Chapter Text
The first seventy-two hours of After were spent in a co-dependent kind of limbo. Hermann remembered some of it, but not that much; the last two days of Before had been- overwhelming. Hermann had been forced to deal with crisis after crisis (the literal end of the world), and after a point (Newton, twitching-seizing-dying) some deep, intrinsic protective feature in his mind had said ‘enough’. He knew the biology of it now, as if he had learned it himself (he had not), and for a while he floated in a sea of artificial, traumatised calm.
The meeting of their minds had been chaotic, catastrophic, a revelation. Newton had been (postictal, delirious, manic, scared-scared-scared), Hermann had been consumed by the deep, sucking agony of anticipatory grief (Newton was going to die-die-die and only Hermann seemed to care), and the half-developed monster they had bridged their minds together with had been in its death throes. Risking his own mind to share the load was logical (Newton’s left pupil was blown, he was clumsy and stumbling and Hermann knew the code , he knew what happened when the neural load was too much), but also the most impulsive thing that he had ever done. He would have liked to say it was to save the world, but he had never been inclined towards flights of fancy. He had weighed himself against the great, yawning thing that was the world with Newton gone, and decided that if one of them must die, they both should.
The kaiju was wrong (alien-alien-alien, thoughts and feelings and colours, minds on minds on minds all tied together). It was dying, but it was a whole, vast explosion of brand new consciousness; a whole brain, not just a fragment, and so full of terrifying potential. Hermann had seen how very easily they could have been consumed, because what were two, tiny human minds in the face of the Hive? Their saving grace (chittering things, Precursors, pushing-pushing-pushing to get in) was likely the fact that Newton was a strange, broken sort of thing. His mind was a nest of anxieties, delusions, obsessive thoughts that went round and round with no hope of ever spiralling somewhere safe. He was the smartest person in the room, but also just a little bit twisted in there too. His mind had been all strange edges, hard to grasp.
There had been a sense of readiness, when the Drift had catapulted mind and mind and hivemind into the spin. That first taste (Newton, fitting, twitching, bleeding) had been enough to make an imprint, and when he came back for more (compulsive, addictive personality, don’t know when to stop) there was a snare set ready for him. Hermann had been unexpected. Hermann had been expected to make well thought out choices, to keep his head on his shoulders and out of the Drift, but Hermann had been so afraid of living out After alone.
Ten years of verbal sparring, matching each other thought for thought; they were compatible like opposing poles of a magnet, snapping furiously together, pulled by an invisible, inescapable force. The Hive might have whittled out a puzzle piece, ready to click Newton into their disastrous whole, but they had the physics of it wrong. Hermann was the immovable object to Newton’s unstoppable force; left brain and right brain, they were an absolute match for each other in the most terrifyingly perfect way. Pilots battled on the mats for a few scant minutes, sticks poking, looking for similarities; their compatibility with one another was registered in how many times they could land a blow. Newton and Hermann had been locked in a furious handshake for over a decade, building and evolving and thinking each other to new greatness; Pilots had nothing on that.
They had entered the Drift and looked death and ruin in the face; the last burst of a dying, half-formed mind, a terrified, possessed foetal creature used as a carrier for the vast, twisted knowledge of the Hive. The Hive had been ready, ready to sink their claws into the bright, mad chaos that was Newton, to scratch and claw and burrow until there was a space for them inside. There had been no contingency plan for a second, compatible mind (receptors on the cell wall, bound up together with chemical energy, no room for anything else to join). Newton brought so much into the Drift (always thinking-thinking-thinking), so many places where a hostile force could lock into place and lock up his mind.
Carbon Monoxide, red blood cells- no room for oxygen when that dangerously similar but different molecule had fixed itself in place. The cell was useless for its intended purpose, once that assassin in disguise had found its place. They had been so, so terrifyingly fortunate that Hermann’s mind had slotted into place first . They had both seen it, in that last, terrifying moment when the link to the Hive had died; the potential, a timeline spinning out of control around them, Newton, dead behind his eyes and screaming in the void. Inception, sleeper agents, infection - and what better mind to steal? Newton had always walked the knife-edge of too-smart (wanna watch the world burn), and oh, but he would have been a terrifying tool.
Hermann had done more than share the load (mind-snog, little death, hilarious but oh god he’ll catch my crazy), he had fundamentally changed everything . He had been exhausted and terrified and his mind had grasped at Newton’s (too tight, too tight, never going to find a way to let go) with everything he had. Their Drift had been chaos theory, relativity, a butterfly flapping its wings and altering the entire flow of time going forward. Their Drift had been a new beginning; a different sort of After.
There had been little time to take a breath, in those first few frantic hours. They had both been (wet-exhausted-bleeding) so tangled up together that the desperate race back to the Shatterdome had been all one person in two pieces. There was a searing headache, leg locked up: agony, cold-exhausted-terrified, and no way to pick apart ‘ours’ into ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. Their vision was blurred; two blown eyes between them, one superficial, one near-blind, their leg was all pain and barely functional, they were running on fumes and hallucinating monsters in the shadows. It was impossible to tell which of the two halves of their body was feeling what sensation, which part of their interwoven mind was screaming-screaming-screaming and which part had retreated into a corner to hide.
Someone from Medical had caught them at some point, huddled together, forehead to forehead in a corner. Everything around them had been light-noise-chaos, and part of them was so overstimulated it was shaking apart. The Shatterdome had become a mess of desperate energy, grief and joy and so much relief, but also so many empty places, so many lost so quickly. There were people missing, great, bleeding chunks carved out of the celebration, and they were a Hive of two minds only, because everything else was death.
Hermann remembered someone (nurse, doctor, some sort of professional), gathering them up. He had been ready to fight it, because half of him was checked out, cold and hurt and vulnerable, and the other half was barely holding it together. Newton (blank eyed, half blind) had been more in Hermann’s head than his own, tucked up safe in a woven cradle of memories-arguments-home. They had startled together, a creature with four legs and four arms and one mind all mashed together, and would have fought if they had not been handled as a single being. They were hurt-hurt-hurt and at risk of shattering; they could not have tolerated being pulled apart.
One mad-eyed thing in pieces, they had been holding on so tight, keeping themselves together by sheer force of will. They were all bits of ‘you’ and bits of ‘me’ and us-us-us, held in four cupped hands between two hearts. Medical had known better than to pry them apart; had sedated them together, kept them touching, kept them close. Neither of them slept, semiconscious and finally (finally-finally) calm, but they rested for a while. Part of them needed fluids, anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, part of them was bleeding, all of them was in an unbearable amount of pain. They were medicated together and scanned together and finally, finally allowed some peace.
It had been perhaps twenty-four hours, when Hermann dragged himself to wakefulness and felt something like himself again. Newton’s body had been twitching-twitching-twitching, all damaged impulses and cerebral irritation, and it would have been terrifying, if he couldn’t so clearly feel the burning soul of the man tucked close against his own. They were curled up in one bed together, two commas, yin and yang, a little bit of each other irreversibly switched around. There were studies that he hadn’t read (Newton knew and learned and had a voracious thirst for knowledge), that boasted improved outcomes for Drift partners suffering from neural trauma, if they were treated as one being.
There had been a dead-eyed nurse, watching over them (they had lost so many, too many, they saw the way to kill them in my head! ) who had acknowledged him with a weary smile. He learned from her that Newton had been the more damaged part of their strange, new whole (twice the damage, all the neural load came crashing down on him because Hermann didn’t listen). There had apparently been moments where it looked like one of both of them might not survive it (the Hive had died while tangled up with them), but Hermann was awake, and Newton, despite looking moments from oblivion, was recovering.
The second day Hermann had been- shocky, distracted. He had been unable to hold a conversation without Newton skin to skin, had stuttered and jumped at shadows, wary, and aside from the small parade of medical professionals he was left to settle back into himself. It was a process, building himself up piece by piece, while Newton slept a drugged sleep and dreamed strange dreams in Hermann’s subconscious. They were recovering, he was reassured time and time again, Newton was improving hour by hour, the electrical storms raging in his overtaxed mind fading in the face of Hermann’s steady mental presence. Hermann did not feel steady, he felt hollowed out and too full, but Newton was there, alive, acting as a bedrock for Hermann to build himself anew.
It was late, or perhaps early, when Newton had come awake with a shudder. Hermann had been dreaming, they both had been dreaming, and the strange, electric blue, blinding sound of the Hive had followed them. It was overwhelming (too much, too loud, can’t find you!) for a moment, before they both settled back into me-you-us. He was slow, puzzled, but so beautifully, wonderfully himself; not too damaged, not ruined, they could fix themselves together because the pieces were still there. Hermann had cried a little, because of all of the terrifying biological knowledge, the things that could happen to a person, should their brain be damaged, that Newton had given him in the Drift. They had been so, so unbelievably lucky.
The third day had been a mess of examination (tests tests tests) and damage control. There had been scans and questions and medication that made them both feel sick and sluggish. Follow up appointments booked, long term consequences discussed, lists upon lists upon lists of symptoms to be wary of. Nobody had done what they had done (Newton had tried it twice and somehow lived to tell the tale), so they were both a curiosity and an oddity (as they had always been). They would be monitored (studied), and Hermann reconstructed himself in those three days around a new, universal constant: he was never, ever going to allow Newton to face it all alone.
Hermann had shut the man off once, called his ideas mad and disregarded his impulses. He had forgotten, in those last, messy hours before the world came crashing down, that when Newton got so tangled up in self-destructive brilliance, Hermann was the counterbalance that stopped his intellect spiraling towards accidental suicide. Hermann had known Newton, in some ways better than he knew himself, but still he had made a monumental lapse in judgement that had nearly been the death of them all (you drove me to this!). If Newton had been lost (dead or consumed or possessed by the Hive) then it would have been Hermann’s stupid fault.
It was traumatic, when they finally encouraged him to take a break from Medical by all but forcing him out of the door. It was good for the both of them, they told him, to start spending a little time apart now that they were stable. The patterns of their brains were all jumbled up together, two minds shattered and all the pieces swept up into a single pile; they needed to be weaned off of each other, so that ‘us’ could form back into ‘me’ and ‘you’ in perpetuity. Hermann didn’t argue, because what was the point when they would never understand. He wheeled himself painfully around the empty hallways of his former life, and could still feel the quicksilver shadow of Newton in the back of his mind.
They tried to sleep apart that night, as prescribed by a stone-faced neurologist who had seen and done too much in wartime, and the gulf between their beds had been as insurmountable as the Breach. They had both been dead eyed and exhausted come morning, but apparently that was progress . The Drift hangover should be fading, the doctors told them, things were settling back to normal, and would be as they were before, given time. Neither of them, in the odd, shared space that nebulously held their minds together, cared to correct that assumption.
~*~
Hermann was himself, as much as he would ever be, now that Newton was superimposed across his psyche, and painstakingly packing away the remains of the last decade of his life. It was all a matter of keeping up appearances; the Shatterdome was being shuttered into sleep. There was no Breach to map, no monsters to fight, and the word was already turning towards ‘never again’. It was probably analogous to other wars, smaller wars, but Hermann found it jarring all the same. He had lived within the maverick confines of the last, greatest hope for mankind for so very long that it was hard to imagine anything else.
Their division was to be funded, expanded, and turned towards research and development. The betterment of mankind, using the scraps of a higher civilisation to drive Earth towards the future; the part of Hermann that was Newton found it dirty. They both could see it, power hungry corporations, groups that had fled behind the walls and left them all for dead, fighting over what was left. There was money and influence to be had, weapons to be made, and Hermann was tired. He was so impossibly tired of death and ruin and despair.
They knew how to kill them, because they looked inside my head .
It was not Hermann’s thought that tickled in the back of his mind as he was carefully wiping down his chalkboards. They would be packed and shipped and set back up again in due course, but for now he found the meticulous erasure of his painful history cathartic.
All dead because of me.
Some things hurt most because they were true. Hermann had never been the sort of man inclined to diluting the truth; a fact was a fact, even when it hurt. It was only recently that he had learned to wish that some truths could be smothered by pretty lies and packed away like chalkboards.
Everything we saw, everything we learned, everything that’s gonna happen will be because of me. Oppenheimer wanted to end a war, and look at what he discovered. God, the world is gonna burn and it’s all my stupid fault.
It was a strange sensation, to have a frightened nexus of guilt and pain run through him that was not his own. He felt it, but it was strange, viewed through the wrong set of lenses, warped. It still hurt like the devil, though, which is why Hermann put away his eraser and collected his cane. There was no use in trying to work, when half of himself was crying out into the darkness, and really, what was there left to do? Ten years of desperate fighting, and everything he owned could be packed into a duffle.
Hermann wasn’t an impulsive man, but there was a difference, now; he wasn’t just Hermann anymore. He and Newton were separate beings, but had become intertwined. Things that had been nonsensical before were easy, urges were addressed and understood. Hermann had always found comfort in sharing space with Newton, even when they were at each other's throats, but seeing the desire through Newton’s eyes was something else entirely.
The fool man has infected me with himself , was the thought at hand, as Hermann found himself decoding the lock on Newton’s door. He knew the passcode, and his biometrics were registered to open the door, no questions asked, but it seemed fitting somehow, to sneak his way inside. Newton knew what he was doing, and Hermann knew that Newton knew it; it made for a pleasant feedback loop between them, rather than the spiral of despair.
The room was dark, when he made his way inside. The monitors were all powered down, and various articles of clothing were blotting out the few lights that remained. The mirror was covered with a ratty parka (Hermann’s), and the entire space was an opposing crime scene of disorderly and packed away. They had both been gathering the last vestiges of their lives together, putting it to bed, and it struck Hermann again how very little they had, aside from each other.
“Do you ever wonder what would have happened, if you had just… left me to it?” Newton was a shadowy blue outline, a shiver of synaesthesia and familiarity. Hermann could feel the way his other half was coiled tight, buried in the bedding with a pillow crushed over his ears. It was a strange duality, to be standing in the doorway while another, separate part of him huddled in the bedclothes, but it was a sensation he was becoming used to. It had faded a little, as the days progressed into weeks, but they had both known that something had taken root in the ashes; they would never be entirely separate again.
Each mind in the Hive is a galaxy, individual and beautiful, but the universe is a greater whole than all of its separate parts. One of them was thinking it, so they both were.
“You would have died.” Unacceptable, terrifying. “It would have been a quick end, but painful, and the rest of us would have followed you in time.”
“Maybe you could have found a way to close the Breach without me.” Newton didn’t believe it, their frantic, horrifying realisation that it wasn’t going to work had told them both as much. If Hermann had not split the load, Newton would have killed himself trying, and their last, desperate hope of success would have been for naught.
“And then what, Newton? What would I have done? Gone on living with the knowledge that I had let you die, just so that I could be proven right? My death would have been a miserable one, when it finally caught up with me.” And it would have, sooner rather than later.
“I felt that way, for a bit.” Newton shifted in the darkness, making space, and Hermann crossed the room to sit beside him. “I couldn’t get it out of my head, that I knew the answer and I just needed to be right about it. I was so, so fucking tired of everything I did not being enough.”
“I should have listened.” There were no secrets in the Drift; it was easy to be honest, when they had already shared everything that mattered. “I was… exhausted, angry. Frustrated with the world. I knew that you were suffering, that the idea was eating you from the inside, but I could not quite bring myself to face the reality of it all.”
Newton huffed a faintly bitter sounding laugh. “You put me off for a long time, dude. Like, I would have done it, and… kept doing it, I think, if I had lived long enough. I still kind of want to, it’s… it’s like an itch in the back of my head, telling me to find another brain, make another brain, because there’s this gap somewhere in me that only They can fill.”
“There is no room for Them between us.” There was enough space for Hermann to curl up, in the gap between Newton and the wall. It was more tempting than it should have been. He was reminded of other nights, other conversations, times when they had each been all the other had left. “They are insects, Newton; locusts, swarming and consuming. It might be tempting to join the riot, but there is no place for them here.”
“We’ve been together for such a long fucking time.” Newton sounded exhausted. Neither of them had been sleeping well, attempting to appease Medical and others who simply couldn’t understand by remaining apart. “I don’t think anyone else can fit between us, not any more.”
Hermann sighed, set his cane aside, and leant down to untie his shoes. “I would rather have you prattling nonsense in my head, than the alternative.” Newton dead, or worse, Newton not really Newton anymore: it didn’t bear thinking about. Hermann sometimes worried about what he might become, should they be separated by more than walls and well meaning but ignorant strangers.
“I’m having a really, really hard fucking time seeing how my life is going to work, now that it’s all just- gone.”
Before, Hermann would have neatly tucked his shoes out of the way, folded his clothes, but Hermann wasn’t just himself these days. He tossed what would be too uncomfortable to sleep in on the ground, his mess mingling with Newton’s in a symbolic sort of way. Fuck the nurses, fuck the police , the unfamiliarly familiar voice in the back of his head proclaimed.
It was easy to slot himself into the too-small bunk, and Newton welcomed him into the dark, muggy cavern of the bedclothes. They fit together nicely, foreheads touching, balanced. They were the perfect mix of order and entropy; equilibrium. “Since when have you ever stalled over how something worked, instead of giving in to the urge to take it apart and work it out for yourself?”
“Must have got it from you. You always want a predictive model for everything, life included. I guess I’m just not good enough at the numbers to make sense of it yet.”
Both of them felt easier, crushed close together and hidden from the world. Hermann felt himself smiling, just a little. “We could build one together.” A life, a predictive model; numbers and dissection, mathematics and biology and two halves of a whole person. “Make sense of it together.”
“You would do that for me? With me?” An echo of another time, not so very far away, when they had been separate but still more together than either of them had been willing to admit.
“It would be my pleasure.” Newton would need someone to keep him in check. Someone to balance out his insane impulses that were worse, now, because that first Drift had left something behind in him. Hermann could not imagine a time or a place where he turned away, let the infuriating little man escape into the unknown and likely self-destruct. It was selfish, and self indulgent, but Hermann could still pretend it was for the good of the human race, if he felt so inclined.
Honest in the darkness, with little more than breath between them, there was no point in pretending. “Newton, it would be my privilege.”