Chapter Text
Newt Geiszler did not snoop.
He occasionally, once in a while, very rarely… came into information that was not, strictly speaking, for his specific eyes.
For example, on this particular occasion, Hermann was still sleeping the sleep of the curmudgeonly and Newt was awake as fuck, man, and he needed to check some things on the PPDC intranet but hadn’t brought his own tablet because Hermann had a distracting mouth. So whatever, sue him, he fired up Hermann’s tablet and went to town.
He checked the latest DNA sequencing for Knifehead — just like Yamarachi, actually, and there had to be something wrong there, he had to run it all again, but that could wait til human hours. He also checked the totally DL wagers forum. He had twenty thousand yen on a couple of the new Jaeger engineers actually brawling instead of fucking, and forty-five hundred Philippine pesos on the new ultra-conservative Prime Minister of Australia being a huge closet case. Odds were not in his favor on either, but that, in Newt’s opinion, was the only way to play. Long odds and big wins.
So he was just checking his own shit, right, when maybe his stylus innocently swiped across a folder marked “private,” and he couldn’t help being literate, no one could possibly blame him for that. So if he read through said folder, just for a second, not even on purpose, it totally wasn’t his fault.
It was the code for the Mark I Jaegers. With minimal scrolling, Newt could see that it was the code to Coyote Tango in particular — the Jaeger Stacker Pentecost himself had piloted alone when Onibaba got Tokyo five years ago.
Why was that marked “private?”
Hermann himself had done up the code, of course. He was the whole reason the PPDC had Jaegers at all, which obvs gave Newt half a boner just to think about, but that was beside the point. The point was that the code for Coyote Tango — the code for all the Mark I Jaegers, in fact — was a matter of public record. Newt would put a healthy amount of Peruvian Neuvo Sol banknotes on each Jaeger having its own folder in this tablet — not that he’d look, he wasn’t like that — and none of them being on some weird lock down.
And maybe Newt did a little check, no harm done, nothing invasive. And maybe Newt saw that Hermann had last accessed Coyote Tango’s code just that morning, but the other files were gathering the proverbial dust. And maybe Newt looked at all that lovely code again and maybe it made the corners of his mouth very, very curly.
Maybe.
—
Newt was up to his ass in kaiju lung when the constant clack clack clack screech clack of Hermann thinking super crazy loudly on his goddamn blackboard holy shit stopped.
“What?” Newt said. “What’s that I hear? Is it… my own thoughts?”
“Oh, shut up,” Hermann snapped. Newt glanced over his shoulder to Hermann’s side of the room and found him fussing with his sweater vest and worrying at his cane.
“Is it that time already?”
Hermann looked up from his nonexistent task to furrow a brow at him.
“To what time are you referring, Dr. Geiszler?”
Newt rolled his eyes. During work hours, which was damn near always, ugh, Hermann called him by title and surname only and would not budge about it. Said it helped him “demarcate and compartmentalize the disparate modes of our relationship,” and wouldn’t hear a word of Newt’s, “but Hermie I’m Newt whether I’m swimming in kaiju stomach acid or blowing you into kingdom come.” But Hermann wouldn’t call him Newt ever anyway. He was Newton in their downtime, like all his dignity lived in that stupid second syllable or something. Drove him nuts, for real. So as far as Newt was concerned, it was only fair to drive Hermann nuts in return. He was going to deploy “kani” as a nickname soon, trial run. Because Hermann, hermit, hermit crab, crabby motherfucker, stick in the mud, crabsticks, kani, see? It was good because it functioned on multiple levels, that was the mark of an effective joke, Newt knew how these things worked. Newt had a whole list of possible things to call him; kept it in a battered Moleskine with a naked lady on the cover so Hermann wouldn’t look. Took it out and worked on it every day. And the look on Hermann’s face when it came out always inspired more names for the list.
“Dr. Geiszler.” Oh, Hermann was exasperated, how tedious, how predictable, how unlikely to result in a supply closet orgasm at lunch time.
“Pentecost’s check-in,” Newt said. “Shit. Is it Thursday already? Herms, what did we even do the last two days?”
“Stop calling me that. And I believe you’ve been dissecting lungs past the point of sleep deprivation-induced hallucination. I, for one, have been doing something useful.”
“Oh, like what, treating the black lung you must have from all the chalk dust you inhale?”
“There are so many logical fallacies in that sentence, I don’t know where to begin.”
Newt flicked some tissue over the line between their halves of the lab just in time for Marshall Pentecost and Herc Hansen to appear in the doorway and send Hermann into veritable paroxysms. By which Newt meant that Hermann was stiffer than usual, shoulders hitched up, ears flaming red, mouth pursed flat and firm. He was practically having a fit, if you knew how to look. And Newt definitely did. He was going to get his 7th PhD in Dr. Hermann Gottlieb Tells. He already had the first fifty pages of a dissertation.
“Really, Geiszler?” Hansen said, and made a disappointed face at him.
“Justified,” Newt said, and pointed at Hermann’s head because for real that haircut explained everything. He and Hansen turned their attention in tandem to the mathematics side of the room and found Hermann deep in discussion with the Marshall. And, to Newt’s eye, profoundly conflicted about whether to salute him or fling himself at his feet and throw his arms around his knees.
Newt had to smother the rising cackle, because he was loud when he laughed or, whatever, existed, he couldn’t help it, and it would snap Hermann out of the big old hearts-in-eyes expression he had going on right now. Newt groped for his phone only to spy it three tables away.
“Shit,” he whispered, very very quietly. “You got a camera on your phone?”
That was when Newt noticed Hansen’s abject horror. He was staring all open-mouthed and furrowed-brow as Hermann yakked and Pentecost nodded all handsomely and thoughtfully and sexily. Whatever, Newt wasn’t dead. The man was a sex beast. And he always, always listened to Hermann, and gave him due praise, and just generally treated the entire K-Science crew the same as any of his Jaeger pilots. That kind of thing went a long way, especially for Hermann. Newt got the appeal, he really did. It didn’t bother him. He just wanted photographic evidence.
But Hansen was having some kind of quiet meltdown about it, and Newt definitely didn’t get that.
“What’s up, Hansen?” he said, knocking Hansen’s elbow with his own. He had to kind of bounce up on his toes to get there, but whatever nobody could prove that.
Hansen startled and looked at him like he wasn’t a creature in is natural habitat, like Hansen wasn’t the one encroaching on his territory right now.
“That’s new,” he said.
Newt snorted.
“Is that… are they—” Hansen cleared his throat.
Newt did laugh then, a big old honking guffaw that bounced between the walls of the lab without his volition, and sure enough, Hermann paused long enough to scowl at him. Newt stuck the tip of his tongue out, Hermann rolled his eyes, Pentecost leaned in like nothing had happened, and the conversation started again. Hansen looked like a particularly struggling Poecilia reticulata.
“Naw, dude,” Newt said. “Hermann just wishes.” He slapped Hansen on the back hard enough to make him stumble and look at him with new eyes. “But you don’t have a problem with that, do you my man?”
“No, of course not,” Hansen said, too quick.
“Whatever, dude.”
He palmed Hansen’s phone off him, snapped a photo, and tossed it back into his hands. Hansen’s continued impression of a threatened rodent — frozen and big-eyed — wasn’t really inspiring.
“Send that to me, yeah?” Newt said, and turned back to the slab of lung on his table. If Hansen wasn’t going to be a titillating conversationalist, then Newt had better shit to do.
Like plan exactly what he was going to do with that photo.
—
Newt decided to make a study of it. He was a scientist and shit. In his naked lady notebook, he now had graphs and pie charts and everything was color coded.
It was nothing obvious. Nothing anyone else would notice, other than the apparently easily scandalized Herc Hansen. Which was good because if anyone else noticed and Hermann found out he would die in a puddle of beige humiliation and then who would Newt snuggle in the night? It was just the little things: Hermann’s eyes tracking Pentecost whenever they happened to be in the same room but pointedly not looking straight at him unless he were speaking to Hermann specifically. Hermann standing a little bit straighter when he was around. Hermann going just a touch pink in the face if Pentecost told him he was doing good work.
Newt thought it was adorable.
And hilarious.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to torment Hermann about it forever and ever amen.
—
Shatterdomes had a serious lack of glitter. Like not even people with kids had any, fucking rationing, and also fucking lack of whimsicality, so Newt was reduced to cutting aluminum foil into the tiniest little pieces of makeshift glitter ever known to mankind. He also had to improvise on the pink paper he was gonna use to cut little shapes out of, which was why his pink Sharpie was dead now, and also why he was maybe slightly just a little bit high.
But anyway, he was in the process of painstakingly supergluing his homemade glitter to the edges of the photograph when Hermann arrived totally unexpectedly and without even knocking dude and Newt shoved all his crap into a desk drawer in a flurry of shiny debris.
“Goddamnit Hermann!”
Hermann gaped at him like a ruffled parrot. If he had pearls to clutch, he’d be wringing his own neck.
“What are you doing, Dr. Geiszler?”
“A personal project, Dr. Gottlieb, now what do you want?”
Hermann scowled at him, and Hermann had a very particular scowl because one half of his mouth definitely went down lower than the other half and his forehead got all lined and he tipped his chin up all sharp and frankly it was really fuckin’ cute but Newt could never let on that he thought it was cute because Hermann had such fits to throw if he thought you weren’t taking him seriously and his scowls were really serious business, okay? So Newt harnessed all his supremely agile mental energies into scowling back.
Through the facial acrobatics, Hermann somehow managed to say, “I had wanted to see if my partner wished to take supper with me, but I can see where I’m not wanted.”
Now, Newt had a choice to make. He could do the thing his body wanted, what seemed natural right now, which was to spring out of his chair and plaster itself to Hermann’s whipcord body and mumble a jocular “baby don’t be that way,” which was a joke which was what jocular meant but it wouldn’t be a joke really, or.
Or he could take this golden opportunity to make Hermann squirm a bit. And really, what kind of choice was that?
So he sniffed and spun in his chair to face his desk again. He hunched in on himself and made a great show of cleaning up bits of foil and paper.
“Is that what I am, Dr. Gottlieb? Your partner?”
There was a strangled sort of scoffing sound from Hermann’s general direction.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Newton. Look at me, for God’s sake. You’re like a petulant child.”
Newt just let himself sag into the desk as if under a terrible weight. Like 220 pounds of handsome, muscle-bound Marshall with so much soul coming out of his eyes he must have made a deal with someone unsavory. And maybe Newt made a pitiful noise to go along with his epic flop. Believability was in the small things. Maybe stage performance would be his 8th PhD.
He heard Hermann’s stumping gait and the thump of the cane as he made his way over to Newt’s desk. But, instead of being berated in RP, he felt spindly fingers stroke through his hair and the cool pad of Hermann’s thumb pass over his temple.
“Is it a migraine?” Hermann asked softly. MEE-grain, he pronounced it, and it always kind of made Newt laugh, so he huffed into his arms as a disguise and then it sounded like sob just a little and that wasn’t Newt’s fault, and it wasn’t Newt’s fault when Hermann’s touch turned more tender than it already was, cupping the back of his skull like a delicate egg. “I’ll get you your prescription.”
Okay, so now Newt felt a bit bad about the whole thing. Hermann cared so much, underneath the sneering and the sniffing and the eye rolls so expansive they affected the earth’s rotation. He cared about math and little coastal babies in danger of being crushed by kaiju and the fate of the earth and how many minutes Newt liked his tea steeped and if Newt had eaten today and what Newt thought about the latest formulae and just — Newt. Newt didn’t get that, dude, he really didn’t. People usually didn’t stick around even to have a conversation with him because he was grating and difficult to be around and exhausting, apparently, whatever, but here Hermann was, four years into this thing, and he still came home to Newt every night kinda frigging happy to see him. That shit was priceless.
So his brain was going “Abort! Abort!” and Newt twisted under Hermann’s hand to nuzzle his face into the palm and say, “No migraine, chill out.”
A put-upon little sigh, and when Newt cracked his eyes open he found Hermann staring down at him, haloed by the overhead light and trying to disguise his concern with a frown but mostly it didn’t work because, you know, 7th PhD.
“Hey, buttercup angel-pie. I love you.”
“What’s got into you, Newton? Are — are you high?” And what a fucker, looking at him like someone’s maiden aunt, like he didn’t roll the best joints this side of the prime meridian, like he didn’t have a habit of doing a shotgun from Newt’s mouth and rubbing off on him with a smile on his face.
“No!” Newt said, too loud. “Only a little, and because this place has shitty ventilation, and it’s not my fault.”
“Oh, and just who is at fault for your huffing permanent marker for God knows how long?”
“Yours!”
“Oh, of course, everything’s my fault, how could I forget?” Hermann took his hands away and stepped back to give Newt the full “irritated Oxbridge man” experience. “Pray tell, Dr. Geiszler, how in the world could I be at fault for your current inebriation?”
“Because you want to make out with Stacker Pentecost’s perfect face!”
Hermann stiffened and his face drained of color and this was what Newt called a tactical error because he’d aborted the mission but somehow made it all so much worse because sometimes his brain didn’t have a filter and he wasn’t very good at being sneaky in the long term and apparently he’d used it all up gathering data for his naked lady notebook and he had to sit up, he had to try to blink away the fuzzy haze of Sharpie because Hermann looked haggard, Hermann looked about twenty years older than he really was and that, that was Newt’s fault, he did that, him, him, Newt goddamn dumbass Geiszler, world-class asshole for real.
“Newton, I… I never meant…”
“Hey dude, no— it’s cool, I didn’t—”
“No. No, please. Allow me to explain myself.”
“Hermann, man, this isn’t—” But Hermann was already talking and he’d pulled up a chair so he could do it while their eyes were level and he was close that Newt could feel his body heat, and he’d grabbed Newt’s hand in his, which was clammy, and ah hell.
“— nothing, with Pentecost, a passing fancy I got when I was reviewing the code one day, like a, a celebrity one might post on one’s wall as a teenager, which I never did of course, but that’s no excuse, I offer no excuses. It’s completely ridiculous, Newton, not at all in the realm of reality, and not something I would want besides. I never meant for you to find out or feel — overlooked, or slighted, or inadequate, or anything like that. I am — Newton, I am yours, utterly and devotedly, and I have been since the first day you called me one of your bloody pet names, you horrible, darling man, I swear to you. I swear to you. This nonsense stops now.”
Newt could feel his face doing a thing, a thing where it was maybe all soppy and trembly looking into Hermann’s face, which was also doing a thing where it was all big-eyed and imploring, and he gripped Hermann’s hand tighter in both of his and he said, “Dude, I know. We do this you-and-me thing every day. It’s real.”
“Yes.” Hermann swallowed, and looked generally like a waterlogged cat. He scooted closer and tugged free of Newt’s hands to cup his own around Newt’s jaw. Newt closed the distance between them by butting his forehead up against Hermann’s and rubbing their noses together. He was totally into Hermann’s nose because it was like a tiny triangle and triangles are the world’s most perfect shape, so.
So Newt pulled Hermann from his chair into Newt’s lap and Hermann made a squawking sound but he didn’t protest like he usually would, just steadied himself with an arm around Newt’s neck, and tried to look less put-upon than he usually did when faced with Newt’s antics.
“Is this okay?” Newt asked, rubbing Hermann’s trouble hip. Hermann just nodded and sort of… melted into Newt. Hermann liked to pretend he wasn’t snuggly but secretly he totally was. He closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice small.
“Dude. Listen. I’m not mad, or jealous, or whatever. I promise.”
“I’ve been so — so juvenile, Newton, I can hardly believe it of myself.”
“You know it’s natural, right? You have eyes, you look at other people, because people are hot sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I would never betray you.”
“I know that. Okay? I know that. I’m not upset, Hermann.”
“You indulged in histrionics all over your desk about it! And for God’s sake what is all this?” He flung out a hand, which Newt took to indicate his totally awesome glitter and pink paper slivers.
Newt groaned and thumped his head on Hermann’s sharp-ass collar bone and kind of regretted it but it made them a little unwieldy so Hermann clutched at his back to get steady and Newt couldn’t really regret that so it was okay.
“I was trying not to get caught.”
That earned him a pause and the half-mast eyes and flat-lipped mouth of consternation. Newt sighed. He reached around Hermann’s body to pull out his desk drawer and reveal the photo of Hermann and Pentecost, only half be-glittered, only slightly be-hearted. Hermann took it carefully in hand.
“Newton.”
“I wanted to contribute to your Stacker Pentecost Obsession Trapper Keeper. I tried to get an honest-to-fuck Trapper Keeper circa 1998, but rationing keeps ruining my life dude, you don’t even know.”
“What is wrong with you.”
“I mean, do you want a list, or like, a doctor’s note or something?”
“Newton.”
“It’s not finished, you didn’t let me finish it, I could make it really good.”
“Newton. Christ.”
“I had one too! Katee Sackhoff, dude. Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“You — you ridiculous, preposterous man.”
“Hey, do you want to finish it with me?”
“Newton. You were mocking me.” He heaved a big sigh, and Newt hugged him around the waist tighter because he was totally into him but also so he couldn’t run away.
“No, no, no, Herms, oat cluster, butt-snail, sun-in-the-sky. I just… I like it when you’re human, like the rest of us. I thought it was sweet. But, fuck dude, you know me. I fuck up when I try to show you I like you.”
Hermann laid the photo aside and linked his hands together behind Newt’s neck. He fixed Newt with a shrewd, considering look.
“Whatever shall I do with you, Dr. Geiszler?”
“Um, you could totally sex me up right now if you wanted, I mean, just as a suggestion.”
“No, I don’t think I shall.”
Newt pouted. “How about if I pretended to be Stacker Pentecost? I could, right? Like I could make my voice all deep like this and I could totally do an accent like this, and maybe I could manhandle you a little like—”
“Stop, stop, Newton, my testicles have receded back into my body in horror.”
Newt goggled at Hermann’s crotch and Hermann made a weird screechy sound and maybe tickled him a little and then Newt made a screechy sound and maybe slid Hermann onto his desk and got all sorts of foil and paper in his hair and whatever, the point was, they sexed each other right there on Newt’s desk and it was a lot of fun and they laughed loads the end.
Later, Hermann let Newt finish his picture, and they pinned it to Newt’s cork board where he could look at it and laugh and laugh and masturbate a little and laugh.