumped set of his shoulders, but it stems entirely from fatigue and twelve long years spent under constant stress of the world-ending variety; he is well-rested– Hermann knows because they spent 14 hours curled together in his bed, overjoyed in that they are not dead, only dead to the world– and he might even go as far as to say the man is content. The war has taken a great toll on all of them. It will not take anymore.

Or so he naively thought, then.

Hermann kisses the space just above the stitches. The skin there is warm, and smells like chalky disinfectant powder. Newt’s face has turned a lovely shade of beetroot in response. In their time, they never quite get comfortable with each other– it stays like this, all warm ears and ducked heads and prickling skin and blushing cheeks. The zygotic stage of a life together, where everything is still new and so bloody exciting. Hermann just huffs out a laugh.

“I adore you, too,” he whispers into his hairline like a secret.

)

(

It is 2025. The world around them smells like death, alien chemicals that have patent-pending names like ‘Kaijuchloric Acid’, ‘Eau de Toilet, ‘Definitely-Not-Neutral Milk’, ‘Gatorade 2’ and ‘Hermann ate my egg and baby spinach sandwich that I put in the lab fridge for safekeeping’, because Newton has tried to legally classify them all before, to varying degrees of success. Hermann isn’t quite accustomed to that up-close-and-personal kaiju stench, not yet. He is ankle deep in mud that shines orange-blue-white with what little city lights are left in the wake of both Otachi and Leatherback. Newt is off to his left, fiddling with some complicated-looking contraption or other, covered in dirt and blue slime that’s probably a biohazard. His jeans are torn at the knees and pinkish hints of seeping, angry grazes peek through.

Hermann, standing amongst the wreckage and festering foetal remains of it all, looks at him in this moment– this moment that could very realistically be one of the last moments–, too. He knows that when (not if , he can’t let it be if ) they save the world, Hermann will only partly have done it for the good of mankind. That their cause is only a half-truth to him, now. He knows, that despite everything, he is being selfish. That he is here because he wants to be.

He is with him because he wants.

Were it not for Newton, he would still be cooped up in his musty old lab as the world ends. Not with a bang and not with a whimper but with the bellowing roar of a great beast.

He trudges up to him with his hair whipped from helicopter blades and shirt not buttoned up straight. He has so many things he wants to say. So many things he wants to admit, to apologize for, to scream from the top of his lungs here at the end of the world. “I’ll go with you,” he chooses. He says everything else in the drift.

)

(

It is 2023. Newton has fallen asleep, yet again, on the peeling and cockroach-eaten brown leather of the lab couch. He’s wearing sweatpants with holes in the bottoms from being trod on and a Japanese Jurassic Park t-shirt. The times where he has worked himself to the point of total collapse are the only times the man looks peaceful. 

Hermann studies him, the red marks between his eyes where his glasses sit, the few stress-greyed hairs that he missed when he plucked the rest out this week. He convinces himself, for a thrilling sliver of a moment, that this is a glimpse into the version of Newton that exists without the war. That somewhere, he might be asleep on Hermann’s couch, shirt riding up to display colorful caricatures of creatures that don’t exist.

Newton shifts, drawing his limbs into and around himself like a cocooning butterfly. 

Hermann shrugs off his parka and lays it over the shape of him. The hood’s fur sways, back and forth, back and forth with his even, at rest breath.

)

(

It is 2017. Newton is crying in a hotel room.

)

(

It is 2012. The letter he’s just received is written in glittery gel pen. The colors alternate through sequential shades of the rainbow across the pages, and the text slants violently because the paper isn’t lined. It’s signed off with ‘Hopefully your new pal, Newt’ and a tiny drawing of a dragon breathing fire. Hermann thinks it’s utterly childish for a man so becoming.

He writes back immediately.

)

The precursor is screaming. It screams, it thrashes, and in between that it snaps its teeth together with a clackclackclack that he feels in his bones. Its nose bleeds and its ears bleed and its ruptured lips and gums and tongue bleed and for a moment Hermann is scared that it might bite Newton’s tongue clean off and its eyes are so red they might as well not be in their sockets at all.

No, it screeches. You can’t you can’t you can’t.

Hermann doesn’t think it’s screaming at all. He thinks they might just be sitting here in silence, acting out a mimicry of awful noise. He thinks if it bit its tongue off, he’d still hear it.

It is like a child throwing a tantrum. We won’t let you. You are nothing. You will not command us. You have no power. Human. Human. Human. Kill you. Kill all of you.

“Two minutes,” Herman just says, watching the saliva drip in frothy white chains down Newt’s chin.

He’s surprised it hasn’t snapped Newt’s wrists with the way it’s augmented itself in the chair, a defensive position. It is still holding onto the jagged, sharpened shrapnels of pride it has left. He is ours, it says, crescendo. He is us. It is a chorus, a thousand voices at once. It is one voice pretending to be a thousand. Wishing it were a thousand. Convincing itself it is.

It hurts. It is making Hermann hurt. A tandem expression of interpreted information– synchronized firings of A-delta nerve fibers and nociceptive response. A scrunching of their somatosensory and limbic systems into a single clump of bloody playdough. 

All the while, Hermann stares at the glass face of his wristwatch. The hands are, somehow, moving both too fast and too slow– like his perception is speeding up and slowing down with the rhythm of his aching head, the rush of his pumping blood. The seconds tick and tock by, and eventually the spasmodic movement of the little metal hand and the throb of his entire body fall into step. The world’s most morbid beat. He’s felt this before, in the moments before the breach was destroyed in 2025, watching the orange LED countdown on the wall with one eye and all of LOCCENT’s holoprojectors with the other. The moments before a world ends. 

One minute thirty.

“You’re bluffing,” the precursor says, out loud, all pomp and unearthliness gone from its voice. It just sounds like Newton, now. Hermann doesn’t even look up. He doesn’t trust his face not to betray him. He can’t give the thing a reason to start doubting him. “You have to be.” Its voice breaks over the last vowel. It sounds like he did, back then. I’m sorry, Hermann. The words sticking quick-dry in its mouth. It breathes in with a rasp and then spits the blood that’s pooled in its mouth onto the floor.

Hermann’s own nose drips a single, perfect droplet of dark red onto his watch. One minute.

His legs are shaking. Shivering with a cold that’s all adrenaline. He’s glad that they’re hidden under the table. Fifty seconds.

The precursor groans, a long-suffering thing that shakes and stutters on the way out of its lungs. 

It looks at Hermann.

Hermann looks at it. 

Its eyes are blown huge, pupils eclipsing the entire irises and leaving only an apple-peel accretion-ring of color before burst blood vessels spill outward in scleral supernovas. Its nostrils flare and shoulders rise and fall dramatically with panicked breath. Its bottom lip trembles microscopically. It is pitifully and oh-so-humanly terrified. 

There’s a beat of stillwater silence before it speaks.

“I don’t want to die.”

Forty. Thirty-nine. 

Hermann flattens his mouth into a long, thin line. “I know,” he says, simply. 

He knows.

Thirty-seven. Its stare flitters between each of Hermann’s own eyes, tears navigating the dried and crusting paths of their predecessors down its cheeks, forming little liquid stalagmites off his chin. Thirty-four. Newton’s body has gone limp before they fall.

(

It is yesterday.

Hermann is in LOCCENT, staring meaninglessly at the circular projector that’s displaying a whole lot of nothing really. Mako is beside him, though she isn’t Mako, not right now– right now she’s Secretary General Mori, and the gold badges on the shoulders and chest of her jacket purport as much. Her shoulders are set square, and her posture impossibly straight-backed despite the crutch held under her arm and the sling around the other. The right side of her face is bandaged heavily, yellow bruising peeking out from under and between the layers of rayon.

“What was it you wanted to talk about, Dr. Gottlieb?” she says, voice soaked in liquid authority. Raleigh Becket is across the room, casting the two of them a weary glare with the sunken, sleepless holes in his face he calls eyes. He’s never more than a few meters away from Mako, anymore.

Hermann explains. Not everything, of course– Mako might be understanding, willing to take his opinion into account much more than her father ever was, but he doubts ‘I think we accidentally taught an alien the abstract concept of love,’ would go down well, even with her– but all the important parts. He tells her about the interlinkage between Newton’s brain and Alice, and how he believes both Alice’s continued presence in Newt’s body and its destruction will take a fatal toll on him, and that getting the precursor to leave of its own volition is their only clear option. 

“I believe we can use the brain’s destruction as a bargaining chip,” he tells her, and doesn’t elaborate further. Raleigh raises a distant, critical eyebrow.

“Dr. Gottlieb.” Mako levels him with a hawk’s-eye gaze. “Are you suggesting I authorize the kaiju brain’s destruction?”

Hermann swallows around the lump that’s formed in his throat. “Yes.”

“And you are aware that failure to extricate the precursor from Dr. Geiszler’s mind will result in his death?”

He clenches his fist, white-knuckled around the handle of his cane. “Yes.”

Mako looks away, expression almost bordering on irritation. “Then you are more of a fool than I took you for, Dr. Gottlieb. Despite his current predicament, Dr. Geiszler is still human. I do not have the authority to order a man killed,” she says, her words unusually cold and quick. “Nor do I have the will.”

Hermann bites back any rebuttals he feels boil up into a bubbly mess in his mouth and nods shakily. The muscles in his face are tensed to mutter out a pathetic ‘excuse me,’ when Mako speaks again. “However, in this particular situation, I am not above underhanded methods. Do you truly believe that the precursor will be willing to listen to you?”

“I–,” he stutters. His palms have an uncomfortable sheen of lukewarm sweat gathering on them. “I can’t say with any certainty, or provide any evidence, but–”

“I am asking what you believe, Hermann. Not what the figures show.”

He looks at her, then. Stares right at the tip of her nose. “Yes.”

She smiles, a sly little upquirk at the corners of her mouth. The fluorescent lights above and the colored pings of the holoprojectors make her eyes shine. “Then I don’t have to authorize anything.”

)

Zero. An attending medical officer has handed Hermann a wet wipe to fix the mess his nose has made. He’s seeing everything in tunnel vision, a dark vignette around the corners of his vision. Someone– he doesn’t know who– tells him that Newton’s brain scans are showing a normal delta wave formation expected from someone in deep sleep. He hears them through a layer of imaginary cotton wool shoved inside his ears. Jake Pentecost is watching him pointlessly try to scrub at the red stains on his shirt from his perch outside the open cell door.

Hermann doesn’t react. He doesn’t let himself react. He wants to rush over to Newton’s gaunt, unresponsive form where it hangs against the chair’s frame and do anything. Wants to cradle the man he loves in his arms and sob like a child because they’re telling him the scans are fucking normal. But he doesn’t, because he can’t show weakness now. Just in case– just in case this is all part of the precursor’s elaborate ploy to escape, he can’t let it get that upper hand. And also… he doesn’t trust the PPDC not to question his sanity after Newton’s. He will not let them think he is compromised. He will not let them think he is a possible risk. He will not let them distrust him the way he distrusts them. So he sits, tries to stymie his nosebleed, and watches in detached silence as they un-cuff Newton from the chair, and re-cuff him to a gurney, one limb at a time. The wheels squeak down the hallway, until they’re gone.

The medical officer offers him a paper cup half-full with water, and his hand shakes as he accepts it. His mind dredges up an image of Newton some decade prior– sitting in the lab, shaking, terrified and exhilarated all at once, the wreckage of a kaiju slowly dying beside him– and Hermann almost laughs at the similarity.

I love him. I don’t want to die.

Newton looks small, almost, where he lays swaddled in a waffle-y cocoon of hospital blankets, wires and tubes of various purposes stuck against his skin, in his nose, in the veins at his elbows and feet. His hair is longer than Hermann’s ever seen it, now that it’s clean, and not stuck to his skull with body fluids and weeks-old product, and his cheeks are dark with stubble. The slow rise and fall of his chest is the only tell that Hermann isn’t staring at a corpse. It took him two bloody days to convince the hospital staff to give him visitation rights– at first, they denied that Newt was even being kept there, and though Hermann was utterly pissy about it at the time, in retrospect it was probably a wise decision–, and it took Mako vouching for his character to finally sway them.

A nurse slides the door open and releases the cacophonous song of medical machinery. When Hermann steps over the rubber threshold, it feels a little like stepping into a holy space. The air is stale and still, and dust dances little pirouettes in the slits of light sneaking through closed shutters. Newt doesn’t move, of course, because God only affords Hermann so much good luck at a time. He’d look almost peaceful, if it weren’t for the trenches of haggard capillaries around his eyes.

The nurse leaves them after a quick glance over the litany of screens arranged around the bed, and Hermann takes a seat in the stiff, waxy armchair beside it. A security guard keeps a hawk’s eye on him from beyond the room’s round-at-the-corners window. Hermann takes a deep breath, clasps his hands together so tightly they ache, and prays.

It’s an understatement to say that Hermann’s relationship with God has always been strained. When he was young, he’d thought all his misgivings had been part of some great, biblical give-and-take; that God made him wrong for all the ways they had made him right, and that made it okay. He could justify all the bad parts of his life that way, and even be grateful for them, because they were just as much a gift as anything else. Hermann wasn’t a gullible child but he fell for faith. It wasn’t until he was quite a bit older that he started to think that God must surely hate him. There was no moral scale to balance, no guiding hand, no cosmic plan, barely even right and wrong– if there was a God, they were a thoroughly egocentric creature to enjoy tormenting their creations so. Hermann lost his faith on August 10th, 2013, but kept up the farce of devotion in hopes that maybe there’d still be a heaven waiting for him when the world ended, if he just pretended hard enough. That he’d wake from his watery, radioactive grave and be proved wrong for the first time. 

Right now, though, Hermann feels like he’s 14 again and so strict in his faith that he lays in bed and prays for God to reach down with their holy fingers and pick out parts of his brain. Surely he’s done enough good in this life to ask for one thing? Surely he’s suffered enough of the bad?

Newton still doesn’t stir, and God doesn’t run their hands through Hermann’s hair.

Newton finally wakes eight days later, while Hermann’s asleep (or, perhaps more accurately, passed out from exhaustion) in the armchair that he’s pivoted closer to the bed, leg propped up on a pillow balanced on a box that purports it once held granola bars. He tries to go home to sleep– he really does, but he doesn’t want Newton to wake up alone– he was just too worried to leave, tonight– he already arranged for the neighbor to feed the cat– sometimes it sneaks up on him you see– it doesn’t matter now, because he is asleep, with his head cradled between his arms on top of that oh-so-familiar texture of waffled cotton, and Newton is awake.

He can’t speak for how long the man has been awake, but when Hermann stirs, it is at the rising sound of– not panicked, per se, but almost– panicked breathing and the slightest shuffle of cloth. He scrubs at the crust that’s gathered in the corners of his eyes, expecting to see another nurse frustrated with him for staying overnight when he realizes that Newt’s hands are fisted in the dual layer of tightly-tucked blankets. Hands that have been still for just long enough that Hermann started doubting himself. In the dim light of the various projections monitoring Newt’s vital signs and brain activity, he sees that his eyes are open, staring mortified right back at him, exhaling unsteady, lilting breaths. 

Hermann lifts himself from his hunched position over the adjustable bed slowly, like Newt is a small animal that will fly off or scatter at any sudden movements. Newt’s eyes follow him on a delay, reflecting bouncing lines of RGB on their wide, watery surfaces. Hermann swallows.

“Newton,” he says, almost-but-not-quite a question.

There’s a butterfly flutter of his jaw, like he wants to speak, but his brain keeps misplacing the electrical impulses it’s supposed to send to his muscles in the cargo bay of a flight to fucking Cancun. It’s familiar on him, in an all-at-once terrifying and heart-rending sort of way.

“I’ll fetch the nurse.”

They handcuff Newt to the bed. It’s the first thing they do– they don’t check the holoprojectors, they don’t speak to him, they don’t shine lights in his eyes or tap his knees with little hammers or whatever the bloody hell medical doctors do. They wrap a circlet of chromed steel around his wrist and snap it into place with a click-click-clickclickclick that cuts through the monotonous, droning beeps of the monitors and the sound of electricity buzzing through the walls and lights and outlets.

Newt’s eyes just follow the motion of it.

The doctor watches the projection plotting the steady peaks and flares of his brain activity for a long couple of moments. She brings up another screen, which is showing the chaotic mess of nerve signals and neuron firings being harvested from Alice, who is stored away, now, in some dark, climate-controlled tank somewhere in the States, surely projecting an aura of genocide and destruction from the kaiju hivemind but ultimately being heard by no-one. Even from Hermann’s awkward little perch in the corner, he can see that they’re still noticeably different waveforms. She hums, gently, a sound trained not to raise alarm.

For Hermann, the day passes in a series of blue-tinted motion blurs. Muffled questions, the constant smell of Avagard, beeping, beeping, beeping– the vending machine in the corridor steals his money. He just wanted a coffee. He can’t deal with any more questions today, not even ‘How many sugars would you like with that?’. The attending nurse informs him that Newton– Geiszler, she calls him– is in a minimally conscious state. Which, apparently, is as good a sign as any towards his… well. She pointedly doesn’t say recovery. 

Because they don’t know, do they? They have no idea if Newt himself is the enemy. They may have been able to sell the possessed-by-an-alien excuse thanks to the electroencephalograms and the correlation between that and the fucking alien inside his head but they’ll never be able to say whether or not Newt invited it in. Laid out the red carpet and served the champagne. They won’t trust any explanation he gives. They’ll never believe him. No-one will ever trust Newton again.

Hermann tries his hardest to have faith that the man is innocent. That the precursor simply accosted him without warning, or weaseled thoughts into his mind in a syrup-slow trickle of temptation that made Newt unable to realize they weren’t his thoughts in the first place. That he didn’t choose any of this– didn’t put that PONS headset on again with intent. 

(He knows, from the drift bleed-out during his confrontation with the precursor, that it was upset that Newton didn’t feel the same as it did. He can only hope that it’s always been like that. That Newt didn’t just fall out of love.)

They don’t know if Newt will still be a psychopath raving about world-destruction when he wakes. They have no way of gauging the damage his ten-year stint as a kaiju vassal did to his brain; if he’s still the same man inside it all; if there’s still a man left. So they handcuff him to the bed and they don’t say recovery.

The nurse explains that while he may seem conscious, he isn’t actually awake. She tells him to call the staff immediately if anything concerning or alarming happens, but Hermann knows it isn’t truly in the interest of Newt’s health– it’s so they can monitor whether or not he’s still a threat. She warns Hermann that, if he does come to, not to go within arms’ length of him. “Patients can be confused, disoriented– their movements can be erratic and at times dangerous,” she says. ‘If he can reach you, he can hurt you,’ she doesn’t say.

Newton’s bed is propped up at a sitting angle when he returns to the room. His eyes are open, and they follow him through the doorway and further into the sterile white-grey interior, but they don’t seem to be processing who he is. There’s a plastic cup of some pink Lucozade-type liquid held in his free hand. Hermann sits in the chair that’s become his chair over this past week, deliberately within arms’ reach, and pulls out the thick, dog-eared Dan Brown paperback that he haphazardly threw into his overnight bag– with his life so bloody ridiculous, he relishes in the banality of boring and predictable thriller. Can escape for a little while into a world where the kaiju never breached. Escape into that universe just to the left of this one.

Newt speaks for the first time since waking about 14 hours later (Hermann’s been counting; there’s no clock in the room and he didn’t pack a phone charger)-- and Hermann plasters himself against the chair in fright like he’s trying to squeeze into the cracks between the vinyl upholstery.

“Hey,” the man says, simply, like it’s nothing at all. His eyes are still red from immense drift strain, but it’s concentrated down from a full bloom of blood across the whites into dark, angry rings around each iris, like Hermann once had around his own.

“Hello, Newton,” Hermann squeaks out. This is all feeling awfully familiar. He just needs a mug to drop. 

Newt squints, vaguely in Hermann’s direction. The room is painted with the desaturated midnight hues of blue and grey and almost-blacks. Hermann’s reading glasses reflect astigmatic sheers of neon light out from origins of machines he doesn’t know the purpose of. There’s a silence, though not a long one, punctuated by something dripping, somewhere nearby, a cadenced little plip-plip. “Holy shit,” he says, slowly, tasting the words on his tongue like wine. He sounds like he has cobwebs in his esophagus. 

Hermann claws his hands into the cushioned arms of the chair. His heart sounds more like that of a small animal, rather than a human, feeling all sorts of different emotions all at once, and he can see his sweater microscopically shift with the beating of it even in this cloying dim. He’s not ready for this. He’s never going to be ready for this. An evil part of him doesn’t want Newton to remember, wants to drift with him again just so he can pluck the memories of the last ten years from his mind and hide them away in his box of things he doesn’t think about. Wants to tell him it was all just a bad dream, he’s okay now, it’s not real, it can’t hurt him, does he want to talk about it?

Newt’s head turns slowly. The cuff around his wrist rattles like a gunshot through the stagnant air. 

Hermann’s hanging on by a single strand of spider’s silk and it’s just started spinning. 

His brow furrows, like he can’t comprehend or focus on what he’s seeing as he stares down at his outstretched palm. His shoulders start to rise and fall about as quick as Hermann’s heart beat. "W-what–" Newt shakily breathes out. "Hermann, wh–" He coughs as the words get stuck in his throat and looks up to the ceiling, like answers will be written there. He pulls against the handcuff's connecting cord a few times, breath coming in ragged cascades, but then stills.

Maybe the answers were on the ceiling, written there in dust and faint cobweb, because Newt's face goes slack with realization. He lays back against the bent-up bed, eyes still skyward. "Fuck," he rasps, red eyes watery.

That's all he says, before a night shift nurse comes in and starts their chart-checking and nervous questioning. Newt is silent for the rest of the night, gaunt face turned away from Hermann, watching his own heartbeat dash across a screen. Hermann hears a little blue voice in the backs of his ears, wishing the cascading lines would stop.

"Leave," Newt says to him the next day, words spoken into the tessellating patterns of his hospital gown. 

It's raining now, and water drums its small song against the windowpane. The venetians have been slid slightly apart, and a grey city is visible through the manila-colored plastic and drizzle. Trapezoids of office building roofs and wet windows and water-broken nimbostratus. Almost-rectangles of a great, terrifying beyond. Hermann doesn't know what it holds. Hermann doesn't know what this room holds. Everything means nothing means everything. His life feels like the space between changing traffic lights.

Hermann doesn't leave, of course, because Hermann Gottlieb does not simply concede to the wishes of his lab partner without a fight. He licks his thumb and turns the page.

Another day, and the rain is still beating down like a thing bleeding. The earth is saturated with it, a water that soaks, a humidity that hangs, a petrichor that seeps through the pores in concrete walls. 

Newt's back is still turned where he's bunched up in the bedsheets, hiding from his own skin and the horrors that marr it. "Hermann," he says, quietly. Hermann can see a faint suggestion of his face in the reflection of a monitor's silent screen. "Go home."

Hermann just scoffs. "Why would I do that, Dr. Geiszler?" 

Newt bundles the blankets further under his chin and draws his shoulders up to his ears. 

He dreams.

Hermann dreams with him.

Great, spasming things that flash palinopsic like phosphene stars and leave lines in the chair’s armrests where his fingernails have carved the vinyl earth. Things that scream and are so tightly packed that they gr ate against the walls of each other and writhe, hidden, under the gorged and decayed flesh of their brethren as the starvation decides they are the food, now. He is born over and over and he is brought back from death over and over. He exists in everything, scattered across the countless galaxies unto which they’ve declared war, each one full of fear and death because everything is scared and dying, here. Even them. Even him. Some of the skies he sees through his four-coned eyes are green with fallout– others are blue, God’s disregard for his creation shining down even now– but in this moment they are all ending, they’re just at various stages of the process. Everything is just a slow crawl toward death. The skies stretch on forever. 

He opens his eyes and it does nothing. He sees them behind his eyes and in the shadows cast by ceaseless machines and in the scalene shape thrown by Newton’s nose across his face. 

He sees Newt, sitting with his knees against his chest in an apart ment that looks out over the Shanghai skyline. His sweater sleeves are pulled down around his hands, concealing the creeping of ink. It’s dark outside, the only light in the place what the moon can send down, the twinkling of office buildings and hotels and New Pearl Tower, and the lurid yellow backlight of the tank in the room across the way. This is a memory, a dream and a fantasy. Time means nothing here. Newt whispers two words to himself on repeat, a mantra, a broken record, a man in prayer.

“Get out.”

The man shifts in his sleep. The wires in his arms sway like lines cast a-current. Hermann can make out the way his eyes dance behind their lids. Hermann doesn’t get out. He deserves to disobey. In the dream, the pre cursor doesn’t get out, either. He maneuvers over, settles himself down beside the man he’ll always consider his friend where he’s sat against the glass, toes gripped into the charcoal carpet. It feels like needles are pulling his brain apart in hemispheres, inserted just so into the interstitial fluid that it can tear into the glial cells’ embrace and insert all of itself into the gaps between. Get out get out get out.

He feels too small as he wraps his arms around Newt’s shoulders, breaking the shield his arms and legs have made. He inserts himself into the gaps he’s made in the man and holds him, as tight as his ethereal arms allow. Newt shakes and breathes in aborted bursts of hot-cold air and makes noises so quiet they’re barely distinguishable from the hum of machinery and the beeping of the heart monitor as it ever-so-slowly steadies. 

“Is this a dream?” Newt asks, his voice weary from the however-many hours he’s been sitting here.

“Only partly,” Hermann says to the unruly hairs at the nape of the other man’s neck. 

“You’re not here, are you?” he whimpers. The world doesn't end.

“If I could’ve been, I would be.” The tank glows septic and chemical, casts distorted light where the preservation fluid bub-bub-bubbles. The doorway casts a sharp-edged, xanthous shadow. Wires have been dragged haphazardly across the floor. They end in a pons headset, bent where it's collided with the wall but still blinking away an opera in blue-red morse. Red blooms on the sleeves of Newt's sweater like rorschach blotches. What does he see in them? What do they make him feel? 

“I love you," Hermann hears, barely even said but said enough, beside his ear. The floor is cold and hard but his leg doesn't ache, here. Testament to the impossibility. The unreality. How far is he to the left of himself? To the left of their notch in the belt of space-time? He wonders about the path he could've taken to get to this moment. The degrees of difference between them. What could he have changed, had he simply held the man more, told him he loved him more, asked him if he was okay more, during their time together? 

The brain stretches out a desiccating grey appendage and taps on the glass. Hermann would like to believe it's just electrical impulse giving the impression of movement. His throat aches, a phantom-impression left in the skin there.

The brain makes a morbid popping sound as it adheres to the glass.

He is all at once content with the reality he was dealt.

“I know. I love you too. I’m here– 

I’m not going anywhere.”

Newt swears as he jolts upward and the handcuff cuts into the skin at his wrist. His breath comes loud and uneven, the noise of a man who has just been punted back into a cold and untrustworthy reality, a world in which his faith has lapsed so heavily that he expects it to reach out and bite him. His hair is stuck to his forehead with a sheen of sweat.

Hermann straightens himself in his chair, tries to pretend he knows exactly who he is and what he's doing, hasn't let his drift-artefacted brain wander into life's betweens. 

Newt looks at his hand, the uneven, flaky lunulae and ruptured quicks and white seam-lines of old scar. He clenches his fist. Once, twice, and then– "What year is it?"

"It's October, 2035," Hermann replies, straightening the buttons on his cardigan.

"Fuck, Hermann," the other man croaks, throat tight with a two-punch of guilt and loss. "Really?"

"Really."

"It's been– It's been ten years?" 

Since when, Hermann wonders? What is the man choosing as his frame of reference? Ten years since Pitfall? Ten years since he drifted with the kaiju? Ten years since them? Ten years since Hermann got home from work one afternoon in early December to find their pokey Hong Kong apartment strangely empty– Newton had been working less and less back then, his field of expertise growing less relevant by the day– but decided to order takeaway for the both of them anyway? Ten years since something else entirely?

"Yes," he says. Better not to dwell on it. 

Newt's breath starts to hitch. Catches on brambles in his mouth. He almost laughs. "When did I get old?"

"Forty-five is not old –"

"Well I feel old, Hermann. I feel–" He blinks the wetness from his eyes, looks up. Like he can deny he's crying if the tears don't fall. "I feel fucking ancient, okay?" 

Hermann would be lying if he said he didn't feel rather the same. Hermann felt old and decrepit after the breach was destroyed for the first time, but now he feels like he was forged with the first things. Summoned up from soup with the protocells. Like he's been twiddling his thumbs and biting his nails and feeling sorry for himself since pneumodesmus took the first breath. 

Newt turns to him, then, mouth pressed into a line, tight at the corners. His eyes are wide, starred with constellations of colored light. A comet of a tear streaks down his cheek and catches in his stubble. Disperses into damp cosmic debris. "Why?" he asks, very quietly. 

Hermann meets those eyes. 

"Why are you still here?" It's whispered into the air between them. 

His own voice is barely louder. "Wherever else would I be, Dr. Geiszler?"

"I–" Newt looks confused. Meteors shower down his cheeks. "I don't get it. How are you just sitting there ? Pretending like– like I didn't–" 

(Light. Bright white illicium light where it twists in the air before him. He feels fragmented, his consciousness split between the pinpricks on Otachi's tongue, staring back at the ruined bunker and his own puny, entranced form fiftyfold. Bathypelagic prey fish. Colorless and cowardly. His thoughts and his senses and his perception of everything gone kaleidoscopic. Black spots in his eyes. Spinning checkerboards. She licks him. He tastes himself.)

(Heat. Burnt hair smell. The pons leaves half-moons of charred skin on his forehead. The makeup only hides so much. He files for paid leave. His eyes won't stop bleeding.)

(Flash. It's looking at him. Flash. He's looking back.)

He can't say it. The only noise out of his mouth is a sob and the accompanying rasping, hiccuping breath. He hangs his head and covers his face with his hand, wipes snot across the scowling face of the monster that used metropolitan Tokyo as a playpen. "Why aren't you scared of me?" 

"You're not frightening," Hermann says, ignoring the way he's been terrified by the man for at least the last fortnight. Longer. Much, much longer. 

Someone rolls a gurney past. The squeaking of wheels echoes down the hospital hallway, bouncing into rooms both empty and occupied, into closets lined with new linens and plastic sheets, into all the offices and receptions and breakrooms on this floor where tired staff working graveyard shifts steal away quiet moments. 

Newt huffs a suffering sigh and dries his eyes with the blanket's waffled cotton. He only sounds slightly more put together when he speaks again– a bottle smashed and the shards rearranged ever so painstakingly back together, balanced atop one another without glue. Like he could be shattered all over again with a careless breath, or maybe even just a particularly strong glare in his direction. "I just don't understand how you don't hate me." 

Hermann shrugs, an aborted motion. "I've hated you before," he says. "I'm not overly keen to do it again." 

The other man takes a breath in to speak but doesn't say anything. Doesn't know what he could say. Just looks at him with his mouth open. Hermann wants to quip that he'll catch flies, but knows better than to throw rocks at a man with the world on his shoulders. A man who's gone through everything and back again. The corners of Hermann's eyes feel tight. 

He wants to reach out so badly. He's only about an arm's length away. He wants to hold him. Feel the warmth and the nightmare-sweat still on his skin. Wants to feel him breathe, feel the way his lungs shiver, the heat of each exhale. The aliveness of him. (He thinks about the last time he held Newton. He wonders if it'd feel the same, or if there'd be some fundamental difference. A little something there). Wants the proof that he is here and he is now and he is real and Hermann is not simply so far gone that he is unable to distinguish the dream from the reality anymore.  

But he doesn't, because a pathetic man smothering him is probably the last thing Newt needs right now. He doesn't reach out physically – he does, however, prod awkwardly at the long-dormant part of his brain that once connected them. That still connects them, all these years later; a fragile thing, gone brittle with age. Wrought of nothing but charged ions and love.

What he sends out is warm and rudimentary. He sieves all his sharp, scary emotions away and lets the fluffy remains drift across the room, a soft tideline gently lapping up the shore. I trust you, the water says as it weaves lukewarm between the exhausted grooves in Newt's brain. You're safe. Nothing more than that. 

He hopes it feels like a hug. Like a long breath out, like a blanket around his shoulders. 

From the way Newt slowly blinks and lets the last tears fall pearly from his eyes, the way a small fraction of the tension drains from him as he breathes all jittery-like, he thinks it just might.

Mako comes the next day. 

Hermann supposes he shouldn't call her that. 

Secretary-General Mori comes the next day. Her chin is high with authority and her suit jacket grips her form like it is scared of what she would do if the fabric dared go slack. She walks with a cane now, and a much more imposing tool than Hermann's– one that carries an air of concealed weapon, the PPDC's eagle insignia in polished silver staring out from the handle's end. Lichtenberg scar tissue works up her face and her right eye is still bandaged– in the future, she will manage to keep her blind spot a secret from all but Raleigh Becket. The man is not with her this time, though surely not from lack of trying. (Though he may be her partner in things both unbelievably small and infinitesimally large, Raleigh does not have the same capacity for forgiveness that she does. He almost didn't forgive the world. He will not forgive the kaiju and he will not forgive the machines that almost killed her.)

She cuts an imposing figure in the hospital hallway, her father's legacy not piled on her shoulders but the wind at her back. She may not be a biological Pentecost, but blood gives diminishing returns in the face of love and respect. 

Mako opens the door with a swift motion that cuts the air and makes the curtains sway. Newt drops his spoon into his jelly cup and Hermann slams his book shut, hand instinctively placed across the title to keep his withering dignity intact. 

She smiles a genuine smile that crinkles her cheeks. "Hello, Newt."

Newt's face cracks down the middle. His eyes follow the angry lines of her wounds, unable to properly process what he's seeing. What he's done. What he didn't do. His voice is broken. "Mako?" 

The woman turns to Hermann where he's made himself as small as possible. "Dr. Gottlieb," she says, producing a round pin-key from her jacket's breast pocket. "Could you please excuse us for a moment?" 

Hermann glances over to Newt. He looks terrified. He doesn't know what future waits for him outside of this hospital room, if there's something waiting at all. He doesn't know what Mako wants from him, but he dreams about what she could do to him. He doesn't know if there's a troupe of armed guards outside that door right now, ready to escort him back into that holding facility underneath Moyulan, ready to strap his still-raw wrists back down. Would he be a better specimen live or dead? How would they execute him? No existing corporal punishment seems enough. They could excuse anything in the name of science. 

Images of a sickly yellow liquid flash behind Hermann's eyes. Air bubbles meandering upward, the beeping of a constant machine. He reaches out and touches the glass. He's on the wrong side. That's not his hand. 

He can smell formaldehyde. 

'Nor do I have the will.'

But Hermann trusts Mako. She may not be the kaiju's friend, but despite everything, she is Newt's friend– she wants to see him alive and safe and in control of himself almost as much as Hermann does. She would not be so cruel as to bring the hand of God down on Newt now. If she wanted him dead or gone, he would be nothing but a statistic on a list of crimes against humanity by now. 

Hermann shoots Newton a look, a silent murmur of you're safe and a prayer to keep him that way. Newton doesn't settle, so to speak, but Hermann feels his anxiety shift into a new, different kind of anxious. Secondhand guilt coils in his stomach like a parasite. 

When Hermann leaves the room, the last thing he hears before the door clicks shut is 'I'm so fucking sorry'. 

He sits in the hospital cafeteria– a sterile place, with tiles that squeak underneath his shoes and the rubber stopper on his cane, chic pots filled with fake plants– and eats a pre-packaged curried egg sandwich that tastes like nothing. You'd think after so many years spent living on Shatterdome slop and cubes of frozen vegetables, he'd be used to food that tastes like nothing. 

Hermann takes another claggy bite and watches a bird flit about in the courtyard. He watches it pick the bird-lice from its feathers. He watches it peck at nothing, convinced every speck on the footpath is a crumb or a scrap of some kind. He watches it fly off into the sky that's still peppered with grey clouds. 

Hermann doesn't know what to do. 

He doesn't know what to do about any of it. He doesn't know what he's expecting. He doesn't know what he wants. He doesn't even know what's realistic to want. 

He feels like, if he leaves the hospital, if he crosses that threshold of rubber and glass, he will wake up in his bed having found himself the victim of a good dream. A perverse little fantasy of victory. Of getting everything he wants. Of being a knight in shining armor like he'd once wished. He will wake up the same shell of a man he has woken up three thousand times before. Cotton wool in the shape of a human being. A chemical equation playing out a mimicry of life and thought. 

His hands on the cafeteria table feel just too far away. Like he has shrunk inside himself. Like his brain is the wrong prescription. The sandwich feels sharp in his mouth all of a sudden. 

He can't expect it to go back to how it was in 2025. He can't expect anything from Newton because expecting him to just exist is enough. He can't expect the PPDC and the UN representatives and all the goddamn authoritative forces in the world to just let Newt go. But he's also learnt that he can't expect himself to be okay. 

So Hermann sits in the cafeteria and eats his shitty sandwich and realizes that he is not okay right now. 

He is unsure of everything– of what to do to make the man he loves feel even remotely more human, of the answers he wants and the answers he doesn't, of what the walk back will hold. He is sure, however, that right now, Mako is laying out the facts of Newton's continued existence to him like they are tarot cards. She will do it softly and kindly, but that does not make the facts any less cold and any less absolute. 

Newton may not be responsible for the actions of the precursor wearing his face, but he is still responsible for giving it the original foothold into his mind. They need to understand how far that foothold went. Whether Newton, even unknowingly, greeted the destruction of mankind with a smile and a wink.

Hermann knows intimately the confusion and the temptation and the primordial want that the kaiju have stitched into their brains. The alien emotions that fog his mind make him wary of even harmless decisions; he doesn't know how deciding to vary his breakfast cereal selection could be just what the precursors want, but he's reluctant to trust it. (He knows, in spite of this, he has become impulsive and more reckless over the years, and that is where his fears should stem from. But something evil in his mind pushes those concerns aside. He has changed, and that is fine, he thinks, he thinks, he thinks). 

They need to know how long Newton was in control of himself until he wasn't, and the answer he gives could damn him.

(Hermann wants to know. He wants to know if it happened while they were together. If the precursor lived a tiny little lie with him, if Newt chose to suffer in silence while Hermann was comparatively on cloud nine, or if it was a sudden and shocking drop down the rabbit hole. If Newt left because he felt it coming or if he left because he couldn't handle it anymore.)

(Hermann hopes he never finds out.) 

Something tugs at a far-off corner of his brain and he finds himself waiting for the elevator before he's processed that he's even moved from his seat. The ride back up to Newton's room feels like it takes seconds and centuries simultaneously, a time vortex of soft electronic music and nausea. When it dings and the doors slide open, Mako is standing off to the side, having just pressed the button calling for it. 

Her expression softens when she looks at him, and she gives him a smile that's all eyes and cheeks. 

"Thank you," Marshal Mako Mori tells him in that hospital corridor, ignoring the elevator as it closes and goes on without her. A flock of birds fly past the window and cast their fluttering shadows along the walls, disrupting the lukewarm sunlight that illuminates the dust in the air. "For helping my friend." 

Hermann sees her, then, as a girl of just 15, migrating from Shatterdome to Shatterdome in the shadow of Stacker Pentecost. He sees her in the lab, watching the white rat she and Newton absconded from testing and development with wide, starry eyes as it sleeps in its rudimentary bed of sawdust and tissue paper. He sees her with a head of awkward seran wrap foils as Newton tries to dye her hair with conditioner and Kool-Aid. He sees her crying when they can't take the rat with them to Vladivostok. He sees Newton slaving away in the wee hours of the morning in the Shatterdome cafeteria to make her some sort of nebulous concept of a cake for her 16th birthday. 

Hermann sees her now, standing tall despite everything and all the unfairness the war has dealt her. He loves her, in that way that stems from watching someone small grow and bloom and wilt and bloom all over again, many times over. He wants to say he's proud of her, and that he's sorry. 

"Thank you, too," he says instead, giving her a small bow of his head. 

The elevator arrives again, and when it leaves she goes with it. 

Hermann trudges down the hallway in his too-loud shoes and rests his hand against the cold metal of the door handle. He takes a breath, a thing that trembles and shakes inside his lungs. 

When he enters the room, Newton is sitting in the chair Hermann has claimed as his own this past however-long. The handcuff is nothing but a line of red discoloration around his wrist and he's dressed in standard PPDC-issue long sleeves and sweats, the cuffs of the shirt pulled over his hands like he can hide from the ink and the things on his skin. He looks so close to normal, so close to okay. If Hermann wanted to pretend, he could convince himself that nothing's happened; that they're still the same men that shared a lab in Hong Kong. That ten years hasn't changed them in a myriad of ways, that they could fall back into the familiarity they once had. That they aren't two men as time has made them. 

(Erosion is both a loss of something and a creation of something new. He has only lost as much as a marble statue has lost what has been chipped from it.)

Hermann can feel the tension in the air as he meanders over to the bed that Newt has vacated and sits lightly at the end of it. He can feel the question trapped behind Newt's teeth like his joints can feel a coming storm. 

"Why did you do it?" 

Hermann has a sudden urge to ask what, exactly, he did, but smothers it. Mako must have surely told him of their bluff, of how the precursor vacated his mind. Of Hermann risking their source of information on the anteverse, Newton's life, his own life, and quite possibly inciting the kaiju hivemind on an unfounded suspicion about an alien's ability to feel. Ignoring the facts in favor of feeling, of hope, of love. Testament to just how much time– and the drift– has sculpted him. 

Before Hermann can answer, he speaks again. "It wanted you so badly, Hermann . It wanted what you knew." He toys with a loose thread at the neck of his shirt, slowly but surely opening a hole there. "Why would you risk that?"  

Hermann wonders, selfishly– if the precursor wanted him, or if it wanted to be him. If it disguised the need it felt for human connection with Newton, the crushing want to be loved by him, with the excuse of wanting Hermann's brain and the information filed away inside it. (He wonders what it would've done, had it gotten that. Had it realized that he has no answers, has no idea how to love someone well. That all he has is dependence and grief and want and frustration and that childish notion of being mean to someone because you like them.)

(Maybe they could've been confused together.)

(Is it hubristic? To think that, had things played out differently, had he gone to dinner that night, he could've made the precursor understand? Understand what it was feeling, understand that nothing is fair in love.)

(Hermann never thought himself a kaiju sympathizer.)

Hermann stares at his hands, clasped around his cane, thinking. He runs his thumb along the worn grip, fidgets with the rubber notches there and the zzzt noise they make against his nail. "I don't know," he says. "I simply thought I could help you. I had faith that I was right, and if I wasn't…" He trails off. 

(Ha.)

(He sees solder and he sees wire and he sees scrap metal. The pons is heavy at his neck and forehead and his hands shake as he clicks it into place. A chunk of Mutavore's secondary brain waves a glutinous tentacle at him, unaware of what this will do and what this will mean and what this will instill in one of its masters. He hits the red button with a gasp.)

(I win.) 

(It didn't matter if he wasn't right. He had to be right.)

He meets Newt's eyes, red from where he's been crying and redder from where his brain broke under the stress of drifting and found an outlet in bursting blood vessels. "How did you know?" Newt asks, like if he's quiet enough, God won't hear him. 

"How did I know what?" 

"That it loved me." The words are little more than breath and fear. 

My wife…'

'They're taking all the emotion out of it.'

'Loving someone so much that you can change the world for them.' 

He glows with a gold adoration at the mention of her. 

An infectious kind of love. 

'It was obvious,' Hermann wants to say, like it was. Like he didn't spend night upon night upon blasted sleepless night poking and prodding at the blue spots behind his eyes, hoping they'd give him an answer, an epiphany, anything. Wishing that he had more than a hunch, trying to push down the fear that he was just projecting, the way one sees emotions in animals and faces in objects. Hermann's gotten better at trusting instinct and emotion over the years but that doesn't mean he enjoys doing it. 

"I felt it," he says instead, because he did. Possessiveness and jealousy and want that might as well have been his own, seeping through the tattered remnants of the ghost drift. The perversion of human emotion that came to him in the dark, in that little limbo between awake and asleep, where the dreams are fast and the falling faster. Thoughts he dare not think. Wants he dare not want. Needs he dare not need. "Though I regret not realizing it sooner."

Newt's eyes drift downwards, to the muted but multicolored squares of matte linoleum that make up the floor.

"Mako gave me a choice." 

"Oh?" 

"She said that she was willing to move me into PPDC supervision at the Shatterdome. Or, if I didn't trust them– that she'd organize my stay at a psychiatric facility." He says the words like he's reading them, like they mean nothing to him. A string of detached, emotionless sounds masquerading as a sentence. Thirty words in a trench coat. 

Hermann grits his teeth. "And did… did you make a choice?" 

Newt scoffs. "What choice is there?" 

Perhaps there's something to be said, there, that Hermann doesn't know what choice he's made. That he doesn't know which fate is kinder– to be tried as a criminal, or to be tried as a man insane. The PPDC will treat Newton only as humanely as they can treat a man they believe isn't human, and a ward will see him so deranged as to invite worldwide destruction.  A science experiment gone wrong in either direction. Damned if he does, he thinks, doomed if he doesn't.

Perhaps there's something else to be said, about the worm of doubt in Hermann's brain. The small fear that the precursor has not left, that they're all just in it for the long-con, the last ditch attempt of a dying alien to do something before it goes out. 

Hermann daren't say either. Newt pulls his knees up to his chest, like he can somehow hide his most soft, most vulnerable parts away. Even though they're all that's left of him.

The hospital has a garden, a large square space with a canopy of dogwood and a path lined with benches winding in-between. Bushes peppered with white and purple blooms give the place a grassy, floral smell, made more intense by the recent rain. Hermann and Newt walk side by side across the concrete, clues of dampness and washed-around dirt still hiding where the pavers meet. The round plastic grips on Newt's hospital slippers squeak with every step.

"Nice to get some sun, huh?" Newt says, awkwardly, like he's trying to make small-talk with a coworker he doesn't particularly like but has been told to get along with (Hermann knows this tone from experience, unfortunately). 

"It is, rather," Hermann answers, looking up to see puffs of cotton-cloud interspersed among the blue of the sky. The thinner, higher-up branches try to claw at them, to reach forever upwards in hopes of drinking from the vapor there. The sunlight is soft where it falls across his face and the backs of his hands. "Felt like the rain didn't want to stop."

Newt plucks a waxy leaf off a shrub as he passes it and starts to shred the thing, dropping a breadcrumb trail of de-veined foliage behind him. Hermann tuts at him. "What have, uh. What've you been up to, these days?" Newt asks, intently focused on the fingertip-surgery he's doing on the leaf. "Tell me something– anything– I don't know."

Hermann hums thoughtfully, and takes a seat on the dry end of a nearby bench. The concrete is cool under his fingers. "My sister and her wife had a baby." It's the first thing that comes to mind.

"Your s– Karla?" Newt seems genuinely surprised, though whether it's because he knows the probability of a woman falling pregnant after 40 or because the image of a Gottlieb with an infant on-hip is just that shocking. The last they'd met had been just after the war ended, when Karla had heard of what they'd done through public news broadcast rather than the phone call she deserved and boarded the first no-layover to Hong Kong to scold her beloved Brüderchen with an iron first and a burnt tongue. She'd squinted at Newton and abruptly realized he was the pen-pal she'd been hearing of since 20-goddamn-12 and had scolded him with just as much threat of brimstone. (They'd gotten along, because of course they had, at Hermann's expense).

"Mm," Hermann hums in agreement. "They adopted, of course. She just… decided she was ready– to give up her career. The little bugger's almost three, now." 

Newt winces. "Ooh, the last leg of the terrible twos. Helluva time for all parties involved." He lowers himself down beside Hermann on the bench, ignoring the way the concrete's still damp in places, or maybe just not bothering to check. The hole at the neck of his jumper has only gotten larger and more threaded as he's picked at the stitches, and he's started working another one into the seam above the elastic cuff with his thumb. The thing's going to be shredded by the time he gets out of this place. 

"I don't envy her, but I am… I am proud of her." The light filtering through the trees casts shadows, almost like a reflection through water. Wavering oblongs of shade cut through with warm white.

They sit on that bench for quite some time, watching nurses walk protectively at the sides of elderly patients as they meander through the garden, all varieties of people finding nice nooks to hide in and eat their cafeteria lunches, children hopping over the cracks in the concrete, followed closely by their parents, blissfully unaware of what kind of place they're in and how many people die in it. Hermann tells Newt just about everything he can think of, from dreadful books he's read to the ongoing courtship of two of his lab assistants, a budding thing that he's been distantly observing for years. He tells him about the time some of the cadets tried to hide in the walk-in freezer from Ranger Lambert and had ended up in medical with bad cases of the chills, having realized too late that they needed his keycard not only to get in, but also to get out. He tells him about good restaurants and bad public transport experiences and his therapist and how he's probably going to have to start seeing her again and his coworker's desktop succulent named Charles that he babysits on the weekends when everyone else has gone home. Newt gets distracted by a service dog and makes assorted cooing noises about it for a while. Hermann doesn't mind. He just studies the way moss clings to the decorative rock beside him, tiny little sporophytes stretched up and out with the rain. 

(He wishes he didn't feel this strangely content. He shouldn't, when Newt is so distressed. It feels wrong to be happy, right now.)

(But Hermann is a little bit selfish, and right now, Hermann is also a little bit happy.)

"How have you been, Herms?" The man asks eventually, when the sun has sunk a bit lower in the sky and Hermann has quite nearly run out of stories to tell, glad for the interjection stopping him from just telling lies and making things up to keep the moment alive longer. A cabbage moth flits about, weaving its haphazard way through the trees. "Have y– have you been good?"

(Without me, he doesn't say.)

Hermann takes a breath in, ozone and damp soil and still-wet flowers. How has he been, these past ten years? Has he been good? Or has he just been juggling the different states of subtextual fine , like he's always been? Before the war, he was fine. During it, he was fine. Even in that time afterwards, he was just fine done differently. What is he now? What does it say, if he's been good?

What does it say about him, if the only time he's been good has been prefaced by some of the worst times of his life? Is everyone's good just bordered by the bad? Is the state of being just a sine wave, constantly dipping below and rising above a neutral point? His eyes follow the cabbage moth. Up and down it goes. 

"It's been hard," Hermann says as the small thing vanishes into the canopy, camouflaged amongst the white blooms. "But I think I have, Newt."

Up and down, he goes.

"I've missed you dearly," he adds then, feeling the need to. Feeling like he should scream it into the dogwoods and their flowers and the sky and its exhausted clouds above just how much he has missed the man beside him, but he settles for saying it, quietly and precious, letting the light breeze take the words with it.

Newt's thumb breaks through the worn stitches at the cuff of his sweater. "I know," he says. Hermann watches his jaw go tense as he picks the stray cotton from the hole and flicks it away into the garden. "I'm s–"

"That's all I need to know, then." Hermann doesn't want to hear another broken utterance of I'm sorry. He doesn't need it. Newton has already apologized enough and he will only apologize more. Flagellate himself with the words he will see said about him in news articles and academia and fucking Twitter. Self-crucifixion on the aching wrath of humanity. Hermann will not be just another thing he has to say sorry to. "Just so long as you knew that I…" 

He trails off, not quite sure what he's going to say. Not quite sure what would be the right amount of emotion to burden the other man with. He decides it's easier to say nothing, to let Newt decide for himself what the last few words of his sentence were. Decide for himself how much he wants to take from it. From Hermann.

"Me too," Newt says quickly, rubbing at some imaginary itch under his nose. "I… I missed you, too."

(

Apartment that smells like chemicals. Skin hurts. Throat dry. It's forgotten he needs to drink. He feels sick. Feels alone. It tells him he's not alone. That it's there for him, always. That it keeps him alive and safe and wealthy and loved and it pumps his brain full of the chemicals that make him happy so why isn't he happy? 

Tells him she's the only one there for him.

He knows it's a lie. It's why he can't believe her. It's the only reason he can't believe her.

He misses him. 

She fucking hates it.

)

Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler sit on a bench in a hospital courtyard and watch waterlogged petals fall into the damp, mulchy garden beds and float on the small puddles between the path's uneven pavers. They have been through about as much as two men can and they have missed each other much the same and the patients walking past have no idea. They have no idea what the future holds; Newt his own and Hermann humanity's. A bird swoops down and plucks a squishy green caterpillar from a low branch, carrying the wormy thing off in its beak. 

Newt shifts his hand over on the bench– just enough to touch Hermann's pinky finger with his own, a brush of skin that would've been missed were Hermann not hyperaware of the man beside him. Hermann shifts his own hand over and positions Newt's finger firmly beneath his own, holding it there with purpose.

They are just a little bit selfish.

Hermann narrows his eyes at the mess of torn stitches where Newt's thumb is still stuck through the new hole in his sweater. 

You really shouldn't pick at it, he says, not saying anything at all. You'll only make the hole bigger.  

Newt gives the ground the smallest of smiles. "Yeah," he says. "Okay."

They are just a little bit happy.

It's a cloudy night when Newt looks up from where he's been doomscrolling on the (heavily parental-controlled and monitored) tablet that Mako deemed him trustworthy enough to have and says Hermann's name in a small voice, clearly leading up to something. A different nurse than usual had come in some fifteen minutes prior and stuck some adhesive electrodes against Newt's forehead, one of which is starting to slowly slide down his temple and catch on his eyebrow hairs. A rather clinical-looking bowl of wontons and clear broth has gone untouched on the side table. 

"Yes, dear?" The endearment slips from Hermann's lips unbidden, but he finds that he doesn't much care. There's bigger things to worry about than the unconscious use of pet names for his ex-colleague. Ex-boyfriend. Whatever Newt is to him. 

A psychologist had visited today. He was a portly man with a greying beard and round, thick-framed glasses and Hermann had only seen him from the side before being very sternly told to leave by an accompanying doctor. It'd taken them a while to find someone both qualified and willing to speak with a man being purported by the media as a genocidal, sexually-deviant psychopath being controlled by an alien from an unbiased perspective. Hermann, entirely from an academic unquenchable-thirst-for-knowledge point of view, had assumed psychologists would've considered him a golden opportunity to explore the machinations of the kaiju mind. They'd done as much when their first kaiju-human drift had been announced publicly after Operation Pitfall, and the ceaseless appointments left Hermann unwilling to (poorly) describe just how integration into the hivemind had felt ever again. He supposes the whole ordeal has left humanity rightfully wary of seeking out alien knowledge, fearful of what may grip them upon discovery, just as it gripped Newton. He supposes Newton's situation is more fit for a xenobiologist's dissection table than a seat across from a psychologist. He supposes any applicable xenobiologists are now questioning their own professions, all the knowledge in the textbooks they learnt from having been pioneered by Newt himself. He supposes it's sensible.

From the state Newt was in when Hermann returned from his short-lived venture back to his apartment and his well-fed cat and his dusty countertops, the visit didn't go smoothly. The man's eyes are still puffy and red along the waterlines, and it's been hours. The screen of his tablet shines in the film of unshed tears across his eyes. His lips are tightly pursed, like he wants to keep whatever he's trying to say from embarrassingly hiccuping out of him. Hermann just waits, politely, until he's ready to speak.

"Can I go with you?" is what he asks, pathetic and heartbreaking and terrifying and so damn brave of him all at once. He knows it's barely a possibility. A benign little hope for some sense of comfort, some sense of normalcy in his fucked-up life– his life that he fucked up. He knows he's asking Hermann to give up everything for him, again . To sacrifice whatever comfort and normalcy he has left. Constant surveillance, he knows. Infiltration of his privacy, he knows. Life outside of Newton set on fire and thrown away, he knows. 

Hermann has spent so long building himself up, building himself bigger around it. Around the hole Newt left in his life. Spent so long becoming someone new, someone different, someone who did things because he wanted to, someone who existed outside of his last name and his title and his job. Someone who talks to his co-workers and goes to their silly holiday get-togethers and someone who gets called a friend, sometimes, and swipes right on Tinder more times than he does left because he's trying to give people chances and someone who tries to make the lowest rated dishes he can find on All Recipes because maybe he has just enough love left in him to fix them and spoils his cat rotten to the point the vet says he needs to put him on a diet but he never will. Someone who doesn't burn himself with kaiju blue on purpose because he needs to feel something other than lonely and incomplete. Someone who cares enough to stop his nose bleeding down the front of his shirt in a conference meeting. Someone who doesn't cry himself to sleep at night, and someone who doesn't wake up still crying. Someone who doesn't mourn an apartment he's never lived in, with a man he's never married, making muffins that they never burn. 

He's been trying to get better. 

But he hasn't changed.

He's rearranged his entire life around Newton twice before, and the saying goes that the third will be the charm. He gave up everything for him once, ankle-deep in mud and kaiju shit, one man in love at the end of the world, and he'll do it again, with the smell of cooling hospital food and disinfectant in his nose and a thumb-sized hole having appeared in the sleeve of his cardigan. One man in love in the spare chair in a hospital room. 

(You would do that for me?)

He gave half his life to Newton that day, necessary to save the world or not, and the man still has it. The grooves in the back of Newt's brain are shaped like him, they house their scampered-off parts of him in the trenches there, sandwiched and hidden away between the walls of electric fat. It's not a choice, to keep him there, just that they have become each other, a little; a heterogenous mixture of two minds, separated but incomplete without each other. White and red blood. Salt and water. (He's realizing, now, that he still has half of Newton. That the man has been halved and then quartered and left thoroughly without himself). Hermann cannot fix himself if he is missing a piece, and that piece is currently sat across from him with a shitty waffled blanket over his knees and tears running down his face as a result of how long Hermann's taken to answer him, to give him anything except a blank stare. 

Hermann, somewhat impulsively, assesses the probability of him being able to kidnap Newton, dispatch the security detail outside, utilize what little power, influence and money he has to snivel them away into the Russian countryside, and never being seen or heard from again despite them surely becoming the most wanted criminals in all of human history, as close to zero. Hermann, somewhat impulsively, is still tempted to try. 

Instead, however, he will ask Mako whether or not she can allow Newton to stay with him rather than under PPDC or medical surveillance. She will say no, of course, because that would be an unfathomable risk, and Hermann will get down on his good knee and he will ask again. 

He doesn't know what she'll say. 

"Please answer me, Hermann," Newt croaks out, aiming for nonchalant and utterly failing, but succeeding in breaking Hermann out of his thoughts. "This silence is killing me, man."

"You're welcome wherever I am," Hermann says, instantly, before realizing that's not much of an answer, mostly because it's a lie. The man is barely welcome on planet Earth. 

"I just–" Newt wipes at his eyes. "I don't want to be around– all that , at the Shatterdome. I don't think I can be around it. Knowing that I… that I'm in proximity of–" 

Newt's voice breaks off with a choke. A sound like a dead branch finally snapping free of the tree it's plaguing. He puts his palms to his eyes, the groove of his socket and nose where they fit air-tight, and presses down, hard, trying to make himself see stars.

Hermann sees checkerboards swirl in his peripheral vision, incrementally shifting with his gaze. 

"And I'm not crazy." Newt's voice comes again, slightly more confident, slightly more put-together this time around. "I'm not," he repeats, a self-assurance. People have been calling Newton Geiszler crazy since he was five years old; his mother, his classmates, his coworkers, tattoo artists, strangers on the street, Jaeger pilots, tabloid journalists and talk show hosts. Hermann has called him every synonym for the word he can think of. Newt is nothing if not defiant. "M-maybe I was, but that– that wasn't me, and– and I don't want to be treated like I'm crazy, Hermann." 

His next words are just a whisper. "I can't let myself believe them," he says. "I'm not crazy," even quieter, a prayer breathed into the flesh of his palms. 

"I'll ask Mako if she can arrange it," Hermann answers, trying too hard to sound sure of himself. 

He asks Mako.

She says yes.

(He didn't even have to beg. She just gave him a look like she'd already prepared for this conversation, rehearsed all the ways it could go in her head. All the ways right and all the ways wrong.)

(He wonders if the rights outweighed the wrongs.)

(He knows they didn't. He knows she's taking that unfathomable risk. Trusting him despite all of her training and all of her instincts and all of her responsibility screaming at her to do otherwise. The world on her shoulders gets heavier, but she won't let it crush her. She won't throw any of it aside for some temporary feeling of relief. She cares too much.)

(How much of a virtue can one accumulate until it becomes a vice?)

(He wonders what they did, to get this woman of steel and soft looks to trust them so.)

((They lived.))

((She has lost so much.))

It only takes three days for them– whoever they may be– to give Hermann's house the all clear. He moves all his work and work-related documents to his office at the Shatterdome, as well as his laptop and tablets and holoprojectors and anything that could pose even a slight confidentiality risk. He also moves his small collection of special edition figurines there as well, along with the old Jaeger blueprints he hangs like posters on his office walls. They make him wipe his home computer, and factory reset his TV, just in case. He donates all his books published past 2012 to the street library a short way away, and a few of the better ones to the Shatterdome's rec room bookshelf. It's mostly non-fiction and textbooks, but he slips a few of the more researched kaiju comic books between them. 

They line his apartment with not-so-hidden cameras, slightly- more -hidden cameras and recording devices and they alarm all the doors and windows, even the ones leading out to a sheer drop. The alarms won't sound, Mako explains to him, but they will send a notification to both the PPDC and their assigned security details whenever they're opened. The security detail itself is 24/7, of course, and is a rotating shift of discreetly-armed guards in the complex lobby. Hermann's intercom will ring twice daily, needing one of them to report– the thing is fitted with voice- and facial-recognition. Any trips further than the lobby must first be scheduled and then authorized, outside of Hermann's commute to the 'dome four days a week, whenever they give him the actual clearance to return to work. Newt isn't allowed out of the apartment without him.

It is, essentially, house arrest, aside from the small capsule they insert into the back of Newt's neck, a little divot in the subcutaneous fat there, hidden between the horns of Hundun reaching around the highest knob of his spine. They say it's a tracking device. They all know it's something else. 

(Bomb or not, it gives Hermann a brand new intrusive thought.)

An officer cuffs Newt around his wrists and his ankles like he isn't 5'5, drip-fed and could somehow overpower an escort of armed guards with rows of shiny military badges on their jackets. (Hermann realizes too late that they kind of did do that, back at the Shao headquarters, and perhaps the idea of Newton being physically dangerous is less proactive and more reactive). 

They get chaperoned through the hospital by four men with splint-straight backs and boots that are loud on the polished linoleum. Two of them have guns half-hidden beneath the wool of their suit jackets, and the other two have glimpses of yellow tasers at their hips. Hermann prickles under the eyes of the patients and staff that turn their way, his stomach turns with every hand he sees placed on a child's shoulder to draw them closer, every head that snaps back away when he looks at them. He can't imagine how Newt feels, shoulders hunched and metaphorical tail between his legs. Maybe he's getting used to it. The looks people give him. Feeling shunned.

Parked directly in front of the building's sliding glass entrance is a black Jeep with the PPDC's eagle insignia decaled into the side. In the taxi stand a short way away is another, more pedestrian car with tinted windows, bearing the same sign– the men with guns break off soundlessly towards it. Ranger Nate Lambert leans against the driver's side door, decked out in the more formal pilot's uniform and trying to look thoroughly intimidating. If Hermann were any other man, he probably would be intimidated, but Lambert's square shoulders, puffed chest and high chin leave no impression on him aside from one of a man attempting to mimic the aura of another. (He knows how much the young ranger admired Stacker Pentecost, knows who puts up the posters of Coyote Tango in the dorm rooms, but the late Marshall's presence was one of unquestionable command and Lambert's will forever be one of unquestionable compliance). 

(If he were Newt, he'd probably be intimidated. There's a chip in his lateral incisor.)

Ranger Lambert doesn't even look at Newt as they approach. If anything, it seems like he's actively avoiding doing so– he keeps his eyes locked on Hermann, in fact, which again, doesn't intimidate him, but definitely makes him teeth-grittingly anxious. The larger of the taser-wielding officers opens the door to the backseat and simply lifts Newton in with what's less of a gasp and really more of a squeak of shock. The man throws him hard onto the leather captain's chair and Hermann winces as Newt struggles and worms his way into a seated position, but says nothing, because he doesn't want to fuck this up. 

Or so he thought, until the man slams the vehicle's door shut and mutters, ever-so-audibly, the word 'freak' under his breath. 

Hermann doesn't see red, per se, but he does see a very aggressive shade of salmon. 

He whacks him sharply in the ankle with his cane, and the man whips around as though a gunshot has rung out, hand instinctively reaching towards the holster at his hip. If the man's eyes were not obscured by dark lenses, Hermann is sure he'd have been seeing as much salmon as he. 

Hermann just steels the set of his jaw and the downturn of his brows, trying not to feel pinned underneath the loom of the much larger officer. "I'd appreciate it–" Hermann snaps. "– if you didn't speak of my friend–" He stresses the word for emphasis, and adds a tap of his cane against the concrete just for flair. "–like that in my presence."

There is a moment of tense silence, just the rumble of a far-off bus going past, before Ranger Lambert interjects, words loud and level. "Dr. Gottlieb," he says. " Behave ."

And Hermann, the little bootlicker that's buried in the core of him come out in full force, drops his shoulders and purses his lips and behaves. 

Ranger Lambert waves off the two remaining men, one of which heads towards the other car, still idling in the drop-off zone, and the one Hermann struck shuffles around to the passenger seat. "I apologize for that," he says, tone of voice implying that he really doesn't. "Marshal Mori sent me to make sure everything went smoothly. She would've overseen Geiszler's transfer personally, though she is otherwise occupied at the moment." 

Hermann wonders if it's because of Ranger Pentecost and his bold declaration of bringing the war to the Anteverse. A ridiculous notion, and one that Hermann is glad to have had insofar nothing to do with. 

Lambert's head ducks, just a little, as he tries to reach level gaze with Hermann. He frowns and sucks a mouthful of air in through his teeth. "Can we trust you, Gottlieb?" he asks, and then purses his mouth like the words were sour.

Hermann blinks at him. "Have I not proved myself trustworthy these past twenty years?" 

"Oh, you certainly had," the man quips, mock-impressed, picking at non-existent lint on his lapel. "Coding the Jaegers, Operation Pitfall, Tokyo– we couldn't have done any of it without you. But then you do this. " 

"And what exactly would that be, Ranger Lambert?" Hermann knows. He just wants to know what words the ranger will use when he says it. 

"Siding with the enemy, Doctor."

"He is not–" 

"He is." Lambert clicks his tongue. When he speaks again, it sounds like a threat. "Not even you can say that he's innocent. And when we're talking about terrorism, genocide, and worldwide destruction, anyone who isn't innocent is the enemy. Involved with the kaiju is something you don't want to be."

Hermann feels small. Like a schoolchild being talked down to. He won't stand for it. "You're correct," he says to his shoes on the pavement. "Dr. Geiszler may not be the picture of righteousness, Ranger- though we all would've died ten years ago were it not for what that man did. He doesn't deserve trust, but he does deserve respect."

Lambert's gaze is birdlike and cruel. He hates this conversation, he hates what he's doing, who he's been forced to be around. He hates the kaiju. Hermann can feel it radiating off him. "I don't think you respect him. No, I know you don't. Which is why I think that both you and the Marshal have personal interest in Geiszler and are deliberately foregoing duty in favor of your emotions."

Hermann wants to ask, what about you? What if it were Jake, because what with the way he's trying to open the door for the kaiju to slither right on in and risking billions of lives on a reckless foray into another dimension, it might as bloody well be- but the look that Ranger Lambert is giving him tells him that it wouldn't make a difference, if it were someone he loved handcuffed in that car right now. That he'd still do whatever it takes to make sure they never posed a risk to humanity ever again. 

(Hermann unfortunately finds himself on the Kantian side of an ethical dilemma.)

"As I understand it, you and Geiszler are drift compatible. And I also know that your drift with the kaiju was the catalyst to Geiszler's..." Lambert struggles for the right words. "...temporary insanity. So you'll have to forgive my sudden wariness of you, Dr. Gottlieb." He scrubs his hand down his face, a momentary crack in the facade. "I'll ask again. Can I trust you?"

Hermann doesn't know if he can.

"Yes, sir."

Lambert hums, then opens the Jeep's driver's side door and slides himself upwards and in, setting the thing's engine a-roar with a press of his authorized thumb to the steering wheel. Hermann circles around to the remaining free seat and tries not to be annoyed by the way they expect him to lift himself almost a foot off the ground to get into the damn vehicle. He does so with a grumble and a wheeze and a deep ache in the joints of his leg, all very unhappy that he's spent more nights sleeping in a chair this month than not. He makes a mental note to check if his medical cabinet is still all present and correct once he gets home. Once they get home, he supposes.

Newt shoots him a sympathetic look from the other captain's chair and Hermann sends him back a feeling and a twist of his mouth that he hopes translates to everything's fine. 

The car starts to move with a languid lurch and Hermann's stomach flips, his entire torso suddenly feeling awkward and uncomfortable with anxiety. He coughs a little to try and remedy it, which doesn't work, of course, it never does. Everything can only go so wrong from here. He starts subconsciously calculating how probable it is that they get into a car accident, that a tsunami warning is issued for right this moment and they're all washed away. Nothing is ever zero. 

He looks over periodically and each time finds Newt with his lips tightly shut, sucking the saliva in through his teeth, a thing Hermann recognizes as something he's always done when he's nervous and can't properly process a situation. He stops his mental calculations for the likelihood of various disaster events or unfortunate accidents or sudden health issues that would lead to them never making it to his apartment. To home. He focuses on taking enough deep, steady breaths for the both of them. 

In for four.

Ranger Lambert can't trust him. The PPDC can't trust him.

Hold for seven. 

Mako shouldn't trust him. Fuck, maybe even humanity as a whole can't trust him.

Out for eight.

But Newt can trust him. 

And back in for four.

And maybe that's all that matters.

Hermann's apartment is dusty and white-grey. Third floor with a little glass balcony overlooking the street, the bright convenience store and hip little cafe down there; most of it is taken up by an ancient air conditioning unit that rattles the sliding door it's sat against something awful. There's a white leather couch that's sunken and sad in the middle, and a matching armchair with hundreds and thousands of little pinprick holes in it from the cat. The walls are covered in uninteresting abstract art and particularly boring stock photos of gerberas with water droplets cascading off them because staring at the empty walls and counting all the imperfections in the paint did absolute wonders for Hermann's mental health and his ability to procrastinate, back in the day. There's things in the fridge that need throwing out, but the place is comparatively tidy to how it usually is. The piles and piles of sensitive documents and loose-leaf graphing paper that have laid around for years and somehow seemed to develop methods for asexual reproduction have vanished, because they're sensitive documents and Newt is a terrorist. He thinks the surveillance team that prepped the place even cleaned up a few of his… older, scarier mugs of tea.

"It's not much, but it's, ah–" Hermann mutters, toeing his shoes off and leaving them haphazardly in the entryway. It's not like they'll be tripping over them on the way out the door anytime soon. He glances across the space and tries to ignore all the tiny ways things have changed. The way one of his remaining books' spines sits slightly out from the rest on the shelf. The fingerprints on the kitchen smoke alarm, just visible through the sheen of dust that's gathered on it because Hermann can't stand on a chair to reach the thing. The tape over his computer's webcam is gone. There is a big black dot of a camera in the corner. "It's home, I suppose." 

Newt's eyes also scan the place, taking in every little way that it's not as perfect as Hermann would like it to be, the ways he always insisted their apartment back in Hong Kong proper be. The cobwebs in the high places, the way the front door's scuffed the linoleum and he's tried to hide it with a cat-themed doormat. The withering microherbs on the windowsill. The chips in the imitation-marble bench and the chair just visible in the bedroom, piled high with clean clothes he just couldn't be bothered folding. The souvenir magnets and photographs on the fridge. One of them has been turned around, only a yellowing Kodak logo visible and the small, jagged print of the date it was developed. Hermann strolls into the kitchen and puts the kettle on. He knows the coffee's stale and surely just a damp clump in the jar. "Sorry about the mess. I haven't been… around much, as of late. Much more pressing things to think about than–" Some of the stucco from the roof around the fire alarm has been knocked loose, and the kitchen floor crunches with little rocks under his feet. "–than sweeping the floor."

"Dude," Newt says, with his hand– quite unbelievably– on the back of Hermann's couch, in Hermann's living room, in Hermann's apartment. Whole and physically unharmed aside from a small bruise on his upper arm that Hermann shouldn't really know about because it's very hidden, from when the guard threw him and he collided with an arm rest. Not possessed. Not dead. Not even handcuffed. Just alive, right there, everything that's left of himself. A collection of wrong puzzle pieces forced together into a picture anyway. He looks out of place. He looks as out of place as he looks everywhere else. "Do you really think I mind?" 

Hermann realizes the absurdity of apologizing that he hasn't had time to tidy up to Newton. That this is Newton, his Newton, and not some other guest that he'd like to pretend he's not entirely rude to. "No, I… I don't." 

The kettle sounds its cheerful chime, announcing that it's just the temperature he likes it, and Hermann spoons out a heap of coffee powder from the soggy brown biscuit it's become. The milk is past its expiration date, but he sniffs it anyway and finds it, unsurprisingly, expired and sour-smelling. There's bugs in his tub of powdered milk. He supposes he'll have to settle for making it black, and voices as much to Newton when he asks if he'd like one, mostly out of politeness because the stuff's going to be awful. For better or worse, the man nods where he's scanning the remnants of Hermann's bookshelf with half-interest, and Hermann stirs them up two mugs of stale black coffee, one with three sugars and the other only one. 

"Thank you, Hermann," Newt says, words more curt than usual, like he's trying to sound sincere, when he takes the too-hot mug and wraps his hands around it, ignoring the way it must surely burn. He doesn't take his eyes off the bookshelf. It's mostly banal things– recipe books, a worn lineup of Baldacci's, a book on cloud watching and another on the constellations as they'd been visible in 2033, some mindfulness coloring books and some Michio Kaku books he wrapped his head around as a child but keeps around anyway to look pretentious and full of himself (strangely enough, they've left Xenobiology for dummies behind, maybe just to shame him). "I mean it."

Hermann asks, inexplicably, over the rim of his mug, "What for?" 

Newt moves his shoulders, almost a shrug. His hands are shaking. "Oh, fuck, I don't know. You only uprooted your whole life for me, no biggie."

"It's not a 'biggie'." He ignores that it is, actually, kind of a biggie. The coffee tastes like hot water and dirt mixed together into something that looks like, but is fundamentally not, coffee. "Really."

Newt just drinks his coffee, and the look on his face says it's no better for him than it is Hermann, and his taste buds haven't been properly stimulated in ten years. He eventually balances the cup on the couch's backrest where he's leant against it, a precarious arrangement, because it really is too hot and his attempts at self-harm have always been half-hearted. He scrubs at his eye and tries to pass the redness there off as irritation. "So," he says. "I guess you live alone?" 

Even Hermann can tell what he's really asking. 

He hums in thought. "Not exactly."

Newt's eyes go wide, the ruddy whites of them visible where he pointedly isn't meeting Hermann's, not seeing the lightheartedness Hermann is aiming at him. "Oh."

He takes another, somewhat reluctant, sip of his coffee, out of habit more than anything else. "There is someone you should meet. If he doesn't approve of you, well…" Hermann gives a performative grimace. The automatic cat feeder and water trough are hidden on the other side of the kitchen bench, in the corner beside Hermann's feet. There are a few toys strewn about– a plush gingerbread man that's had his embroidered eyes and smile thoroughly defaced, a chain of pink feathers on a stick that's getting rattier and rattier– but mostly on the ground in front of the couch, which Newt has his back to. "You'll have to leave, I'm afraid."

"Um. Okay." Newt is looking pale. Hermann probably should've rethunk teasing him. "What's his name?" 

He steps out from behind the counter and sweeps some of the stray stucco popcorns to the side with his socked foot as he goes. "Junior. I'm sure he's around here somewhere."

He pokes his head into his bedroom and finds his quote-unquote housemate (though perhaps freeloader is more of an accurate term) sunning himself on the windowsill between the closet and the bed, a vortex of grey-striped fur with no clear beginning or end. In his attempts to find the best spot to accumulate solar radiation, he's pushed the potted cactus that usually lives there into the very corner. It's looking very brown and very soft and very sunken-in, and the sill around it is littered with old, squashed petals. The poor thing was flowering, before everything. Before the world didn't end again. And now it's little more than a neglected mush, no good for anything except the trash. Hermann files it away under things to deal with later and hefts Junior under his unoccupied arm. The cat gives a small mrrr of annoyance at being woken up so rudely, but doesn't protest further, simply hangs limp and fat as he's carried. 

Newt looks to Hermann, and then to the cat and its dangling limbs, and then back to Hermann, and his face goes soft. "Oh my god," he says, a breath out, sounding fond already. Of the two of them, Newt has always preferred animals, and animals have always preferred him. His mouth goes tight as he tries to fight a small smile when Hermann places the cat on the ground between them. 

Junior seems utterly unbothered by the presence of a new person, simply watching as Newt bends down a little to present his hand for him to sniff at. The cat forgoes him in favor of licking his own shoulder awkwardly. 

Newt takes the shunning in stride and glances back up at Hermann, a smug quirk to his lips. "Knew you were a cat person."

(Hermann's never had a pet before. Family had some yappy dog or other that died quite tragically, or so he's told, but he was honestly too young at the time to remember the thing aside from a vague impression of red-brown fur. Dietrich and Karla's emotional reactions to the dog's passing solidified that the Gottlieb household would never have another animal– not even a neglected betta fish Karla once tried to smuggle home from her boarding school dorm one summer. Poor thing flipped around in the garbage for longer than was pleasant to watch. He supposes that he may have been a defacto caretaker of Newt and Mako's rat, though he'll deny any involvement with it whatsoever. He never even really wanted a pet– all few years of his adult life before the war broke out were spent painfully busy at the behest of his father's company or both sides of the education system. During the war, things like pets were just a liability, something you'd have to leave behind if you had to start running. After, though… maybe his bed felt too empty, too big around him. Maybe a ball of fur by his feet was just enough of an excuse for a real warm body beside him.)

"Reluctantly," Hermann answers, a half-truth. 

Newt laughs around the rim of the mug he's reclaimed from its precarious position on the couch. "Your coffee tastes like shit, dude," he says with a grimace, and Hermann just throws him a little look like I know and decides that he should probably show the other man around the place he'll be stuck in for, well – however long the fates permit, he supposes. 

(He knows it won't be forever. Can't possibly be forever. Newton will be tried, either as a man or a monster, at some point, and neither will end well for him. He knows this, logically. He just hopes it takes them a bloody long time to find someone willing to steal God's own eyes to judge him.)

The couch in his office folds out into a futon that really isn't all that bad on the back if you're not Hermann– he does, or at least did, have occasional guests– and he throws some assorted bedding at Newt and tells the man to make it himself, seeing as it's his. (It's always been his– guests be damned, Hermann only bought the bloody thing in the hopes that Newt might show up at his doorstep and ask to stay. A ridiculous thought, of course, but one he entertained anyway. Thought he might show up in the middle of a thunderstorm soaking wet, like their lives were a bloody rom-com. But their lives aren’t a rom-com, or at least not one that’ll sell, and Newt never tracked water across Hermann’s floor one night, didn’t sit awkwardly at his dinner table and dish out every combination excuse-apology he could think up. But he’s here now. God, is he here now .)

He watches Newt struggle with the fitted sheet, corners popping off haphazardly, and doesn’t even realize he’s staring. Staring like he’ll blink and all the things he can’t see will snavel Newt up, disappear him somewhere. (He doesn’t want to close his eyes and find that Newt is still there, behind his eyelids. What with the side effects and all.)

He says something about buying Newt his own things, sometime, so he can feel like he isn’t just bunking in Hermann’s office. They’re at the start of a long road towards anything that might be considered normalcy, and they both know it’ll be awkward and strange and unwelcome for a while– both cohabitation after so long alone, and the circumstances they’re having to live under, but they’ve done it before. Said a mental fuck it and just accepted that wherever they go, they’re just going to have to go together. Three times over, now. Newt stops fluffing a pillow to wipe half-fake sweat from his forehead and quips about how he’s gonna need a shower, after all that hard work. Hermann gives him a tour of the bathroom, shows him where the painkillers and the toothpaste are, which towels he’s allowed to use, briefs him on how the hot shower tap is too sensitive and the cold tap not sensitive enough, so it’ll scald more often than not. Opens one of the travel-size toothbrushes he’s kept from some trip somewhere and sits it in the cup beside his own lonely green one. Newt says he doesn’t remember the last time he brushed his teeth, and rides up his gums with a finger to examine them in the mirror, like they might’ve rotted and he hadn’t noticed or something. He sticks his tongue through the gap Ranger Lambert left in them. Hermann rifles through his clean clothes pile in search of something long-sleeved he doesn’t wear all that often, willing to bequeath to Newt’s stitch-picky fingers, and sets them on the floor beside Newt’s PPDC tracksuit while he showers. The glass is so opaque to almost be white, but he can make out the dark outline of Newt sitting on the bench in there, and the steam says that he’s chosen to let it scald.

Hermann just sort of stands in the living room and drinks the cold dregs of his terrible coffee, mind running wild with anxious what-ifs until the other man reappears. His hair’s mussed every which way and still mostly wet, dripping dark trails down his shirt. It’s just a grey thermal thing Hermann usually wears under his button-ups when it gets too cold, paired with some fleece pants with selburoses and reindeer on them in a Christmassy pattern; he’d honestly worried they wouldn’t fit (he’s always been a far stretch thinner than Newt, just by nature, and they’d never been able to share clothes unless it was something purposefully oversized) but they seem almost loose on him, now. 

“Hello,” Hermann says with a smile that’s mostly eyes.

It all feels scarily normal. Like they’re pretending to be normal, to be fine, to not both be in pieces across the tile, that it’s going to take a bloody long time to glue themselves back together. That they won’t always be missing pieces and sometimes not able to tell whose piece is whose. That they’re pretending they can love each other easily again, that there isn’t a chasm wrought open in the inches between them. Because they are, and they will. Pretend. 

“Hey,” Newt says back, a little sad, but that’s just how he is, now, how he will be, for a while. Maybe for forever. 

It’s okay.

It’s okay. 

It is. 

Really.

Finally.

Not really, but, y’know–

It will be.

It can be.

It’s okay.

Fuck.

Hermann is soon given the task of feeding two people with the meager and long-forgotten contents of his fridge and pantry. What isn’t sealed is full of weevils and what is sealed is mostly expired, and all three types of pasta he has are stale, aside from some unopened spaghetti hiding in a yoghurt maker that he barely remembers owning. All the dairy’s off, but thankfully there’s a just-add-water packet of alfredo sauce somewhere that he’s had for yonks, mostly because he’s sort of scared of instant food, now, and also because things coming in convenient powders and foil packages reminds him too much of the old Shatterdome, the old war, the rationed slop they were dealt. His microherbs are only withering, not completely done for, and he thinks there’s enough left of the parsley and chives to salvage some sort of color into the meal. 

Newt’s sat on the couch, tossing a string of bright pink feathers all around the coffee table, making Junior dash wildly across the floor with the sound of bells a-jingle and claws a-tearing. Sometimes he’ll hop, in that half-hearted senior cat way, and breach the side of the table just enough for Hermann to see a flash of grey ears in his peripheral vision. Sometimes he’ll jump up onto the cushion beside Newt and the man will grab him carefully and flip him onto his back and accost Junior’s expanse of pristine white belly for a moment while the cat fights playfully against him.

The sight is so painfully domestic that anxiety snakes and roils in Hermann's gut while he picks the moldy spots from the cheese. Not just anxiety- there's fear there, too, clung to the bigger monster that curls in him, a small thing stuck on tight like a sucker-fish between flashes of the sleepless night he'll have tonight. Fear that he's being tricked, fear that having Newton safe and alive is too good to be true, because when you've been through two wars and countless amounts of death and loss, being distrustful stops being a bad trait and starts being a survival instinct. And they fooled him so well the first time, you see- he's sure it's just paranoia, he's sure that's his Newton sat there, he can feel him thrumming away at the place where his spinal column meets brain, but- but what if they can come back, what if it just made a strategic retreat, what if it's just lying in wait until it can finally deploy some master-plan that'll really destroy them all, this time, what if-

(Fool him thrice, shame on who, exactly?)

What if it's worse. What if it's Newt having him on. Fear that having him safe and alive is too good to be true. What if he gets up in the morning and-

He puts his tapwater/sauce powder/cheese concoction onto the burner on high, listens to the water on the bottom of the pan sizzle with fledgling heat. Panic thrums at the core of him.

"Dude," Newt says from the living room, and Hermann can see the cat scratches raised and red against the skin of his hand but he keeps idly skritching at the couch fabric, getting Junior to pounce. "I can hear you thinking from here."

Hermann stirs the sauce, watches the liquid separate in the trail of his wooden spoon and then reconnect, bubbles of powder breaching the surface. He can feel the underlying 'do you need to talk about it?' threaded into Newt's words like a headache, like a hair being pulled out at the back of his head. He doesn't particularly want to talk about it, neither of them do, but he's well aware wanting and needing are different things. He throws a handful of chopped herbs into the sauce and sits heavily onto the chair in front of the stove. "Newton, you…" he starts, and then shuts his mouth again with a click of his teeth. He doesn't know how to say it, how to articulate what he means. 

He sees it, though. Clear through the now-familiar fog of his mind, a thing wrought in the washed-out early-morning colors of fear. 

(Blood on the bathroom floor. Not much. Just enough. A considerate amount, enough that a sweep with the steam mop and running the tub tap will get rid of it all. The kindest explanation.)

(Loud bang. Blood on the walls. Blood in the carpet. Tried to run. No more running. No more anything. His knees hit the floor and there's nothing left above them.)

Newton's teeth clench, he sucks his lips tight against them, and Hermann feels it, the grit and the squelch. He saw that, blue and heady-scented in the drift.

(He's tried before. Just a kid with too much on his shoulders and a mom three-quarters of the way around the world and medication that he doesn't take because it changes the way he thinks, the way it feels to think. Makes him feel like his body is shrink-wrapped around him, tight and constricting. Just a man watching a second monster rise from the ocean after they'd killed so many innocent people with their own evil weapons taking down the first one because they weren't made to kill kaiju, they were made for killing people and that's just what they'll do. He watches the newswoman report the death and destruction that slowly but surely approaches, watches grainy clips of it writhing below the whitecaps, and her voice is so calm and uncaring and professional and he can't fucking do this again, man–)

(Just a man in a Shanghai apartment, sprawled at his desk that's covered in breach blueprints and spilt ink and molding cups of coffee that he forgets exist the moment they're put down, not real and hot in his hands. But he isn't just a man, though, is he? He is a man and something more. Maybe he is less man, and more something else, now. His grip is so tight on the pen-knife that even the handle is cutting him. It's all he has. It's all he can do. He is just something sat in a Shanghai apartment.)

When he breathes the drift out, it feels like pulling a blade from skin– it bleeds out like a stuck thing, like an ink blot across the fluid surface of his brain. Hermann shouldn't know any of that, and his heart clenches with guilt about knowing something so personal, so sensitive about someone else. When his eyes refocus, when the room around him stops looking like somewhere else, somewhere he's never been before, he finds Newt looking back at him with his brows pulled together in something like embarrassment and his cat-scratched hands folded tight between his knees. He gives Hermann a look like it's okay, like Hermann is the one that needs the comfort, like he could possibly be alright with Hermann reliving his own suicide attempts in front of him. Like he could possibly be alright with the constant thrum of anxiety Hermann feels about losing him again.

"You're…" he starts again, feeling inexplicably pinned under the look Newt's giving him. He still can't articulate it, but at least he knows that Newt understands what he's asking. "You're okay, right?" he finishes lamely, looking to the floor, losing some sort of mental fight with himself.

The corners of Newt's mouth upturn, tighten a little, but the smile doesn't reach his eyes. "No," he shrugs out. 

(He's not okay, but okay is also relative; the concept of okayness changes from person to person, from day to day, and Newt's personal standards for being okay have dramatically shifted and they will shift again, as life goes on. As he gets bigger around everything. By Hermann's perception of the world, he isn't okay. By his own, he's alive, he's safe, he's with Hermann, and he can pretend things are normal– that time hasn't eaten away at them, between them, around them, that he hasn't done unthinkable things– Newt is fucking fantastic .)

"Hermann," he says. "I've lost ten years of my life. I've ruined every good thing I've ever had." 

(It's almost funny, how many times he can ruin the same thing. A morbid part of him wonders if he could fuck it- fuck them– fuck it all up a third time.)

The sauce starts to bubble on the stovetop, the rising and popping of them disturbing the patchwork of un-stirred herbs on the surface. 

"I can't trust myself. I don't know what's going to happen– to me, to the world, I–" Newt slumps a little on the couch, letting his back and legs conform to the slouching shape of it. His eyes drift to some point in the middle-distance, some spot on the bookcase across the room. "I don't know what I've done. I don't know if the precursor had backup plans that're just– just waiting to go off." 

He runs a hand through his hair and holds it there, grips the roots and tugs outwards until even Hermann can feel the tightness of his scalp. "I can't tell if anyone's actually forgiven me or if they're just– just saying that to make me feel less guilty."

Hermann wishes he could tell him it wasn't his fault. None of it. Not the re-breach, not Tokyo, not the kids he's killed, not Mako– He wishes Newt's guilt were a physical thing he could help the man shoulder, and not just a fog of emotion that hangs around his feet, drags at his sleeves and tugs his chin down. He wishes he could just– he wishes he could just tell it to piss off. Ask the guilt of reigniting a trans-dimensional war and possibly dooming all of humanity if it would pretty please leave his friend alone. 

But he can't ask it, because guilt doesn't have ears, so he has to sit in the kitchen and listen to the man he's loved for twenty-three years say things that kill him and let the sauce burn. 

Newt's hand trails down to cover his face, cover his eyes as he speaks. "I don't know if you letting me stay here is conditional or not. I don't know if you… if you actually care about me or if you're just– pitying me. If you feel like I'm your responsibility."

No, Hermann thinks. Bugger this. 

Maybe in the next universe, he'll sit there and he'll let Newt say this, these things that need to be said, these feelings that are hard to fix. Maybe he'll say he's sorry. 'I'm sorry, it's not conditional, it's not pity, you're it for me and without you I don't know what I'm bloody doing–' and then he'll turn and scrape the browning sauce off the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Bugger it all to hell. Not in this universe. In this one, Hermann reaches behind him and flips the burner off and stands from his stool and crosses the threshold from kitchen to living room.

"Newton, dearest–" he starts.

Newt puts his head back against the couch, staring up at the ceiling. He gesticulates with the hand that was in his hair, a hopeless little flick of motion. "Everything is so hard to understand. I'm fucking terrified. Of course I'm not okay," he answers Hermann. Of course he's not okay. "But I'm trying to be. Really." 

He shifts to look at Hermann, where he's stopped in his path halfway from the kitchen. Smiles in that new, sad way of his. Smiles in that way that makes Hermann's heart fit itself back together just to break all over again. 

Hermann takes a few more steps, until he's standing beside Newt where his knees are pulled up on the couch. He aches with the need to touch him, to gather him up in his arms and hold him tight, to wrap him in blankets and bubble wrap where he sits so that nothing can ever get to him again, nothing except Hermann. He wants to open his ribcage and hide Newt away inside himself. Have the man wear his skin in a permanent hug. He hopes that Newt didn't catch onto any of that, lest the possessiveness he feels drive him away further. He means it all nicely– he really does. He hopes he does.

(God, he hopes he hasn't changed in the way he loves Newton. He hopes he still loves him, as a person. In that primal, fire and brimstone and butterfly heart, uniquely human way.)

Hermann reaches out, tentatively, and Newt's eyes follow the movement of his fingertips with a nameless emotion. Half-fear, half-want, the gaze of a man that doesn't get touched. A man that once fed off the warmth of others rendered scared of another's body heat with time. Newt reaches up and captures Hermann's hand with his own, fingers wrapped around the bony curve of his wrist. 

Hermann thinks, for a moment, that Newt might push him away, but soon his thumb tilts up to press into Hermann's palm and then drags his hand downward. Newt holds the backs of Hermann's fingers against his forehead, small and sacred a gesture. They could pray, like this. They could be wrought in stained glass and the colored light shone from it on the cathedral floor. 

"You haven't ruined everything, Newt," Hermann tells him, doxology of a man that knows there is nothing holy in this place, on this whole fucking planet, and that if there ever was a God, they've all been thoroughly abandoned. Here they are, with the knowledge of extraterrestrial life, that there are others out there so totally unlike them to be unrecognizable, but still utterly alone in a cold and silent universe.

(They are here acknowledged. They are here detected. It is still the nature of intelligent life to destroy others.)

(It is still the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself.)

(Love is a tale of mutual self-destruction. Love is a cold and silent universe.)

"I know it doesn't mean much," he says. "But I'm still here?" He says it like a question, like he doesn't know if he's really here or not, whether he's here in his living room after the end of the world with Newt or if he's in the lab with a nosebleed aching behind his eyes before it or if he's overlooking great bio-peninsulas that snake around the birthing pits as they bubble and spit out screaming half-made things and to be honest, he doesn't. He feels like he lives in superposition. He moves his hand down Newt's face to cup his cheek, to make him look at him in all the places he simultaneously exists in, all the realities and all the places along all the timelines leading to and away from this moment. 

Newt leans into the touch, hard enough to test whether Hermann's actually corporeal or not. "Yeah," he says back. "Yeah, you are." 

And then he stands, abruptly, and wraps his arms around Hermann's midsection, pressing his forehead into his chest. Hermann can feel his breath move the fabric of his shirt, back-and-forth. Back-and-forth. The sudden contact is like electricity on his skin, hot and tingling and freezing him in place, and it takes Hermann a moment to settle into it, to realize he has hands and he should move them, because if he doesn't, that's a bit of a mixed message, and– 

Oh.  

Oh, he would move mountains for this man–

He would shout at the sea until it parts– 

He would ask an alien with no concept of the word 'no' to give him back to him. He'd say please. All the cherries in the world. He'd do anything. 

(Maybe he doesn't have to ask. If Newt gave himself willingly. Maybe he understands.)

(It wanted you so badly, Hermann–)

(It's too selfish. He wouldn't have. Not for him. Not that.)

Hermann puts his hand on the back of Newt's neck, pushes aside the too-long hair there so he can rub soothing circles into the skin with his thumb. "If I'm being honest," he says into Newt's ear, lighthearted. "It might be hard to get rid of me." 

The man makes a motion like a laugh against him, and then just holds him tighter, and Hermann holds right back. Once again, he could pretend that it's the before-times, before the apocalypse, and before the apocalypse before that, back when they were still stupid enough to hope that the kaiju weren't the be all, end all of their lives. Back when they were still people and not just creatures trying their hardest to be anything else (-- and in Hermann's case, half-succeeding at it). Could pretend that they haven't been shaped by the war, haven't had most of their adult lives consumed by it and its aftermath, aren't things born of creeping radiation and rationed food and choke and guts and chalk dust and stupid, stupid hope. Or– he could pretend they're in his living room, standing on his weirdly-patterned rug, sauce overboiled on the stovetop, eyes on them from every direction because Newt is a genocidal maniac and Hermann is whatever you'd call someone who loves a genocidal maniac. (Hopeful, maybe. Stupid, definitely). 

"It's not conditional," he continues. "It's not . No matter what, I–" 

I'll be on your side, he wants to say. He doesn't say, because his eyes flick to the lurid orb of the camera in the corner, beady blackness of the thing surely winking at them with the display they've been giving it. Probably not the thing to say if he still wants to be employed come morning. He almost says it anyway.

Instead he drops his head to Newt's shoulder, and ends a little pathetically with, "I don't know."

"Fuck," Newt says to him, like he's said so many times before– losses too great, weight too heavy, no words for feelings like that, no words except 'fuck'. "Don't know how I managed that." 

In the end, the sauce is only a little burnt.

Newt doesn't get better, but he does get better at it– at not being okay. The first week is hard, mostly because he's stuck in a place he's barely familiar with for what might be forever, and he owns nothing and he is nothing and there's only so many TV channels to flip through before you just start crying. Pre-war ghost hunting shows can only keep his thoughts at bay for so long, and Hermann finds himself no longer caring about the ever-present tear stains on the shoulders of all his shirts. It's hard, because the home Hermann's made is so impersonal to him, the room he's in still feels like the office it is, the bed for guests still unwelcoming and temporary at his back. Even the clothes he wears are all borrowed from Hermann's closet, and Hermann can only sympathize with how difficult it must be for a man with as fragile a sense of self as Newt has been forced to become to look around him, to look down at himself and see absolutely nothing he recognizes, nothing he can derive comfort and stability from. He can't even familiarize himself with his environment because security hasn't been given the go-ahead to let them outside yet; thankfully, Hermann doesn't have to stoop so low as to hand one of the door decals a grocery list, because his meal kit subscription has still been paid all this time, and he has to watch the guard on duty rummage through the box of neatly-packaged ingredients for anything potentially dangerous, like two aging scientists would somehow be able to scale a building undetected with the help of exactly five frozen shrimp and a packet of mornay sauce. The box does not, unfortunately, come with milk, so they both keep drinking Hermann's shit black coffee, and they both keep complaining about it, just for something to do. 

Hermann does remember to tick the box labeled vegetarian on his subscription from now on, though. Newt eats the food, because he's never been particularly strict with his diet, especially not when they lived ration to ration, and he doesn't say anything, but Hermann can tell by the way he side-eyes his plate that he doesn't enjoy it. 

The only game Hermann owns is a 3D chess set someone gave him as a gift and he never took the plastic off of, and at one point, he considers getting it down, before realizing that suggesting he and Newt play a game with the premise of waging dimensional war on one another is not one of his brightest ideas. Instead, he subjects Newt to his growing list of TV series he promised he’d watch and never did, some of which are good, some of which are laughably bad, and Newt forces Hermann to read his cheap paperbacks out loud to him, and Newt’s tablet doesn’t let him use social media, but Hermann shows him all the posts he thinks might interest him on his phone anyway. They chat and they twiddle their thumbs and they whittle away the time between intercom reports like it’s a thing physical. They start watching old Jeopardy episodes with dinner every night and play along like their honor hinges on it, and Newt’s won more times so far, and Hermann will blame it on the fact that he’s not American, of course he doesn’t know anything about American football, and of course Newt counters it by saying he also doesn’t know shit about American football, but it’s not the same and he knows it. Junior, little traitor that he is, abandons his usual bedtime haunt on the covers by Hermann’s feet to curl up on the empty side of the office bed and hog Newt’s duvet. Newt’s trying to nurse the microherbs back to health. They brush their teeth together in front of the bathroom mirror every night. It’s so painfully normal. It’s so normal, if you ignore the way Newt yells in his sleep. The way the man rarely goes to bed, just lets himself pass out on the couch most nights, the way the blue-light glow of his tablet lights his room up whenever he is there. When Newt does sleep, Hermann often finds himself startled awake by a dream half-remembered and an overwhelming urge to be sick, an electric feeling in his limbs that he hates as he stumbles into the bathroom. A feeling that he recognizes but doesn’t want to– aching, terrifying want. His subconscious doesn’t yearn for Newt, like his nightmares of old used to taunt him with, it yearns for the precursor. Yearns for the fullness inside his head, yearns for her multi-pronged tongue to slide back and forth into the valleys of his brain, yearns to feel her imaginary hands slot into his each time he closes his eyes, tilts his head back. He wants her to poke at his sympathetic ganglia just for fun, twist his white ramus around her fingers. It’s disgusting, and he’s disgusted and confused by it, but it doesn’t stop the way he wants it. (Hermann thinks, aimlessly, that he’d happily feel like this all the time if it took even a little weight off of Newt’s conscience). 

Eventually, they get approval to leave the house with an escort, and Hermann makes damn sure the first thing they buy is the most teeth-rottingly sweet caramel latte premix he can find. They trot down to the ParknShop a few streets down, Newt in a red checkered shirt of Hermann’s that he’s trying to disguise the too-big size of by tucking into his slacks and his noisy hospital slippers because all of Hermann’s shoes are prescription. He’d manage to dig a black bucket hat from god-knows-where that Hermann doesn’t even remember owning and it only makes him look a little like a lost child and Hermann feels incredibly fond, watching the man flutter about looking at window displays and yellowing posters for long-gone-by events and all the little ways Moyulan has disguised itself as a bustling town, spread out like a shanty from the Shatterdome’s wake, the first line of defense against the enemy that will surely attack again, is just biding its time under the surface of everything. The proximity to the Shatterdome and the military occupation, at least, makes the presence of their armed escort less alarming to passersby, and they’ve dropped far enough back that Hermann can almost convince himself that they’re not teetering at the threat of violent death for every sudden movement Newt makes. 

He lets Newt buy literally whatever he wants, because the man doesn’t ask for much, doesn’t have the confidence to flippantly demand things anymore, but he does give Hermann what can only be called an attempt at puppy-dog eyes every second supermarket aisle they go down. Their basket is full of confectionery mostly marketed towards children by the time they get to the checkout, and where Hermann would typically feel immature or embarrassed by the state of it, he finds that he instead feels a little proud. Of Newton. Of the both of them. Of how they’ve both made it to this point, the point where they can just ramble about the nutritional content of breakfast cereals at each other, when so much of their lives have felt utterly hopeless. Of how he’s only now realizing that he spent all that time convincing himself he was okay because it was a lie, and now… this time, maybe, he won’t have to convince himself. Maybe he actually can be okay. Maybe if he’s okay, he can start helping Newton be okay. And if he can’t, well… that’s okay, too. (He’s allowed to be okay, he tells himself, religiously. He shouldn’t feel guilty for feeling better. Newt wouldn’t want him to). 

He buys Newt shoes, and the stark cream of the sneakers he chooses stands out jarringly against the rest of his haphazard outfit, and then they get him at least the basics of a functioning wardrobe, because, all things considered, the PPDC pay Hermann quite nicely, and he’s got enough tucked away to not have to worry about things like that. He’s sure Newt has a bank account, somewhere, the man had to afford that Shanghai apartment somehow, but he’s also not sure if he even has access to it, or would be allowed access to it, so he doesn’t bring it up and Newt doesn’t second-guess him when he says I promise it’s fine. Everything Newt buys himself is considerably more long-sleeved than looks normal on him, but Hermann can’t say he doesn’t understand why. 

They stick glow-in-the-dark stars on the roof of Newt’s room, pointedly ignoring the fact that they’re two men in their mid-forties, and if some find their way onto Hermann’s ceiling as well, it’s no-one's business but his own.

Eventually, Hermann gets his job back, and he can tell it's not because they want him, it's because his kaiju blood thrusters were a bright idea and they can't implement them on a wide scale without him. They also need him to back-track through all the systems the precursor didn't manage to purge before the DIY breach opened, find out exactly how it was manufactured using Earth-resources and Earth-technology so they can use it for their happy little skirmish into the Anteverse (all under strict confidentiality, of course). It's not far-fetched to assume that they won't let him near any of the new kaiju samples; even if Mako trusts him, she can only ignore a blatant security risk so much without her authority being questioned, and there are enough amateur K-scientists in the department to handle all the truly hands-on work, these days. 

He leaves Newt with a hug and a promise not to stay too late, and Newt waves him off and says he'll be fine, he's not five, he can handle being on his own for a few hours, even though the shake in his voice attests otherwise. The chauffeur to the Shatterdome is awkward, but also pretty bloody convenient, so he supposes he better get used to sitting in cars with dark windows and heavily-armed men. 

Hermann's not sure when he stopped thinking about it. The next universe, the next him. The next Newton. All the things that aren't real because they aren't him, they aren't now, they aren't this one lucky-unlucky world line some God or some chance committed them all to. 

(There was a time, somewhere there, when Hermann thought about his idyllic little possibility so much that he started to dream in analogues to it. He'd fantasize, he'd mourn so vividly while he stared sleepless at his bedroom ceiling that when sleep finally did overtake him, he wouldn't notice. His feet were so thoroughly planted in the fantasy, pushed through the boundaries of this reality into the next that he would spend several hours a night living it. Feeling and thoroughly believing that he was the Hermann with the life just a little different to his own, just a little better. Deluding himself. Sending himself just a bit insane. Then he'd snap awake as the light crept yellow-grey through his shutters and the air he heaved into his lungs then would feel exactly the same as it had in the dream. No more real, no less fake. Just heavy in his chest.)

(Shuangxi dreamt he was a butterfly.)

(Is the butterfly Shuangxi's dream, or is Shuangxi a butterfly's nightmare?)

Hermann just notices, one night, when he's put his pyjamas and his bed socks on and his mouth still tastes minty-cold with toothpaste, the door cracked just enough that the light of the television drifts in, shifting in hue every few moments, just enough that if Newt glanced over, he'd be able to see him– that he lays under the covers, arms crossed over his chest as he watches the stars on his ceiling slowly die in failing flares of non-toxic phosphor, that he's thinking about what he'll make them for breakfast in the morning. What he'll be able to whip up before he has to leave for work.

There's eggs, and spring onions, and he thinks the cream is still good.

(Turns out, Shuangxi and the butterfly were one in the same. Not dreams, not nightmares, not reincarnations, not one-universe-over's, not impossible possibilities, not nice little fantasies. Just time.)

(Just time, and Shuangxi would find himself inexplicably presented with a half-finished chrysalis, and an unshakeable urge in his chitin limbs, to weave.)

(It just wasn't time yet.)

It's late afternoon, sun streaming golden through the balcony door, casting tiny rainbows along the walls where it refracts off a dusty crystal vase, when Hermann tosses Newt a battered menu and tells the man to order them something, anything, he really doesn't mind. It's a little family-run establishment a few streets over, too local to have a menu online or a deal with a big delivery service, and maybe it's the novelty of still having to ring up and order that makes it Hermann's favorite. Physical menus are a level of intimacy that's been few and far between, since the war, and he likes the way it takes him back to the days before Uber and QR codes and drone-delivery.

Newt just sort of stares at the paper in his hand, peers at the poorly-printed font on the front. He unfolds it out into the larger sheet listing dishes and prices in both English and Cantonese. "Uh," he clears his throat after a moment. "Could you order, actually? It's just…" 

Hermann looks up from where he's stacking the dishwasher, a real task with how compact the thing is. 

Newt makes a non-committal noise, eyes leaving Hermann's to continue idly scanning the lines of text. "It's nothing."

He places the glass he was holding flat on the bench with a hollow noise. "Newton."

The other man waves his hand in abject dismissal, and then stands the large menu straight up on the table just to hide behind it. "Don't worry about it, man."

"Now I'm absolutely going to worry about it," Hermann tells him, opening the soap drawer with a click and putting a capsule inside, wiping his hand on his shirt where the soluble plastic makes his fingers feel sticky. "So you may as well just tell me."

"It's– I…" Newt scrunches the menu flat against the table in defeat and sinks low in his chair, shoulders high, eyes held straight ahead avoidantly. "I was gonna say something, but then I didn't, and then I left it too long, and now it's gonna be awkward and shit, and–" 

He purses his lips, rubs the worry lines in his forehead smooth with his forefinger and thumb. His eyes drift over to watch Hermann place that glass in the washer, balancing everything like crockery Jenga, and close the door with only minimal noise of porcelain and stainless steel colliding. Newt sighs and does a little gesture with his fingers.

"I can't read it, is all," he says, is all , like it's nothing, and then puts on a lighthearted tone to continue. "I mean, c'mon , Hermann, you know what I'm like. My vision's dogshit."

"Are– I–" Hermann stutters out, squinting at the other man like he could somehow see the poor eyesight on his face. "I thought you got surgery, Newt."

(Didn't just think it– the precursor told him, when he'd asked, because he does know what Newt's like and he knows his eyes are too sensitive for contacts, and in their profession, the devil's in the details, so getting around half-blind isn't really an option. He's acquainted with the specific manifestation of Newt's disorders so intimately that he knows Newt chooses the biggest, boxiest frames he can find instead of glasses that actually suit him because he feels he can hide behind them. Feels that they soften the blows of other people's eye contact. That they excuse his lack of it. The precursor wearing his friend's face, but unable to truly empathize with him, had said, simply, ' Got Lasik', and waved him off with some excuse about his vision getting worse in the eye the drift fucked up, and that making updating his prescription more of a hassle than a help. It's true– Hermann's are bifocals now, adjusted for distance in just the one lens, and they tell him he should wear them all the time, but he doesn't–, but he's only now realizing that he'd taken the kaiju at their word for it.)

"Yeah, uh. No. I didn't." Newt wrings his mouth like a sponge at the admittance. "She– It didn't need me to see, I guess. Made it… a lot harder for me to do anything on my own, or–"

Or interfere with it, he doesn't say. Hard to call for help when you can't see the numbers. Hard to tell what that code you're writing does when you can't make out a single line of it. 

There is a box in the bottom of Hermann's closet. Wrinkled with age, dust stuck to the packing tape's ends, a thing he's carried around for ten years, now. Unopened, undisturbed– full of air from a time long-gone, a time when they were both different people, and they're different people again. Newt left so suddenly, back then, gone with the late afternoon sun, and it's not like the precursor asked for any of it back, so there the box still sits, indented into the carpet under the little shelf that holds Hermann's shoes. 

"Hold on, then," he says, realizing he probably should've done this much sooner. 

Newt doesn't protest, just watches him with muted interest as he shuffles into his bedroom and disappears. 

They didn't have much, when they lived together, what with the war and having to leave whatever didn't fit in a suitcase as they hopped from 'dome to 'dome and blatant disregard for material possessions on the brink of annihilation and all, and he did end up throwing quite a lot out with the years, so the box is small and half-empty and quite easy for even him to wrangle under his arm. He maneuvers it out onto the dining room table and dumps it a bit harder than he intended in front of Newt.

"I was going to say something," Hermann quickly tells him, an intentional mirror of Newt's own words while he's eyeing the meager box of belongings like it might leap out and bite him. He can hear his heart hammering away in his chest, quicker to panic than it used to be– he just doesn't want Newt to think he was keeping things from him, is all, and– "And then I didn't. I didn't mean to hide it from you for this long, I just–" He just didn't think Newt was ready to come to terms with that time– he didn't want something miniscule like a box of belongings to hinder his progress– he's thinking about it now, and all his excuses really do sound condescending, don't they, and really, did he not think giving Newt his things might actually help the man settle back into existence and reality and everything? Hermann lets out a shaky breath, aware he's making this about him and Newt hasn't even done or said anything, yet. "I didn't want to upset you, love," he finishes, pathetically, still feeling quite dirty because he was hiding things from Newt, no matter how well his intentions. 

Newt doesn't answer his ramble, just reaches forward and peels the ragged duct tape keeping the box closed away. He opens one cardboard flap, peeks inside, and then shuts it again, holding the thing close to his chest, arms folded over the top of it. He opens his mouth to say something, anything, imitates a fish gasping for air as he tries to put anything he's feeling into words. He looks up, determined not to cry today. "You didn't have to–" he cuts himself off before his voice breaks. 

Eventually, he sorts through the box like everything inside it could break at the slightest touch. His old tour shirts smell like moths and age, the windows on figurine boxes opaque with dust. Yellowing photos, his half of the friendship bracelet he made with Mako when she was just a kid, the one birthday card his mom ever sent him. A tarantula and a shark's egg both encased in glass. All his letters from Hermann, the paper gone all crinkly and stiff over the years (he always knew they both kept them, that he wasn't the only sentimental sop between the two of them). There's a few picks and a battered orange pedal he doesn't really know the purpose of– the whole guitar is in his cupboard as well, most likely rusty and a long-suffering victim of the humidity, but he'll get around to telling Newt that later. Hermann pulls out a chair at the table and sits. 

"You didn't have much," he says, and then understandably adds, "– understandably. I kept everything that I thought you might–" 

Come back for. 

(Selfish.)

(Hermann Gottlieb is so, so selfish.)

"–that might mean something, to you." 

Newt pulls out a battered leather case. The glasses inside are 13 years out of date. They're big, square clear-framed things that sit just crooked enough over his nose and that's why they were his spares, Hermann remembers now, remembers the man constantly having to adjust them, remembers the aggravated noises he'd make whenever he finally got fed up with fixing them for the day and would toss them across his desk with a clatter. He looks bloody dashing in them and the Hermann of 2022 was quite glad when he switched them out for the dorkier black ones. 

Newt puts them on and blinks a few times, both to adjust to the old prescription and to clear away the moisture gathering there. "Thank you," he whispers, looking all at once like a child who's just gotten a gift that was far too expensive to feel deserved and doesn't really know what to say about it. 

"I–" ( didn't do it for you, he almost says, because he didn't. He fought the urge to throw out Newt's things almost as much as he fought the urge to wear his old shirts, to sit in the box and pack himself away with every left behind thing because that's how he felt at the time– and knowing what he knows now, was a deeply wrong way to feel, if such a thing exists. He kept them out of that same hope that they'd somehow lure Newt back to him, preferably at night, in the rain, spitting apologies and confessions like vomit). (He didn't know. He can't blame himself for feeling like that. But he will). (Hermann and Newt are drift compatible for many reasons, and martyrdom is just another one of those things they share. The inability to accept that something was beyond their control. They sniff out fault like dogs and are overeager to claim it. It's part of the reason the losses of the kaiju war resonated so heavily upon them. They were n't to blame. They could n't have prevented it. It was n't all their fault). "You're welcome. Is it… is it better ?" 

"No," Newt tells him. They're 13 years out of date. Just like he is. Of course they're not better. Of course their fix is only temporary and barely effective. "But yeah." 

It is better. 

The Moyulan Shatterdome is cool and well-lit, unlike any of the old ones, the threat of extinction so prevalent during their construction that their actual habitability was secondary to their effectiveness in every way. Where the Hong Kong Shatterdome had long, boxy, claustrophobic corridors lit artificially from striplights in the floor or hulking, sickly-green fluorescents set into the ceiling, Moyulan has windows, or skylights, or at the very least, cool white halogen bulbs in the deeper or more central sections. Where Hong Kong was made of beams and girders that were shipped express without trimming or buffing, had to be cut to size and cleaned up during installation, Moyulan is rounded and safe and proper. There is no rush of war here, no sixth sense of the crunch the place was built under. No cruel concrete, no exposed piping or dagging ventilation foil, no orange light that exuded a sense of panic. Moyulan is almost welcoming, in a morbid way. Even the mess hall is an improvement, not entirely torturous to be in– still a large, rectangular space, several dozen tables spaced out across the room with trash cans spaced periodically between them, entrances from every direction with paths to them laid out in blue LEDs. Vending machines and holoprojectors and the occasional blu-tacked poster advertising yogurt drinks or grass jelly sprinkle color throughout the place. It's quiet, this time of day, past breakfast though not yet late enough for lunch. Used to be, Hermann would only ever eat in his quarters, or on rare, desperate occasions, in the lab, though in recent years he's found himself eating in the mess more often. 

Mako requested that Newt come to the 'dome to talk to her in person, last night during their check-in. Hermann almost said no on instinct, before realizing it's very much not his decision to make, and stepping aside to let Newt give her what would become a hesitant affirmative. They both know what it's about; Mako isn't exactly opaque with her intentions, and it's easy enough to infer that she wants the PPDC to have easy access to Newt's brain– both his experience and his expertise. He can't blame her, even ten years out of date, Newt's knowledge of kaiju anatomy and physiology is still at the forefront of the field, and Hermann can say from experience that all the K-scientists that adopted the research after the war are sorely lacking in practical application– all the samples are flash-frozen, long dead. There's only so much you can learn without live specimens (once again, Hermann knows from experience). They both know she's going to offer Newt inside-man status at the PPDC, though only because she'd be touted as insane if she offered him his previous position back. They both know what Newt is going to say. 

Hermann's sitting in the aisle-seat at one of the tables, with clear view of the door that eventually leads to Mako's office, taking small bites of his half- ham and mustard pickles, half- salad sandwich (and if he did that on purpose, well– ).

After what seems like a small eternity, the door slides open and Newt and Mako (as well as the ever-present escort) appear in the hallway. She gives him a small wave, with just the tips of her fingers, and then spots Hermann where he’s sat and repeats the motion at him. He lifts his own fingers in acknowledgement around his neat little triangle of bread. Newt stalks over, shoulders held high and hunched like they have been the whole time he’s been in this place and pulls out the seat beside him at the table; Hermann passes him the remaining portion of sandwich wordlessly, and he takes it much the same. 

A cadet rushes into the cafeteria, hair mussed and shirt buttoned incorrectly, and grabs a plain packaged granola bar and a tub of jelly before heading back out the door they came from. Newt scoffs a little around his mouthful of salad and mayonnaise. “Good to know the food hasn’t changed,” he says. “I’d literally rather die than eat the ‘dome jello ever again.”

“I thought you liked the jelly,” Hermann jokes back, remembering Newt’s late-night raids in the kitchens for any kind of conceivable sweet to keep him going through til’ morning– more often than not, he’d resort to eating several sequential sachets of the protein-and-collagen-rich blue jelly and making himself sick. The stuff has no conceivable flavor and the texture of it is toeing the line with liquid; Hermann’s never been a fan of it himself. 

Newt, obviously remembering the same, shivers. “Desperate times, desperate measures, Herms.”

Hermann folds the empty paper the sandwich was wrapped in into a square, finding the nearest trash can slightly further than arm’s length away. He grimaces and decides he'll dispose of it when they get up to leave. "How did it go?" he asks, only a little hesitantly. "With Mako?" 

Newt's face falls immediately, and he hides it under the guise of wiping away crumbs from the side of his mouth. He looks down at the sandwich like it's personally wronged him. "I told her no," he answers.

"Ah," goes Hermann, not surprised in the least. 

Newt stuffs the remainder of his food into his mouth, face turned away from Hermann to hide the way it's a bit more than he can chew. "I didn't want to, but–" he continues, and then coughs to clear the huskiness from his voice. "– fuck . I did." 

Hermann reaches over to place his hand over Newt's where he's sat them on the table, sleeves held tight in his palms to cover the skin of them; something that Hermann's come to accept as sort of uniquely him, now, just another small thing about him that's a little sad but a lot reasonable. He runs his thumb over the bumps of Newt's knuckles. It is a parallel of another time, slightly to the left of where they are now. "I'm proud of you, Newt." 

Newt doesn't snatch his hand away, indignant and offended. Not like he did. "I can't do it, man. I can't be around any of this. I-I know how much I'd be able to help, but I just…" The white light sharpens the corners of him where they've softened with age, makes the hollows of his eyes seem deep and pointed, the cut of his cheeks crueler, somehow. They're all just skin stretched over frames of blood-mush and bone, and it is especially evident now, as Newt's brows furrow and he turns his hand in Hermann's to hold him right back. " Am I supposed to feel guilty?" 

They both vaguely register one of the cafeteria doors sliding open and the quick footsteps that follow. Newt moves away to wipe the seemingly ever-present dampness from his eyes and Hermann to stand and throw away the sandwich paper. 

"Dr. Gottlieb?" 

Ranger Namani sidles towards him, a manila folder fat with stapled documents clutched to her chest. Clearly running errands as penance again, like all the cadets (or ex- cadets, he supposes) seem to be doing on a Sisyphean schedule. Her formal ranger uniform dwarfs her, sitting large in the shoulders and long in the sleeves, but all the kids involved in the New Tokyo skirmish have taken to wearing them like badges of honor despite their impracticality and awkwardness. Honestly, they deserve to be proud; they're living proof of the immutable spirit of humanity. 

"Oh, Miss Namani," he says, taking the three steps back to their spot and lowering himself back onto the bench beside Newt. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" 

The other man scoffs at his formal greeting. Hermann kicks him in the shin under the table. He mutters a quiet 'ow'. 

Amara, bless her soul, pretends not to notice that she just witnessed Dr. Hermann Gottlieb kick someone. "Um, Jake– Ranger Pentecost–" she corrects herself, the exact opposite of the way Jake himself corrects everyone, "was wondering if you're available to discuss… some stuff." 

Hermann raises his eyebrows. Some stuff. "Currently, I am on break, but you can tell him that I will seek him out as soon as otherwise possible." 

"Oh, okay. Um." The girl's eyes wander over to Newt's stiff-shouldered form with interest, obviously not recognizing him out of the designer sunnies and gaudy suits. His hair is longer, these days, wrought with greys that he doesn't cover up anymore, hanging distractingly in his eyes and curling at his neck, and the big glasses work to hide him at a prying glance, too. He's none and all of the man that wracked with laughter atop a New Tokyo skyscraper as hundreds of people died screaming below him. He's the haunt of the insane, traitorous little man they all knew him to be. 

"Hi there," Newt says to the girl who saved everyone from what he did.

"H-hello," Amara says to the man who almost cost her everything all over again. 

He holds his hand out, sleeve slipping as he does so to reveal the slightest sliver of color at the junction of his wrist. Amara's eyes follow it the way a cat might follow something a-scutter in the grass. "I'm Newt," he says, easy on the outside but Hermann is trained in recognizing the tightness in Newt's jaw, the way his teeth click together when he closes his mouth. He can feel the man's flight instinct hammering away in the backs of his legs to run. 

The young ranger doesn't take his hand. Her fingers twitch, almost to do so, a subconscious response to an offered hand. "Amara," she says back, clipped, and Newt is careful not to let his expression shift when he lowers his arm back beside him. 

"Oh my god," he goes, because while the man is smarter than most people alive today, that does not bring with it the sense of social awareness that other, normaler people seem to innately have. "I've heard all about you. Getting a Jaeger to operate off a single neuralink system? It's not impossible, but it might as well be, and that's fucking impressive by itself, but at your size, holy fuck–" 

"Newton," Hermann interrupts, and while he suffers from much the same social ineptitude as Newt, he runs off a set of pain-stakingly memorized rules as to how, when and to what extent interactions with other human beings should occur. "Language."  

(They are not always correct.)

"Hermann, c'mon, look at her, she clearly knows what fuck means–" 

"That is no excuse for such unprofessional behavior, especially in the presence of a Ranger–" 

Newt makes a pffsh noise at him. "Shut up, dude." 

((Some things never change.))

Hermann frowns at the man. "You shut up." 

((Some things, however, do.))

Newt gapes at him, blinks and shakes his head a little as though physically struck. "Did you seriously just–" 

"Are you allowed to be here?" Amara's voice is strong, steady, from her chest– she isn't a teenager doing chores, in this moment; she is all the Ranger she has proven herself to be, the world's most unstoppable force. She is staring down a threat and her readiness to fucking obliterate the man sitting in front of her shows in the white of her knuckles, the distance between her feet. She knows, logically, that he wouldn't be in this place were he not allowed, much less out in the open like this, but the world that begrudgingly raised her and the world she viciously fought for has not been something that runs on logic, it's a world where soulmates are real and monsters come out of the fucking ocean, so she's not going to take any chances. 

Newt wilts like a timelapse of a plant, curling in on himself immediately. (Sometimes, you really do forget that you aren't okay. Life, at least, is eager to remind you.)

Hermann clears his throat. "Miss Namani," he says. He remembers a time when he would just watch as Newton would sputter and yell and throw clumsy punches whenever some cocksure Ranger or other would make a quip about his sanity, his sexual proclivities. Let the man fight his own battles. Hermann knows that, were he to be magically transported back in time to witness that very situation again, he'd be the one eager to fight. "Dr. Geiszler is here with strict approval from the Marshal. I assure you that he would not be had she thought it unsafe." 

He watches Amara's jaw work, watches her suck her teeth as she deliberates how to react to being presented with a man she's meant to hate on a silver platter. Whether she'll regret walking away right now. Her eyes flick from Newton to the documents in her arms to the floor. "Okay," she says, deciding that killing Newt Geiszler with her bare hands in the middle of the mess hall when she's meant to be on duty just isn't worth it. She gives Hermann a curt nod, and he knows whatever respect he may have garnered from her thus far has gone right down the drain. "See you, Dr. Gottlieb." 

(Siding with the enemy, Doctor.)

(They'd all do it in a heartbeat. If it was them. If it was their partner. There's no sides when you're drift compatible. There's only love. There's only love. It's all you've got.)

Amara stalks away, her boots tip-tapping on the alloy floor. Her back is straight and strong. There's a tiny little world on it. Spawn of Atlus, all of them. Giants' fry. 

"Kids." Newt huffs out a laugh, sour with how fake it is, when she's gone, and the mess door has solidly squealed shut. "Gotta love 'em. Not afraid to stick it to ya." 

"They've all been through a lot–" 

Newt waves him off, but his voice is softer and more sincere when he speaks again. "I know," he says, watching his shoes scuff the floor where he swings his legs back and forth beneath the table. "I wouldn't blame her if she tried to kick my teeth in. I overstepped." 

"They just need time to heal, Newt," Hermann tells him, the both of them knowing that war isn't something anyone heals from. War is a gangrenous wound in the chests of even those who didn't fight it, leaves even the proudest men hollow and oh-so eager to place blame. Newt mightn't have been in control of himself when he laid the red carpet out for the kaiju, but it's easier to crucify the man than the voice in his head. (Thou art cursed above all cattle, above every beast of field. Dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life). "I'm sure she understands." 

"Yeah," Newt says to the floor. "Yeah, you're probably right." 

The lie is sweet and easy, at least. 

The office Ranger Pentecost summons Hermann to is windowless and lit with only the light from the holoprojector on the desk, making the shadows starker and the dust visible in the air. One-two , the dust goes, dancing with tiny, otherwise-unnoticeable draughts around the room. Three-four. The place smells like it isn't used often. Must-and-mildewy. 

The young Pentecost's jaw is set and his posture tight, commanding, where he leans against the central round table. Hermann remembers him but a boy, launching peas at the grouchy doctor that refused to entertain the whimsy of a child from across the mess hall. He remembers him but a man, spurned and belligerent in his re-relegated service, stalking around the kitchens in the wee hours in his ridiculous robe, looking for anything to do but his job. "Dr. Gottlieb," Ranger Pentecost says. There is no kindness in his voice. There's no acknowledgement of their 20 year acquaintance. There's no please, call me Jake. Right now, he is sir and Hermann is just a replaceable cog in a much larger clockwork system, albeit the best cog there is for the job, albeit a cog that might well be turning backwards, traitor to the machine. (A small part of Hermann– the Newton part of Hermann, let's admit it– wants to call him Jake anyway. Just to be contrary.) "Can you manufacture a breach into the Anteverse?" 

"No, sir," Hermann answers immediately, stood in the doorway. His shadow is long and spindly, cast with the corridor light. It creeps up the walls, sometimes merging with the shadows thrown by the shelves or the sink's faucet, sometimes cut through by streaks of the projector's vibrancy. It is warped and awkward and alien. It's more him than he is. 

The Ranger just sucks his teeth. "Then I'll ask you again." He crosses his arms across his chest, the gesture eerily similar to a mannerism of his father's that's still ingrained in Hermann's brain all these years later, though only half as intimidating. "Can you make a breach, Gottlieb." 

He can. He sees it, still, every night. Sees the guttural screams of bad knowledge, information-vomit when Newt inevitably wakes him up in the wee hours, throat gone hoarse with it. (Funny that, how something so abnormal can become normal with time. How if he wasn't plagued by nightmares of unexplainable and eldritch things every night, he'd feel like something was wrong, like a good night's sleep would be a disruption to his routine, somehow). 

He won't do it. He won't be the reason for another war. He wonders how that makes him the traitorous one. 

Hermann hangs his head. His shadow goes with him, thin and strange. "I'll see what I can do, sir."

"Ranger Pentecost has given me an assignment," Hermann loudly announces– against his better judgement– after he has been escorted to the foyer of their apartment and the door solidly swung shut and automatically locked with a resounding click. He toes his shoes off somewhat haphazardly, only really half-caring how neatly lined up they are beside Newt's sneakers. He needs to mention it to someone, and yes, he's quite aware he's picking the worst possible person, thank you very much– he pinches the bridge of his nose and swears quietly. He really, really shouldn't be bringing up his top-secret military duties to a man that might literally explode at any moment if the surveillance team doesn't like what they're hearing. 

The linoleum is cold through his thin socks as he meanders into the house proper. He can hear the quiet, off-tune plucking of steel strings and finds Newt sat on the floor, trying to convince his nerve-damaged fingers to remember chord shapes. The guitar's an old, unvarnished thing covered in stickers and scuffs– Newt's ear has never been perfect, but Hermann, despite having no experience with string instruments at all, strangely knows that the sourness of the notes is from rust in the machineheads and the wood swelling from over ten years spent in Hong Kong's humidity un-teched. Newt watches him hang his satchel over the back of a chair. "Oh," he says, idly strumming an A-minor that sounds sadder than usual with his thumb. "Guessing I'm not authorized to know what it is?" 

"You would guess correctly," Hermann answers. Junior stumbles in from whoever's bed he's been passed out on, rubbing amorously against Hermann's leg in an effort to be fed, even though he can see the little red bowl with his name on it is freshly half-full already. He reaches down to scritch down the cat's back, who makes a combination half-purr half-meow and proudly displays his bumhole in response to the attention. "I just thought I'd inform you that it'll probably lead to me being home later than usual– not being allowed to bring work home and all. I'm sorry if it makes things… awkward." He can't think of a better term for 'knowing that your roommate– or whatever Hermann is in their situation– is working the graveyard shift trying to decipher all the shit you did when you were possessed and can't tell or ask you about it'. 

"I don't mind, Herms. Really." Newt scratches at the carpet but Junior seems disinterested in anything that isn't trying to trip Hermann on his way to the bedroom. 

"I just…" Hermann sits on the end of his bed, still visible from the living room, and strips off his sweater. He works the thick grey ribbing of the thing nervously between his fingers. His voice is louder when he speaks again. "I don't enjoy having to hide things from you. Especially when your expertise would be helpful." 

"Hermann," he hears, and then the small noise of the guitar being sat strings-down against the couch cushions and slipping. Newt walks towards him, and then leans against the doorframe. His pyjama pants have space on them. Little fleece depictions of Saturn and Neptune and shooting stars and spiral galaxies. Newt's eyes have always been a seafoam-y green color, and Hermann has always felt rather caught in them, but right now, he feels absolutely pinned. Hard carapace pushed aside and secret, membranous wings exposed, on display against his labeled styrofoam backdrop. "Whatever it is, I don't want to help you with it." Newt immediately winces, looks to the floor, raises his hand to tug at the curling hair at his neck. "That came out wrong. I mean–" He tips his head back until it thunks against the glossy wood behind him. "I said it to Mako already. I don't want my job back. I don't want to expose myself to it anymore." 

Hermann envies him– his bravery, how strong he is in the face of pressure. Hermann's always crumpled in the face of authority, trained like a dog from birth to follow any order given without question. He wishes he could click his fingers and un-learn all his discipline, recondition himself to his own rules instead of his father's. But that kind of upbringing takes your whole life to properly shake. He's so proud of how steadfast Newt is being in the face of such great adversity, such a want for him to relapse, the whole world essentially guilt-tripping him into staying sick, staying worse. He supposes the man's whole life has been like that– he's always performed better in the throes of mania, always lost his spark the moment the meds hit his tongue. Newt's choosing to burn out. Newt's choosing himself over his performance, over validation, over purpose. Over everything that's ever mattered to him. Maybe for the first time ever.

Hermann knows– he does. That martyrs are short-lived creatures. That you can only cut yourself on something for so long before it becomes too much, and you either stop or you lose yourself in it, to the bliss, to the pain, to the praise. They both know this. Too well, probably. (But living for someone else is so easy.) (There is little purpose to be found in the self.) (He wishes there was an anatomical diagram of where exactly it is, his purpose. A neat little line pointing between his ribs saying 'here it is', 'this is what you can live for', 'this is what really matters'. Having to dig around inside your chest to find it is hard, and it hurts, and it never feels like you've actually found it. You just have to convince yourself it's there, in the fleshy red mess of you– the thing that matters. The only thing. You just have to love it. Even if it feels like it isn't worth it. Like it isn't enough. But it will be, and it is.) (Sometimes you have to shed layers of yourself to grow. Ecdysis isn't just for bugs, y'know?). 

"Yes–" Newt continues, suddenly. "–of course I still find it all fascinating, I still love my work, I'd love to be able to apply myself to it again and find out how far we've come since– since everything." He takes a few steps into Hermann's room to scoop Junior off the floor by his armpits. He holds the cat's round body aloft for a few moments, staring seriously into his eyes before hefting him against his shoulder, braced like an infant. Junior does nothing short of collapse into him, his purr more a rumble beside Newt's ear. "But I know what fascination does to me. I know that it's not actually fascination– I just. Convinced myself that it was, because otherwise– fuck." He buries his face into the scruff of the cat's neck. "There's something wrong with me," he says, steady, quiet, Junior's gray fur moving with his breath. "Maybe there wasn't before, but there is now, and I– I can't risk it. Not for you. Not for the Marshal. Not for the fucking world. I need to draw that line, for me."

Newt takes a deep breath, and the movement makes Junior struggle against him. He gently settles the wiggling cat back onto the carpet where he quickly scampers away. "Sorry," Newt tells Hermann, still sat on the bed where he's only been half-present in his body for quite a while now, actually. His fingers have worked their way through the knit of his jumper, large holes loosened through the otherwise-uniform pattern. "I guess I needed to get all that outta my system." 

Newt moves to the bed beside him, sitting at first but then leans back to stare at the ceiling, rumple Hermann's nicely-made bedding. He laughs a little at the stars on the roof, on the blades of the ceiling fan. They're arranged in the shape of Cetus– the biggest star, Diphda, at the beast's posterior, 96.2 light years away, just out of reach, blu-tacked to the stucco. Stuck in the monster's throat, Messier 77's nucleus is sending out radio waves. It wants to serenade them, specifically, because Hermann's naive enough to think they're cosmically important like that. He undoes the buttons on his shirt and tosses it aside. He's always felt over-exposed in just a t-shirt, like his spindly arms are a thing he should keep hidden, should be private. 

"I'd do anything to just– clap my hands and make it so I could be alright enough to work with you again." Newt props himself up on his elbows, turned to look at Hermann where his head is as scattered across space-time as the constellation above them. "But I'm… I'm happy, like this. I love being able to just– exist. Without anything in my head trying to stop me. It's really nice, actually." 

Hermann lays back beside him, watches the phosphor stars soak up the lamplight. 

(Two photons decay, split into electron/positron pairs, collide head-on with the sound of screeching metal and burning rubber, turn back to photons and continue on like nothing ever happened, fundamentally changed but still believing they're the same. Half of what they used to be. Half of each other. Something entirely new. Light-light scattering.)

"I think I might also be happy," he tells Newt, and the man smiles at him, missing tooth and all. "Like this." 

(Cosmic significance.)

It's bad. Of course it's bad. Reverse-engineering a kaiju's handiwork was never going to be good. In the case of the first breach, the portal was technically one-way, manufactured through kaiju technology that Hermann knew the intricacies of, once, in that singular moment spent in drift-limbo where he was a kaiju and his brain was that of a kaiju and he understood things that a kaiju with ability enough to understand understood, where the universe is so drastically different that concepts of relativity and ether-flow and space as we know it don't really apply, but now finds his brain turning to spaghetti and his sinuses aching upon trying to recall or comprehend. The second breach– which his subconscious is unfortunately referring to as Newt's breach– was, from what Hermann understands of his scribbled notes, an open two-way structure mimicking the throat-like properties of the original, a catenoidal tear in space-time where anything entering it followed a straightest-possible equatorial geodesic at constant speed from one side of the breach to the other. Essentially, a true creation of a traversible wormhole under Ellis geometry, though collapsed before allowed to stabilize. At least if it followed the original breach mechanics, bio-scanning for kaiju DNA sequences at each mouth of the catenoid, it would be possible to recreate a door to the Anteverse that would not allow the kaiju entry into their universe– turning what is currently a worldwide-destruction mission into simply a suicide mission. The simulations of the precursor's code on his holoprojector offer no hope for that particular outcome. It's not a lockable door. It's just a hole in the wall.

Hermann sabotages his own work, makes blatant mistakes and pretends to be sure of himself and the others they've brought in to work with him– the brightest minds, they say– don't question him until the sim crashes and the lights in the lab flicker from how extensively he manages to fuck up on purpose. He mutters apologies. Sometimes he pretends to get angry. He's sure they know he's not trying, at this point– well, that's not entirely true. He is trying. He's trying his darnedest to not simulate a breach successfully. He's sure they know he's working to be as directly adverse to their project as possible, but he was appointed head of this little operation because they know he's the only one with enough kaiju (read: concoction of all the best parts of all the best species across every ruined universe) in him to actualize the theoretical, and whenever someone questions him, he puts on his fake affront and acts all of the dithering old man he looks. 

The nights are late and he's tired all the time, finds himself nodding off at his desk because he just isn't made for wartime crunch anymore. His hands shake from the caffeine pills. He feels like he's traveled back in time, sometimes, except Newt isn't there, across the lab being worse at self-control and personal hygiene than he is, making Hermann feel better about himself in comparison. Newt is at home playing solitaire against the computer and farm simulators and trying (and, surprisingly, not failing) to magick a semi-edible dinner into existence every night. He leaves sticky notes on the tupperware containers of pesto pasta or Singapore noodles or fried rice he puts in the fridge for Hermann to come home to, with corny pick-up lines or bad jokes or fairly accurate ballpoint pen drawings of the cat on them even though he's still awake no matter what time Hermann trudges in and could just say whatever quip he's thought up to him. Newt goes for walks around Moyulan, accustomed by now to the sight of the heavily-armed escort that tails him, tells Hermann about whatever restaurant or boutique or cafe he's found just around the corner, about how they should check it out, about how they should ask to go to Hong Kong proper sometime, he hasn't seen it in years. Newt uses the gym in their apartment complex and is only a little embarrased by always being the least fit person there. Newt crawls, scared and lost far away from himself, fragmented across all the realities he's existed in, reliving them all simultaneously, into Hermann's bed at night and doesn't touch him, doesn't let Hermann touch him, just wants to feel the presence of him, the divot in the bed beside him until he gets swept up in it again, a hellscape only reminiscent of sleep. He's taking meds for that, now. Sometimes they work. Sometimes. 

Hermann's tired, and he's spiteful, and he feels old all the time. His hip aches and he's redeveloping a long-dormant dependency on painkillers. He hates everyone, but he doesn't, because they're people he's saved the world with and they're good people, but by god he hates them for going along with this fool's errand, this warmongering disguised as altruism, as heroicism. They've all spent so long in it, the hungry vortex of conflict and violence and fear that they can't see the forest they've saved for the trees they've already lost. They'll make the breach, eventually. They'll get what they want. It took the precursor ten years, how long will it take them, with all its hard work already on the table? He could take a guess. That's kind of his job. He doesn't want to do either. 

He's stopped wondering about other Hermanns, other universes. He's started wondering about this Hermann. Where he'll be when the end inevitably starts again, the kaiju inevitably cusp the horizon with their threat– no, their declaration of extinction. He hopes it's not in this fucking laboratory. His box at the end of the world. He hopes he's at home. He hopes he can take Newt's hand before the lights go out. Hopes he can hold him close while the water runs bright blue again and the war-noise approaches. Death sounds like rubble under giant feet, sirens that are too close for comfort, the screaming of a creature that knows it was made to die. It always has, for him. 

(He hopes that death sounds like 'I love you' . He always has.)

The light on the balcony is small and shines a sodium-orange. Its a relatively warm night, but the wind is cool coming off the ocean and Hermann pulls his cardigan further around himself to fend the chill from his skin. He lets his tea grow cold in his hands. He didn't really make it to drink, anyway.

(He doesn't turn the balcony light on, often. He finds the lurid glow of it reminds him of the lights in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Their ever-presence and the stark shadows they cast down the corridors. He prefers his home as different from that place as he can make it.)

Newt follows him out eventually, with the squeak of the door on its rails and the crunch of the sun-brittled imitation cane of the chair out here as he sits. The man is silent, hair in his eyes, picking at the springy, broken wood of the armrests, but Hermann can sense the concern radiating off him. The intrigue to know what's the matter. It's odd for Hermann to come home and not say anything, conduct his nightly rituals without some sort of running commentary, or at the very least grunts and mmm s in response to Newt's own commentary. It must be bad, Newt thinks into his head, and it is bad, Hermann answers him, electric impulse waves and heart-beat whitewash across the dark and empty ocean between their brains– he's got a decision forming in the depths of him, one of those minds you've made up before you even realize there's a mind to be made, and he's scared of it. Because of it. 

"Newton," Hermann says finally, putting an end to their emotional radiation. "Can I ask you something you may not wish to answer?" 

"Herms," Newt says back, a mirror. "You've saved my life, twice. The least I owe you is an answer." 

Hermann turns to face the other man, his friend, his Newton. The street is lonely and fake-feeling at his back, like the lights in windows and of distant cars aren't actually real, they were just out there to convince him that there's people with lives unrelated to them and the war and the PPDC in Moyulan; that the place wasn't built for the Shatterdome's sake. A clump of high-rises and minimalist houses and shops with tightly-packed aisles, all pretending they aren't the first line of defense in a war that doesn't exist yet. The light ever-present casts its stark shadows across Newt's face, obscuring whatever emotion is on display there in faux-sunset shades and for a moment, Hermann doesn't know what year it is. 

(Perhaps it is 2018. Perhaps they are crowded in an elevator in Vladivostok, forced with not-knowing whether the deployed Jaeger is succeeding or whether they've just sent another pilot to his early, watery grave.)

(Perhaps it is 2023, and perhaps they're drinking on the lab couch with the lights low because that's another fucking new year gone by with no celebration aside from the routine announcement of how much they've lost and how little they've won.)

(Perhaps it is 2025. Is he watching Newt scurry down the hallway with tissue paper shoved up his nose, both of them knowing he is going to his death but neither saying anything at all, because that's just what their job– what war– is like?)

"Did you love Alice?"

(It's October, 2035.)

(Fuck, Hermann. Really?)

He watches Newt's jaw get tighter, watches the man start to chew the inside of his cheek, bite little pieces of anxious flesh from it and swallow. He wasn't expecting that to be the question.

(What was he expecting it to be, then?)

(Why did you leave me? I could've helped. I could've noticed.)

(I should've noticed.)

"I just… I need to know." The words push themselves, pained and heart-raw, from Hermann's throat. He needs to know. He loves Newton. He needs to know if he can let himself be in love with Newton, again. Needs to know if he has to stamp his feelings– that suffocating, hopeful pinprick of feelings at home in the otherwise-lonely clutch of his ribs– out for the third time. He needs to know if he's broken Newt's heart as much as Newt broke his.

"I… It's hard to explain how I felt. When I was… I don't think any of words are the right ones, I–" Newt scrubs a hand down his face, and then presses his thumb hard against his teeth through the skin of his cheek, thinking. His eyes are blown wide, orbs of wavering orange in the sodium light. "I could think, but I couldn't think right. It was like thinking through a, a– a funhouse mirror, or a cheese grater, or– it just got more wrong and more confusing the more I did it but I couldn't tell that it was wrong, y'know? My brain felt like a fucking kaleidoscope." 

Hermann knows the answer already. Devil's in the details– devil's in the long winded justification for falling in love with a kaiju brain. 

"I wanted connection. I missed having that connection. I missed you , Hermann, and I think– I think it knew that." There's an ashtray on the balcony, the blue porcelain of it empty aside from dust. Hermann gave up smoking years ago. His fingers itch for one now, just to hold it. Just to feel the thing between his lips. "It twisted the way I thought until I was convinced the precursor was what I wanted. What I was missing."

He wonders what's so different, between the two of them. What made the precursor take root inside Newt's mind easier than his own. He wonders if you can be predisposed to getting possessed by an alien, and if Newt's disconnected thought processes and his erratically polar mind and his crippling inadequacies filled only by spite and all his fucking empathy for those things made him like a beehive to them. A weathered soapstone of places to worm their way into, fill the trypophobia-inducing holes in who he is and what he means to people. He wonders if it tried to take him, too. If it would've, were Newt not such a perfect environment for it to seed in. 

(He wonders if it would've been happier, had it taken him. Happier if it hadn't had to see the damage its very presence did to Newton. It could've touched him, he thinks. It could've talked to him.)

(He knows those are bad thoughts to have, but it's left things inside him too. Bad little things. Infectious little wrongs.)

Newt scrapes his fingertip through the dust at the bottom of the ashtray, leaving a line of deeper blue. The shape he draws curls, spreads out at the end like a flower. It's been burnt behind his eyes for ten long-short years. "At– at the time, I couldn't question it. It made it feel right. I just… couldn't realize what I was doing. That I was–"

(

The pons slips from his head from where he's seized his way into a slumped position in the armchair. He scrapes off lines of the dark red velvet of it as he grips it, tighter, tighter. He's still there. The pons is at his feet and he can see it in his fractal eyes but he is still there, he can feel her thumbs behind his eyes, the pads of her long, spindly fingers pressing down his spinal column, into the space between his vertebrae. He can feel her press at the very back of his throat from the inside out and his mouth is so full with saliva from it that he's drooling in long, thick chains of fluid right down the front of his shirt. They sway and break off as he huffs in deep, shivering breaths. She pulses inside his head, pushes against his blood-brain barrier. 

His eye starts to bleed and he gasps, and it's not with pain. Not with the feeling of the drift receding, the feeling like his skin is being fitted back over himself with a vacuum sealer. 

It's all pleasure, build and release of blood under his skin, nerve endings firing in places he didn't even know existed. He's so lightheaded he can't even bring himself to feel disgusting, he's too busy waiting for the feeling in his arms and the tremor in his legs to stop. 

Across the room, she's still in her tank. Still in her yellow and her blub-blub-blub. She casts a shadow of herself across the floor, right across his form where he sits slumped and sweaty and every part the freak they always said he was. 

He feels a tear, run from the corner of his eye and down the slope of his nose, watches it teeter at the end of it, all hydrogen bonds and cohesion, until it finally sways too far with a ragged breath and falls. Just another bodily fluid on his suit.

And then he's gone again.

)

(

He's never craved this before. 

Craved sex.

Why does he crave it now? Now, slumped over a blueprint he's made bloody with the pen-knife she was using against the hard green plastic of the cutting mat. Why does he look at the wound he's made against the flesh of his wrist, the face of Yamarashi that he's torn asunder, a yellow god peeking through red clouds, and want her inside of it? 

Why does she make him crave it?

)

"I wish I could tell you that I didn't love her," he says. "But I don't want to lie to you."

Hermann has his answer. His painful, terrifying, sad little answer. He sips his tea and it is so cold and it tastes like nothing, like the inside of his mouth reflected back at him. Across from him, Newton puts his head in his hands. Weaves his fingers tight to pull at the too-long strands of it. 

Is he in love with this man, Hermann asks himself. Is he in love with him and every part of him, all over again and again-again? Can he love the part of Newton that will always love the kaiju he killed? Can he love the part of him that will always ache for its fingers to lovingly prise his brain apart, always want for a smile of its too-much teeth and a wink of its too-many eyes while it reaches in his ear and stirs everything he is around? 

Newt's hands card through the hair of his hung head until he can clasp them across the back of his neck, elbows on his knees. The press of the pons headset was always the tightest, there, at the junction where spine meets brain. "I was confused and scared and I was going fucking insane and she said she loved me and I just–" Newt's voice lilts in pitch until it finally reaches breaking point and screeches out, a high-pitched rasp in his throat. He takes a deep breath, like he can steady himself, like he'll ever be steady again, and exhales it pointedly back out. He says the next words slowly, carefully, because they don't want to come out of his mouth, they want to grip onto his tongue like velcro. "I wanted someone to tell me that it was going to be okay. So I loved her."

He is. He can. He can love him, again and again-again and again-again-again and as many times as it takes. 

(Maybe he aches for it, too. Maybe he wants .)

(Once, Hermann had the thought that perhaps the moment the breach blew, they were the singularity. The moment into which all other universes collapsed. That they were the only quantum outcome. But things have changed in the ten years since and Hermann is now a deeply selfish man, stood against the glass balcony railing with his cold tea and his empty ashtray and all the love in his heart for the specimen of a man across from him. Once, and still, sometimes, he relished in the fantasies of another Hermann in another place on a better world-line than theirs. A Hermann that caught the bus and taught kids and went home to his husband-or-whatever and the quaint apartment they share. But this Hermann is selfish and thinks the universe revolves around him, just a little, just a tilt on the axis, a tiny little gravitational pull, and right now– right now, Hermann thinks that maybe this is the singularity. That this is the vertiginous moment, the only quantum outcome, the place where it will all split in infinite little ways from. He thinks, despite everything, in this moment, there is no universe in which he does not love Newton Geiszler. Every other universe has ended, and they are all that is left. In the silence and the grief and the aching, hollow loss of an almost-empty everything, this is that warm spot on that dead earth. The light is the loneliest just before it meets the prism.)

(But that's impossible.)

(But it's a nice thought.)

"I'm sorry it's not the answer you wanted." Newt looks back up at him, face open and human and fractally cracked down the middle, Lichtenberg's figure of that insatiable burning beneath his skin and that utter ruinage of the everything of him gone gold in the light. Kintsugi. His eyes are clear. Irises round and bright, no longer ink blots of red across his tissue-paper sclera. 

A car crests the street outside, headlights silhouetting him in their shock of white for just a moment. A man-made halo. Light is just the places you aren't, everywhere that isn't you. You're just a bubble of shade. If you open your mouth, do your lungs glow? When you speak, do the dark recesses of yourself, your organs and your oceans and your stringy epithelial tissue, bathe in the light you let in? Are you a sun, an icon, apocrypha inside yourself? Hermann taps his fingernails against the side of his mug. The sound is sharp, grounding. He exists here, even now. He is still enough to feel the ceramic beneath his fingers. Time has whittled him, but he is enough. He casts a shadow, still. "Newton, dearest?" 

"Yeah?" Hermann wants nothing more than to push his hair behind his ear. 

"Would you like to stay with me, tonight?"

"Fuck." Glowing lungs. Red light through your fingertips. Torch against an eggshell. "Yes."

Let the light in. 

They lay in Hermann's bed with all the lights on, spots of bright white against the ceiling, warmer orange filtering through the dusty grey lampshade. They leave spots in Hermann's eyes, patches of aberrating blackness that follow his gaze. They lay in Hermann's bed above the covers, heads not on the pillows, socks still on. Newt's head is on his chest, the rest of him tucked into the crook of his arm; the man's hand has come around to Hermann's hip to tug at a stray thread of his cardigan, a loop of cotton too tightly-woven for him to break apart with just his finger and thumb. He's listening to Hermann's heartbeat. Hermann's hand is at the pulse in his throat, a reassuring weight on the back of his neck, listening right back. They are radio waves sent out from distant planets, life made creation made music made discovery, hope for touch and love and knowing in a vast void so inhospitable to you, specifically, never to be understood by anyone or anything that matters because no-one's actually listening out there but everyone wants to be heard. They are the instant those waveforms pass each other, identical, a momentary superposition in the grand scheme of things, impedance ratio infinite. They are the speed-of-light embrace of radiation before it resettles and continues onwards, into that good and endless night.

On his chest of drawers, there's a framed picture of his sister's wedding. Between the cardboard backing and the photograph, there is a tiny square of circuit board with three wires running from it, all of which attach to an even tinier microphone. He can tell it's there from the spot in the bottom corner of the frame, a spot where the picture is pressed tighter up against the glass. In the lapel pocket of his good suit, hung in its dry-cleaning bag in his wardrobe, there's another. He's sure there's a litany of the things throughout this room alone. The camera looms dark and silent in the corner. He wonders just how much they can pick up. He knows he really, really shouldn't test it. 

Hermann sits and pulls the duvet from where it's folded over beneath their legs, silently motions for Newt to move his feet so he can throw it over the both of them. The light shines a faint orange through the material, feather clumps water vapor melancholia against a choleric sunset. He turns on his side, creating a small open space between them. Newt turns with him, glasses still on, gone crooked over his nose. 

(For a moment, it is the year 2000 and Hermann is the child he wasn't allowed to be. He's got no last name and wasn't born with a to-do list scrawled on his infant palm and he's never been told friends are for less-important children. He's 11 and his feet don't reach the end of the bed yet and a feather duvet makes him feel invincible. The cheap, floral detergent smell calms his racing heart, promises there's no monsters here. No hospital smells or complicated relationships with fathers. No caramel tegretol syrup or learning what his mom looks like from the TV. No kaiju. They're safe. He's always wondered what Newt looked like as a child, but he's never been the type of person to carry around photos of himself, so Hermann's brain supplies that he just looked the same, but smaller. Cartoonishly large glasses and obvious freckles on his face because he spends every waking moment in the dirt and sun. Hermann wishes he could've had sleepovers as a kid. Newt just wants to be invited. Right now, though, they can play pretend. There's stars on the ceiling.)

Newt blinks owlishly at him.

(It's 2035 and he's a 46 year old man, whispering secrets under the blankets and praying no one will hear.)

"They've asked me to manufacture a breach," he says, so quiet he thinks he might've just thunk it into Newt's head. (Which, if they can still do that, is a mighty convenient way to communicate when you're under 24/7 surveillance). 

Either way, Newt's eyes blow wide. There's fire in them. He's a good man. "No, that's–" he exclaims, shocked, then realizes that this topic is very-very hush-hush, and promptly shuts his mouth with a loud clack. "They can't just endanger everything like that–" he continues, possibly whispering, possibly just mouthing the words and Hermann's hearing them through decade-old drift magic and a little old fashioned lip reading. 

"I share the sentiment. I don't want to do it."

Newt rubs idly at the space below his nose. Takes off his glasses and folds them away, clutches them to his chest tightly. "Warmongers."

"Rather," Hermann agrees. The exchange is oddly familiar, for them. Hermann spent a lot of his younger years purposefully naive to the man-made horrors, both by nurture and by choice. He understands the lucrativity of war, both in monetary value and in supportive sentiment; fear has always been the quickest route to the hearts of less logical men. The Jaeger Program began as an effort to revolutionize modern warfare. A man with shares in weapons will never find himself questioning the ways they're used, the countries they're shipped to, the children they kill; the sins are blinding, pride and greed the most. The robots becoming mankind's salvation, the foundation of human triumph over evil, was just lucky. It just let him think about it less. That salvation and mass destruction are just two sides of the same coin. "Thank you for trusting me. With the truth."

He gets it now. Wars don't end. They just get quieter. It can be righteous, but it is never, ever good .

"Of course I trust you." Newt answers, squishing his face into the mattress a little. "We're drift fuckin' compatible."

(Of course I trust you.)

Hermann picks at the fitted sheet's pilling fabric, gone soft with age and use. "I'm going to trust you with something, then. In the interest of fairness." 

(How many universes have they died in?)

(How many times did the war kill them? How many times have they just been unlucky? How many times has there just been no other option?)

(How many times did Newt choke on his own tongue after drifting with Mutavore? How many times did he get torn apart by Kodachi, in the universes where her umbilical cord snapped before her neck? How many times did Pitfall fail, and his drift-artefacted eyes had to watch the sun rise on humanity's last day from both sides of the breach? How many times did Alice kill him? How many times did he kill Alice?)

(How many times did Hermann damn him, ball himself up in his coward's hole in the ground and refuse to help? How many times did Alice kill him ? How many times did Newt?)

(How many times did they die together, in that tepid blue wasteland between them?)

Newt looks apprehensive. "O-okay."

(How many iterations of themselves have they sacrificed to get here? How tall is the pile of themselves they stand atop now?)

"If…" he starts, trying to find the right words. He doesn't think any of them are right. He settles for the wrong ones. "If you'd asked me, before I knew about Alice, to– to help you." He locks eyes with Newt, trying to gauge his reaction, trying to walk the tightrope between misinterpretations of what he's trying to say. The man's turned to stone across from him. "I would've thought about it," Hermann admits, and then ends with a rather pitiful, "I wouldn't have done it, but– but I would've considered it." 

(Hermann wonders, for a brief moment, if he has died. If he is both the corpse and the pile– the foot on his own back, as well. If this is some form of limbo, some cosmic graveyard where all the versions of him across the multiverse get sent and compiled like pixels into a bigger version of himself. If he is his own personal whalefall, turning every choice made by every him into detritus. A gift to the seafloor. God's blessing to the many-legged things. If he, in this moment, is the best that Hermann Gottlieb can do.)

(The best Hermann can do is admit that he'd tell a genocidal alien asking for his help to press the extinction button that he'd get back to her on that. Dwell on it over tea and crumpets. Have a right proper think about it. That he'd maybe end the world for Newton Geiszler. That his love is so all-consuming that it makes existence seem like something he could probably go without if it meant he got to spend his non-existence with him.)

(We love him, Alice hisses at him, her borrowed voice breaking, her borrowed throat closing up around the words she's spitting out as though solid.)

(I know, he tells her. God, he knows.)

(He wonders what it is about Newt that makes love something so apocalyptic.)

(Salvation and mass destruction are just two sides of the same coin.)

Newt sits up, abruptly. He takes the blanket with him and the bedroom light is sudden and harsh. The volume of his voice isn't adjusted for th fact that they're being watched; he doesn't care. "Wh– Hermann, that's– What the fuck ?" He exclaims, pulling so tight at the roots of his hair that all the wrinkles and stress-lines in his forehead have disappeared.  "Why would you… do that, for me?" 

Hermann wonders if he said it like that on purpose. He props himself up on his elbows, looks up at the other man. The man who isn't really that other at all, the only man on the planet– this godforsaken, wonderful planet that Hermann would both watch burn and do anything to save at a second's thought– who can empathize with exactly how he's feeling, because he's feeling it in analogue through the drift. "Is it not obvious?" he asks.

Newt sets his jaw tight. The light is inset into the roof above him, and from the angle Hermann's at, the yellow iridescence frames him like a halo. "I want you to say it." 

Hermann reaches up, rubs his thumb along the indent beneath Newt's eye, the soft, goosey skin there stained amaranthine with time and stress and war and everything between. "My dear," he says. He's said it many times before. "I fucking adore you."

His eyes ache from staring at the projections for so long, squinting over his own bad handwriting, letters that look more like ants marching down the page than any conceivable language. He stands in the fire-escape doorway to one of the 'dome's many helipads, the grey concrete gone cold with the sea breeze. He checks his watch, a battered old thing he's worn forever, just part of his dressing routine at this point as opposed to serving any sort of function, what with all the newfangled technological advances towards making telling the damn time easier. The leather strap is worn to a soft beige at the seams, where it touches his skin. Just turned eleven, it tells him, like he doesn't know this, like he hasn't checked his bloody watch going on umpteen times this evening– five p.m. in Munich, his brain tells him, too familiar with the time difference between them for comfort. 

In the pocket of Hermann's blazer– the inner one, lined with a silken fabric that has cute little birds printed on it that no-one sees but him, and much to his expense, Newton on their rostered laundry days, got some good cooing out of him for that– there's the also-too-familiar rectangular shape of a packet of Marlboro reds. They're years old, now, bought in a fit of weakness and then never opened, sat in his sock drawer like a reminder all this time. He knows they're going to be stale as shit. He knows it's bad to flirt with re-addiction like that, and that no matter what he tells himself, he's trying to regain the crutch smoking gave him on purpose, wants to kindle the dependency in him because nothing else is working. His zippo smells like rust and old metal. His fingers shake around the filter, only half from stress. 

He takes a long breath of silvery air. He doesn't even cough. Maybe he isn't bigger. Maybe he's the same fucking Hermann that broke his chalk and bit his fingernails to red stumps and bled down the front of all his clean shirts. Maybe he's the same Hermann that watched the man he loves get worse and worse and didn't notice. He's scared it's going to happen again. He's scared he's not bigger. He's scared he's the same idiot man who watched the world end a decade past, and he hasn't grown or changed in any truly meaningful way since; that for every step forward, the world has pushed him right the same step backwards, and any ways he's changed have been purely superficial. He's scared neither of them are better. (He shouldn't put Newt down like that. He's doing so well with what he's been given. But there are rational and irrational fears. Usually he can differentiate them). The smoke tastes exactly like how he remembers; his memory isn't all that great, these days. A vague implication of oak and moths and small death.

He slides his phone from his pants pocket and dials her number. It rings twice, sharp and shrill, before she picks up. 

"Karla," he says around the cigarette.

His sister tuts at him. He can hear her rolling her eyes. "Ominous greeting, but okay." 

"I haven't called to talk about the weather, I'm afraid."

"Spit it out, then." Karla only sounds a little disappointed he didn't call her to gasbag over tea. Always been a dreadful gossip, that big sister of his. Used to spend pages and pages rattling off mildly offensive garbage about her friends in the letters they'd send back-and-forth from boarding school (and much more offensive garbage about their other family members in some cypher they made up that they've both forgotten with age). It's no wonder she and Newton get along roaringly. It does make him wonder, though, what she says about him– because surely she does, Hermann's aware that he's the easiest person to poke fun at possibly ever. He wonders how alarmingly accurate a picture of him she can paint just through snide comments. "A girl knows when she's not wanted," she ends with an audibly exaggerated pout. 

Hermann taps his cigarette against his finger and watches the ash scatter in the wind, illuminated for just a moment in the floodlights like dust in the air. He knows his phone is bugged, and whatever he says now will be promptly communicated back to command. He doesn't care. He's been doing more and more of that, lately. "I've been considering something and I need you to tell me if it sounds rash."

Hermann can hear the ocean, sloshing dark and endless just a ways away. The lapping of its wet tongues against the barnacle-encrusted scaffolding on which the helipad sits. The same ocean they blew up ten years ago. Still here. Still ebbing and flowing with the tides. The blast strapped to Striker Eureka blew and expanded faster than the speed of sound, and for a split second, the ocean– she tried to embrace it. She tried to reach out her fractal fingers to hold the unstoppable fucking force they just let off in her like she was nothing, everything she loves and keeps painstakingly alive collateral damage in the fight for existence. She loved them for it, and still does. She even loved the bomb, weaving her boiling and twisting way into the blast bubble, condensed the death of everything against her chest like a babe. Right now, 2 kiloparsecs from Earth and everything in it, the Crab Nebula is showing the same effect– Rayleigh-Taylor instability. Oil in water. Gas around a neutron core trying to expand violently into the space around it but being held so tightly by the denser interstellar gas that an initial act of violence turns into a final act of love, rainbow colors splattered across the night sky like art, visible from billions and billions of kilometers away despite the insignificance to everything that would ever chance to see it. Bomb in the ocean. Tiny supernova. Massive act of love. How much of the universe is built on love? How much of everything is done as a declaration, as devotion, as self-sacrifice for the sake of something else? 

(War can be righteous, but it is never good.)

(War can be an act of love.)

(Vice versa. Love can be an act of war.)

(The first war against the kaiju was all three.)

(There is no love in this place, anymore. It all collapsed into a black hole of righteousness.)

"Okay," Karla answers. No cheeky comments, no remarks about what it could be. Just communicates that she's listening, that she can tell Hermann wouldn't call her like this, much less tell her so bluntly that he needs advice, if it wasn't important. She knows he doesn't like to ask for help. That admitting he doesn't know what to do makes him feel sick. He really does love her, and he should tell her more, but candid I love you 's aren't something that the Gottlieb family does, not now and not ever. 

He tells her. Tells her everything he can without breaking the NDA. They're making me do something unfathomable, he says, and hopes she can infer what that something is. Judging by the intake of breath he hears on the other line, she can. 

He gets to the end of his little spiel and there's silence for a short while. Karla runs the tap, and the sound through the receiver is more like hissing static than water. Hermann doesn't know why his heart's pounding.

Karla hums after a moment, puts a glass down on the counter with a sharp chi-chink. "Oh, yes," she says, in that dramatic and over-pronounced tone she gets when she's making fun of him. "That's unbelievably rash, Hermann. It's also selfish, and deplorable, and utterly unlike you."

Hermann sighs, presses his fingers between his eyebrows to try and relieve some of the pressure his constant frowning is building up there. "I just don't know what to–"

"You should do it."

"What?"

"You should. I can't tell you if it's the right decision, but- they're also being selfish and deplorable and not caring about the consequences this could have." There's a moment's pause. Hermann can sense his sister rubbing the bridge of her nose, the curve of it into her eyelids with her finger and thumb. It's an old tic of hers. "Even Steven, if you ask me."

"Even Steven?" Hermann finds the phrase a little lacking in nuance.

"Even Steven, Hermann."

When he gets home, it's still dark but the sun is threatening to rise over the jagged, industrial line of the horizon, blue-black shifting to blue-grey between the blocky highrises. From the doorway, he can see the scruffy outline of Newt's head, silhouetted against the shifting TV light. Must be asleep, if he didn't hear him trudge down the elevator hall– he shuts the door as lightly as he can, takes his shoes off much the same. He should really tell the man to go to bed– he'll have a crick in his back something awful tomorrow (today, Hermann's brain chimes in), sleeping upright like that. He sets his bag down wherever and his cane against the couch arm, shuffling over to sit beside Newt with a huff.

The man starts awake immediately, hands clenching in the minky fabric of the blanket thrown over his knees. It has bugs printed on it, inching caterpillars and ladybugs with bright, unnaturally-colored elytra. He squints against the sudden brightness of the show that's on– DS9, Hermann quickly recognizes when he looks over–, turns to Hermann with his watery eyes. He reaches up to rub at his stuck-together lashes. "Hey," he says, voice pitched low with sleep. "When'd you get back? Should'a woke me up."

Hermann slumps in his seat, the shoulders of his suit jacket pushing awkwardly upwards with the motion. "Only just walked in, love." The endearment comes easy, these days. He doesn't even realize he does it.

Newt tugs his eyelids down between his forefinger and thumb with a groan, trying to force himself awake. "You want anything? Tea? Shit, what time is it?" He throws a generous portion of the blanket over Hermann's own knees. "Is it too early for coffee?" 

Hermann tucks the fleece thing beneath his legs. "Never."

Newt laughs as he stands up, some joint or other making a worrying noise with the motion– what was he just saying about sleeping on the couch? "You should be disagreeing with me, right now."

He watches Newt walk to the kitchen and dig around clumsily for two pods for the keurig. "I'm too old to be contrary for fun."

"You're not old, dude." He slams one of them into the machine with a little more force than necessary, too half-asleep to have any patience with the thing. 

"I feel old."

(Well I feel old, Hermann. I feel– I feel fucking ancient, okay?)

The coffee machine stirs to life with a torturous groan, a low-pitched droning noise gradually building from within it as it struggles to fill the mug with the thick brown liquid. 

"Yeah," Newt concedes quietly, and the fridge light paints the room with silvery-white. "Heck, maybe we are old. Is this what old feels like? Because I feel, like–." He pours the milk into the metal jug with a slosh and sets it against the frother at the side of the coffee machine. He keeps the meat of his palm pressed against it as it starts up. "I dunno. Simultaneously eighty and fifteen."

The milk frother's noise, however, is much less low and droning and more like a small animal in peril, and it grates antagonistically against Hermann's frayed nerves and forever sleep-deprived mind.

" You're old," Hermann quips at the other over the cacophony, contrary for fun. " I'm twenty-eight."

Newt laughs at him. "Shut up. You suck."

Hermann slips his jacket off with a slow roll of his shoulders and throws it over the armchair across the way. He only realizes now that his shirt's come half-untucked over the course of the day. He needs to be less of a mess. "I feel more like a child now than I ever did during childhood, if we're being honest. My bones disagree, but– you're right. I'm the oldest and youngest I've ever been, I think." He stares with unfocused eyes at the long frame of a painting he's hung above the TV. A generic picture of rolling hills, somewhere, painted in the dulcet orange tones of morn. Mist creeps in the low valleys, hunches close to the ground between the few tiny houses dotted about. When he breathes out, his ribs ache with it. Loss. Realization, maybe. "It's been 24 years, almost."

"Since when?" Newt asks, then hisses and snatches his hand away from the milk jug, thoroughly a-boil. 

"Since we met– well. Since we started writing."

"Huh. It, uh." He pours the white, frothy liquid into the two awaiting cups. He spoons sugar out the pot and into them with a small shhh noise of the grains being displaced. One. One, two, three. "It doesn't feel that long, for me."

Hermann wonders exactly how long it feels for him. How did time pass for him, with that thing in his head? He could ask, he knows, and Newt would answer. Newt would tell him anything. "Feels like an eternity ago, for me."

The man trudges back over to the lounge, sets his own cup onto the glass tabletop and twists Hermann's around in his hand so he can take it by the handle. The warmth seeps through the porcelain and into his hands, makes his skin feel wet with it. How easily life can be imitated, that a vessel of hot liquid comforts him. That this damp heat is close enough to that of another's body between his fingers that he feels tightness seep from his muscles like wringing a sponge. The TV flashes in his peripheral, staring down at the divot in the milk froth where the sugar's sunk through it. Scenes of a picnic, of children playing in a park, others lit with an obnoxious orange tinge. He can't follow it. His brain's mush. He knows he still won't sleep tonight.

"In the darkness. In the blink of an eye, I see her like this," come the words from the TV, turned down low, just a murmur amongst the nocturnal noises outside, the steady rhythm of Newt's toes curling and uncurling into the rug's plush fabric, over and over.

He wonders if he smells like cigarettes. 

"Herms?" Newt asks, eyes on the TV's reflection in the table, the wavering square of refracted light, the same scenes, upside down. He wipes his upper lip, trying to clear away coffee remnants that aren't there. "I… I know things are shit right now, but I need you to listen to me."

"And I have never learnt to live without her."

Newt reaches over to where Hermann's got his mug between both hands in an iron grip. He wraps his own hand around Hermann's wrist, steady. Solid. Real. Right there beside him after all this fucking time. Hermann's throat feels tight and his eyes feel like he's watching himself from the tabletop, from the cobwebs on the blades of the ceiling fan, from the spine sat wrong on the bookshelf. His brain feels all over the place, everywhere at once, he doesn't remember leaving work. He barely remembers walking in. He can feel his pulse in the place where their skin meets. Their pulse. Them. Together. He's never lived without him. He's always there. The back of his head, spine meets brain, the pons was always tightest.

"It's gonna be okay. I promise."

So you choose to exist here?" On the screen, Commander Sisko nods. "It is not linear."

"No."

"It's not linear."

"It's not linear," Hermann whispers, a breath out. He looks over at Newt, and Newt's looking back, and the TV is reflected in his eyes as a square of glossy, colored light and oh. Oh. It's not linear, any of it. Time. Healing. Love. The universe– none of them. Nothing exists separately. Everything that's ever happened in every universe is happening concurrently right now. He is every age he has ever been and he is feeling everything he has ever felt and he exists in all his memories and every timeline at once. Nothing is separate. Nothing is the same, either. It doesn't feel that long. Feels like an eternity ago. Non-euclidean existence. The present is just a line drawn between non-parallel points, constantly shifting in time. World line. World electron cloud. You're somewhere there. You're smeared across everything. You're never where they want you to be. Newt looks like he did, all those years ago, across LOCCENT. They were so in each other's heads then that he heard Newt mentally reciting his childhood phone number over and over again like a prayer to keep himself calm, keep himself on the ground. Silhouetted in the shifting blue light of the holoprojectors monitoring Raleigh and Mako's vitals, broken lens of his glasses sending rainbows down his face. He'd looked over at Newt and the hope in his eyes– it was almost too much to meet. The same exhausted spark of hope he's looking at Hermann with now, whittled down to just a flickering wick, a firefly of light and a long plume of smoke, what with the everything and all. He'll never feel like he deserves it, to be looked at so reverently like that– he didn't then and he doesn't now but he knows his face, looking back, is just as slack-jawed with unbridled adoration as Newt's has always been. He'd end the world for him, just a little bit, he said– you don't get much more reverent than that. Love is an act of God put into the clumsy, stupid, selfish hands of man. 

Newt lets him go, goes to say something, does a little motion with his hands leading up to it–

Hermann kisses him. Hermann puts down his mug and he kisses him because he's beautiful right now, on their couch in their living room bathed in the opalescent iridescence of their TV and it was so hard to get here. Millions died for them to sit here and drink coffee and kiss. Billions of people across time languished and hurt and bled out in the mud for Newt to look this beautiful in a tour shirt for some 2000's band and his space-print pants all swaddled up in a blanket. Infinitely more across space for him to be this version of himself, so strong and so scared and still here. It's so hard not to love him. Hermann spent too long trying. He knew this was it for him and he fought it for years, made them both bitter and miserable about it all because Hermann thought he had some semblance of pride to uphold, back then. That, somehow, admitting he loved Newton felt like settling. He wants to go back in time and give that Hermann a right what-for. Bloody idiot. Kissing Newt's always made him feel a little existential and outside-himself, and maybe that's just what it's like with romantic drift partners. This person was made for you. They fit you like a glove. You should freak out about it. They haven't done it enough. He should know this feeling better. He's mad he doesn't. 

He kisses Newt and Newt kisses back and it's  lightning forking across the primordial sky four-point-one billion years ago and synthesizing glycine from nothing. It's thermal energy overtaking gravitational potential in a bubble of interstellar dust and the whole thing collapsing in on itself, slamming every instance of molecular hydrogen into one another so hard that it becomes something new, something that burns, something visible from sixteen-thousand light years away. It's as boring as kissing someone has always been, wet and warm and smelling like each other's breath. It doesn't feel special. He loves that it doesn't feel special. It feels momentous and mundane all at once. Something that was once new and exciting turned everyday, and despite everything– despite everything that's changed, despite them knowing each little way the other person is wrong, each little nook of themselves that hides something evil and terrifying inside it, they are the same two men who caught each other's eye across the room after the war-clock stopped, across the cacophony of cheering and screaming and the combined whoosh of hundreds of people taking their first real breath out in 12 years.

(

Newt runs over to him where he's leant against a railing because his good leg's gone all wobbly with the weight of relief, jostling people every which way, and the man grabs him around the waist and lifts him off the ground and Hermann flails, because of course he does, he's not designed to be manhandled like this, but Newt doesn't hurt him– just spins him around once, giddy and smiling what's probably the widest smile he's ever seen on him, and then sets him back down on the wrought-metal floor of the control room. He keeps his arms around Hermann's midsection, though, holds him like he'll disappear. Rests his head in the junction between Hermann's neck and shoulder. He smells like a wet dog. They need a shower yesterday. Hermann reaches his hand up to hold him tighter against him, press them together at the seams. Blur all their sharp edges together. The crowd around them undulates like a living thing. Someone pops a bottle of cheap wine, and sure, it's not champagne, but the cork still goes flying. 

"Holy shit," Newt breathes out, incredulous against him. His shoulders deflate like a balloon. "How the fuck are we alive, right now?"

"I–" Hermann starts, and then takes that same breath out. It's going to take him years to properly relax. He's going to have to re-learn how. "–have no idea."

"First for everything, I guess."

Hermann slaps his arm for that, tries to swat him like a fly.

Newt just kisses him about it. There's nothing hesitant or unsure about it. He knows Hermann loves him. He's in his head. 

It's star formation and it's Miller-Urey between their mouths and it's boring as it's always been.

Tendo wolf whistles. Hermann flips him the bird. Newt breaks the kiss to laugh at him for it.

It's perfect.

)

It's perfect.

Hermann pulls away. 

"I'm going to quit my job," he says, a little breathless, because that's a thing he's doing, he's just decided. His eyes dart to the camera. He wonders if his two weeks' notice starts from today.

"Oh," Newt answers, pupils blown so huge his eyes are black with them. "Okay."

"I've had enough. I don't want to be a tool in another fucking war, Newton. I can't ." His eyes sting a little. He feels the edges of his vision waver. He looks away, tries to blink the feeling away. It's a lot, whatever emotion this is. Heart like a superball bouncing between the forgotten depths of his gut and his throat. Love in oblivion. "I can't go willingly."

(He will not stare into the apocalypse's gaping maw and choose to jump. Not again. Not when he has everything to lose, now. He won't do it again.)

"I know it's selfish, I just–" 

Newt's hand snakes around to the back of his neck and pulls their foreheads together. He radiates a point of pinkish warmth where they connect. He doesn't say anything, just holds Hermann there, tight against him, like maybe they can sink into each other if he just thinks about it hard enough. Hermann won't let him go again. He won't be so fucking stupid as to be complacent in losing the man he loves like the ocean and the atomic bomb again. 

(He'd end the world for him. He might just be doing that.) 

(It'll be a nice couple years.)

(Peaceful. Quiet.)

(He can't save the world again.)

(He can kiss her goodnight, though. He can thank her for everything. She's been so strong for 4.5 billion years. He can say he's sorry. She'll accept his apology. She loves him. She must, to let him sit here like this.)

"I just can't see the greater good, this time," he mutters wetly, sliding down Newt's cheek to tuck himself away in the fabric of his shirt. He laughs a little, a grim, barely-there noise. "I guess you are supposed to feel guilty."

The Defense Corps can't keep him. He's a selfish dog that's learnt to worm its way out the muzzle. The only two people who know how to open a hole to the Anteverse are in this room, sat sad and sappy in each other's arms. It will take anyone else– any less experienced scientist, any more human man– years and millions and by then Hermann will be old and he'll have stopped caring about the ways with which mankind decides to destroy itself. But in this moment he does, and he will not let it be by his hand. (He's only ever cruel enough to be complacent.)

"I know I've said it before, but uh–" Newt clears his throat. It's not elegant. He's never been elegant. "I love you, Hermann. More than anything."

(

In the other universe, he wakes beside Newt in the yellow light of a lazy Sunday morning, shutters casting abstract polygons of warmth across the carpet. He has papers to grade. Fuck the papers. He rolls onto his side and curls himself around the other man like a millipede would its young, segmented body holding him close and precious. Newt makes a sleepy noise, throws his arm across his eyes to give him any semblance of darkness, still. Creatures dance on his skin, an oil spill of color against the canvas of him. Maybe they're mythical, maybe they're not. Hermann presses his cold feet against the warmth of Newt's legs. The man swears, grabbing Hermann's foot between his shins instinctively, trying to plead with the laws of thermodynamics to hurry the fuck up, just this once.

"You're so lucky I love you, right now," Newt says into the pillow, and his voice has never let him sound particularly threatening, so Hermann just laughs.

"I know."

)

He knows. God, he knows.

(More than anything.)

He called Moyulan Shatterdome welcoming, once. It is none of that, right now. It is cold and it is unforgiving and the sheer white light holds no comfort, just detached ambiance, every blinding spot of it on the ceiling a passive observer of his ruin. The boundary between the hallway and the control room feels like a chasm. Like a line of yellow tape. A metaphysical boundary meant only for him, only for his own good, only to keep himself in check. 

He steps over it, shoes and cane stopper loud on the metal floor. Checkmate. Mako's proud figure is stood against the central projector, displaying trial data of Gypsy Avenger's new thruster system. Raleigh Becket is sat in one of the swivel chairs, reading a hardcover of some actor's memoir; the sticker on the front proclaims he fished it from a bargain bin for $5.99, somewhere. Wherever he goes when he isn't in Moyulan. Hermann doesn't know the man well enough to know which continent he calls home. 

"Miss Mori?" he starts, stopping short of the step-up onto the slightly raised dais at the center of the round room. 

She turns her face towards him. The projector light makes the webbing of her scars look white, forked like lightning across her face. She knows, already. She knows everything. She's just waiting for him to knit together the balls to say it to her. Not Newton, not his sister. She wants to watch him, ever faithful to her father, ever quick to raise his hand in salute, buck against her absolute authority. Watch him spit on the hand that feeds him. Curiosity is a kind of respect in itself. A kind of awe. "Dr. Gottlieb. What can I help you with?" 

"I…" Jake and Ranger Lambert are on the other side of the room, stood around a pile of grainy, ink-splotched print-outs. They've both turned to him. They watch him with the same pallid eyes as the lights above. "I'm requesting t–"

I'm requesting termination of my employment. It's what Mako expects him to say. It's what she's run over in her mind as the most appropriate, most polite way for Hermann Gottlieb to admit to her that he's run out of fucks for humanity and would sooner watch their world burn than fight for it a third time. She doesn't blame him. They all crave normalcy, all feel the ache of their lost lives like a missing limb, and Hermann's is dangling just shy of his fingertips. He just needs to reach out and grab it. Human beings are self-servient creatures before they're anything else. She knows Hermann is human to the core. 

Damn his appearance. Damn his pride. "I quit," he says, simply. He reaches out. "I will carry out my notice as required, but from then on, I have no contractual obligations to continue my work here."

There's a sharp rustle of papers flying as Jake uses the bench to push himself towards Hermann. "Have you forgotten how important you are to the war effort, Gottlieb? You can't just abandon–" 

"Ranger Pentecost!" Mako snaps at her brother, who seems to curl in on himself, seems to shrink down to that memory of a young boy being scolded by his unyielding father. "Know your place."

"Roger, Marshall," he mutters, stepping back around the hunched form of Lambert picking up and re-organizing the documents he disturbed. 

Silence. Mako looks Hermann up and down for a long while, her scrutiny only apparent in one eye. "Are you doing this of your own will, Doctor?"

"Y-yes," Hermann stumbles in response. "Or at least, I believe so, ma'am."

"Why?" she asks, quietly. "You have been a pillar of the PPDC for twenty years. Your commitment to stopping the apocalypse was as admirable as any Ranger. May I ask why you feel the need to leave us?" 

"I am…" Hermann swallows dryly, the motion making his throat ache, close up around the words he's practiced and drafted and recited on repeat like a broken record for weeks. He's always been a stiff public speaker, and he feels all at once like his child self trying to read an acceptance speech for some academic award or other from cards poorly concealed in the curve of his palm. Feet too close together, shoulders too high, eyes anywhere but on the crowd. "No longer aligned with the cause. Since their proposal, I have seen the plans to bring war to the Anteverse as– as stupid, ma'am. I am certain that the risk involved astronomically outweighs the benefit, and will most likely succeed in doing nothing but inviting the kaiju back in, for which we will be ill-prepared for. I understand that the war is not over, Miss Mori. I just don't believe that this is the right way to fight it." He takes a long breath out, a thing that stutters on its journey between his lungs and mouth. "I will always be on the side of mankind," he says, a little lamely, because that's just what he's like. "But I will not fight war for war's sake."

Mako takes in his speech like it's an acquired taste and she's trying to work out if she likes it, yet. A glance over to Raleigh reveals the man eavesdropping, book forgotten on his lap. Their eyes meet and he scrambles to pick it back up, holds the thing awkwardly upside-down in front of his face like he can hide behind it. "I can see that you have given this great consideration. Your words are sensible." The unsaid but hangs in the air like rain, like humidity bearing heavy on wavering pavement. "Unfortunately, the world we live in does not follow such things as sense. It is irrational, and irrational things must be done to save it. There is no surety without risk, Hermann. You know this." She steps down from the platform, eagle-eyed. She looks at him like prey. "I will not sit idly and pretend the threat has not just slipped out of sight like I have done once before. We will not win on their terms a third time. I believe that a slim chance now is better than certain death in the future, and I can say that the Rangers here think the same. However, I will not pretend that I cannot see why you would think differently."

He has something to live for. He has someone to go home to. Someone who can't be involved in any of this shit anymore. Every one of them is deeply touched by the war, both flesh and spirit rended by the things they've done and seen and felt and survived. Ranger Pentecost and Lambert's reasons are each other, the cadets they've taken under their wings, seen blossom into headstrong little weapons; Mako's reasons are the only family she has left, Raleigh and Jake; every one of them is a limb of the PPDC. They were human, once. But after this long spent fighting, spent fearful, they are flexing, feeling, human-shaped extensions of the war effort. They bleed and they cry and they love so wantonly, but the fight for humanity is in them like a parasite. Like an alien in their heads. It pilots them, tugs their nerves like strings. The rush of war. You don't just walk away from it. 

(For the briefest of moments, Hermann is glad he was never a Ranger. Then he tucks the thought away into the rotten Pandora's box at the core of him.)

Hermann can walk away. He can. 

"Tidy your loose ends, Dr. Gottlieb," Mako says, voice exuding finality. "It will be more than difficult to find someone that can replace your expertise for the breach project, though I am sure we will manage without you." She steps towards Hermann, down from the platform. Her steps are small and quiet. The same ones she once used to sneak around the Shatterdome in the wee hours unseen. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, soft. She is his friend. She will always be his friend. "Hermann?" she says. She reaches up to his shoulder to brush away imaginary lint. She's like the sun. The kindest thing, the giver and sustainer of all life on Earth. She's still too bright to look at. Her warm eyes blind him. "Thank you."

It should feel reassuring. 

(He's supposed to feel guilty.)

One universe to the right of this one, the sky is pink all the time. Gradients of deep midnight magentas to mid-morn candy floss, peach-and-cream sunrises. One universe to the left, and the whole place is a lot older, and the stars are closer together about it. The sky's had a lot more time to fill up with ever-distant testaments of nuclear fusion, and it looks less like space and more like spilt glitter, points of starlight stacked up and up and up on top of each other. Across the street, there's a universe where Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler never met. Maybe they exist separately, or maybe they don't exist at all, or maybe they're just unlucky like that and Hermann threw the first letter away unread. 

Take the laneway between the blocks, a sliver of foot-worn grass between plywood fences, and at the end, not too far from here at all, really, there's a universe where Hermann teaches at some Massachusetts uni and his students hate him, cheer when he tells them the Tuesday afternoon lecture's moving to Microsoft Teams and constantly ask him when the census date is so they can drop all his classes without failing. He will insist the low pass rate has nothing to do with his attitude, and everything to do with this generation growing up with no discipline and even less work ethic. He and Newt implement cloned kaiju blood as a replacement for less efficient nuclear fuels and end up back in New Scientist about it. The two of them fight over who should pay for the Netflix account and how the coasters under the coffee table leg are not a long-term solution to the problem and the clues for this week's cryptic crossword and he makes Newt sleep on the floor when he's mad at him but the man always ends up crawling back beside him, or Hermann will sneak into the blanket nest he makes and wait to get snapped at about how lying on the hardwood cannot be good for his leg and if they're both going to be on the floor beside the bed anyway they might as well move onto the bed, Hermann, why did you even kick me out if you were just going to– Hermann pretends to not like the music he plays over the surround system when he cooks and he chides him about his choice in breakfast cereals and complains about Newt missing the laundry hamper when he throws his balled-up socks across the room because everything else is annoyingly perfect and all he has to be angry about are his boyfriend's dirty socks on the floor. 

In the universe down the lane, so insanely far a-fucking-way, Newt and Hermann sit at the kitchen table and try to coordinate some semblance of a grocery list. Everything they write down will be promptly forgotten upon entering the supermarket and they will inevitably spend a week's pay on whatever garbage with bright packaging catches their eyes as they meander down the aisles. There was no re-breach and no precursor and no hands around Hermann's neck and no action plan to invade the Anteverse and kick-start extinction and Moyulan Shatterdome was never even built. Newt throws a box of muffin mix into the trolley. Apple and cinnamon. He'll misread the baking time on the package because he hasn't updated his lens prescription in years and smoke the kitchen out, set off all the triangulated alarms in the apartment, and produce an utterly pathetic tray of muffin-shaped charcoal. He'll eat one anyway, or at least try to, in an attempt to convince Hermann that they're salvageable, and the batter will crunch between his teeth and make him cartoonishly cough out a mouthful of black debris. He'll sit in the corner of the kitchen with his head in his hands and contemplate crying for attention, and Hermann will smooth down the rowdy hair at the back of his head and tell him they're just muffins, it's not the bloody end of the world, but it'll still feel catastrophic because he worked really hard on whipping that cream by hand and now he's just gonna have to eat it with a spoon. They sit on the kitchen floor with all the windows open and fans on and eat whipped cream out of a bowl with the same tablespoon. 

Hermann is so glad this is not that universe. 

He spoons out a chunk of sugared grapefruit and taps his pen against a notepad, sat at the kitchen table at their apartment in Moyulan, long since used to the feeling of being watched boring into the back of his neck. He doesn't even know if anyone's still watching. Maybe no-one ever was. The table wobbles as he writes. He slides the coaster out from underneath his mug of tea and reaches down to place it under the uneven leg. It almost fixes it. It's allowed to be a little shaky, he supposes. They all are. 

"Dear?" he says at Newt. The man looks over to him, the cat curled between his legs where he's laying lengthways on the couch. He let Hermann cut his hair, yesterday, a shoddy job done half with clippers and half with the kitchen scissors, hacked away at the grey-threaded waves of it until Newt eventually wrestled the blades away from him, half fearing for the future of his hair– it's thinning enough already, Hermann, are you trying to make me go bald– and half teasing about all the dreadful Shatterdome sink haircuts Hermann's given himself over the years– I know you have a super mega gay crush on him but I swear to God, if you make me look like Alan Turing– and it's almost a passable style. They almost haven't found any stray long bits sprouting from the top of his head. Shorter hair makes him look older in some ways and younger in others. It's more grey now, patchy clumps of it at his temples. He looks good. "Can you think of anything we need from the shop?" 

Newt looks to the roof for a moment, then smiles. "I'll think about it when we're there."

Hermann frowns. "That's not a good technique, Newt–"

"It's hasn't let me down in forty years, babe–"

The oven dings. Newt squeaks in surprise and scrambles off the couch, the cat loudly proclaiming his disapproval at being awoken so rudely but seeming quite satisfied that he now has the whole divot between the cushions to himself. Newt doesn't so much as walk behind the kitchen counter as he rushes there in a flurry of excited limbs. Hermann watches him first attempt to fish the piping hot tray from the rack with his bare hands before surrendering to using the tea towel hanging from the handle. He exclaims a small yes when he produces the assembly of little golden-brown cakes. The house smells of warm spice and apples in syrup.

They don't burn the muffins.

But maybe that's okay.