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It turns out that, if you are Doctor Newton Geiszler (and only your mother calls you 'doctor', though also everyone at every conference you've ever been to and the people you shoved past in order to squeeze your way into a shelter, undeserving), hooking your brain up to an alien and your lab mate has the following effects:
One, you develop a series of movements that aren't your own, shudders and shaking hands and a limping stride that doesn't fit your shorter legs. Two, you forget how to play the piano, and that realization drives you to tears, makes you scream and throw things and tip over your electric keyboard; makes you lose it until Hermann comes running and drags you away from where you're trying to tear up the power cord. Three, things in your brain get rewired all wrong and you get pain when you shouldn't and pleasure for no reason you can discern, all your responses scrambled and weird and almost too frustrating to decipher.
Four, you start watching someone else's dreams at night, borrowing pieces of someone else's subconscious, and shit if that's not the weirdest thing of all. Dreams are your background brain crawling into the foreground, spitting up old information clogging the recesses of your gray matter so it can be processed, but you've been connected to someone else's brain, picked up their electrical patterns. You've shared his impulses, and now what your head dredges up at night doesn't make sense, looks utterly different, foreign.
It feels different, too—different sensations and different perspectives, and it's like being high and you love it, you do, even while you feel like you're stealing someone's life when they're not looking and even though you're sure he wouldn't want you to see.
It tempers any measure of guilt you might have felt when you remember that he's probably dreaming your dreams, too, your neural impulses mixed violently with his, bits of Newt scattered across oceans of Hermann.
Five, you start thinking of everything in subsets. It's stupid, it's a little thing, but it's too organized for what you're used to and it drives you crazy, seeing any data and organizing it into categories and subcategories on autopilot, without consulting the rest of your brain. It makes it harder to see the artistry that you so love in biology, mucks up the beautiful not-chaos of it all with its systematic sorting, and you want to tell Hermann this is why you're not the biologist, this is why I never listen to you but you see him staring at his blackboards and swearing softly under his breath and you don't, because you know, you know he's inherited something like that from you: maybe not your whole nature, maybe not your essence or your soul or anything like the religious extremists would suggest, but just enough to turn his processes haywire.
Six is weird, and you don't know if it's his fault or the kaiju or even just the fucking trauma of it all, but you don't like sleeping with any lights on, anymore. You have to disconnect all the glowing kaiju figurines that sit on the shelves of your dusty flat every night before you go to sleep, too put-off by their eyes in the dark when you lie down, and after a while you stop turning them on again come morning.
Seven, you still yell at him but you do it in German almost always; you did it in German half the time before but now you know he likes it, and not in some weird sexual way but just because it reminds him of family and home and it startles you that he's managed to slot you into that category despite all your fighting, made you a subset of the universal set Gottlieb. You're an unordered field with a permanent place within his life, acknowledged, known, defined.
It feels good, being a subset of Hermann, rather than just the set Newt, and better to have a subset of Hermann encapsulated in you, and you wonder if he sees it that way or if having you in his head has made his way of thought too scattered, too messy.
(And you wonder, amidst all these effects, if it's just the kaiju and him or if it's the fact that they declared you thoroughly and completely unsuitable to drifting with anyone else, not just because you were too unfit to run a jaeger and too manic-depressive to be trusted not to pull anyone too deep into your head; if it's because you're crazy, you've always been, and this is just a dozen psychosomatic effects you've made up for yourself, running through your head and turning into real issues because you've thought of them, quick-onset obsessive-compulsive, a madness that'll grow until it renders you obsolete—)
The drift specialists prescribe you anti-anxiety pills.
Eight: you look at those pills and you remember shelves full of medications that aren't your own, medications for a physical ailment that you never had (though the biologist in you laughs and points out that the brain is a physical thing, too, run by physics, electrical fields and atoms and cells all building up to create a whole person, so really every ailment is a physical one if you go deep enough). You have to read the label on the orange pill bottle you're holding three times to extract the right meaning, because you keep seeing Rivotril/clonazepam and that's not what it says at all, and you wonder if maybe he hated these particular ones, that's why they're so etched into his memory and now into yours. You don't ask, add it to the seemingly endless list of things you refuse to ask about because you shouldn't know.
Nine, he shows up at your door one night with his eyes wide and a sheen of sweat standing out on his pale neck, marring what ought to be a perfectly-pressed collar, and reaches out with one spasming hand to grab you by the shirt, hisses, "How do you do this, tell me," clutches at the fabric and nearly falls over the doorstep, growls when you catch him. "I thought I understood you," he tells you, when he's sitting at your kitchen table at a space you've cleared of empty cereal boxes and unwashed bowls, "every time you got like this, I thought I knew," but he didn't, just like you didn't know before what it was like to wake up in the morning and feel unable to move, just like you didn't know what it was like to think of everything as a set of probabilities, just like you didn't know how to mourn a wife and didn't know how to lose a child, all these things that are buried in you, now, yours and not yours, pieces of him that he has left behind.
Ten, you take back what you said about the quick-onset obsessive-compulsive coming from you. It's him, definitely him, or rather what happens when you mix him with you: the mess in your apartment is driving you insane and you itch to press your shirts and roll down your sleeves and you can't stand having anything touching your bare shoulders and you want to press your left wrist between the fingers of your other hand if you forget to wear a watch—you're going crazy, you are, but these are the symptoms without the root cause and it's weird, it's confusing, you can't take this to a psychologist, they wouldn't know where to start.
Eleven—
Eleven is you kiss him, and boy, you hadn't thought of that when you were shouting at each other across the line in the middle of the lab but it makes sense now, six shots of tequila deep at an after-party held at some conference about you closing the breach (because of course you managed to instigate a party at a science conference, he huffs at you). You kiss him and he lets you and he presses his palms flat to your collarbones and doesn't push you away, pulls back just enough to say against your mouth, "Newton, not now, what are you doing, arschloch," and that curse is unexpected enough to stop your whine of complaint, to get you to look at him. You don't do anything else that night and you forget most of the rest of it but you hold onto that moment, you remember that he didn't say no so much as later, and you hold onto that promise, you do.
Twelve is you washing your hands ten times up to the elbow in the space of the half an hour you spend prepping kaiju entrails for long-term cryo. It's him that stops you, him that struggles over to the sink on his cane and grabs you by the wrists, hands fitting perfectly over the open maws of Hundun and Yamarashi, and he says "Stop," and "Newton, think, this isn't like you, it is like—" and the me hangs unspoken but you get it, let him guide you over to a bench in the lab and force you to sit still long enough to tone down the compulsion.
You let one of your assistants finish the last of the packaging under your scrutiny, your hands painful and boiled-red from the hot water, and Hermann's long thin fingers (which look so good around a stick of chalk, you realize now) stay curled round your right wrist, steadying and cool.
Thirteen is him (appropriately, your newly-adjusted brain decides, he's like odd numbers and you're like evens, you're so easy to divide and use and think about and he's all primes, all ones and perfect digits indivisible) looking at your work and seeing the flaw immediately, intuitively, pointing it out over your shoulder with a quiet murmured comment. And you would flush red, mortified, you would, if this were still before; but he's seeing your work with your own slant and fresh eyes, and you just nod shortly and agree to change it, don't yell at him at all.
Fourteen is him kissing you, and maybe he's not odd numbers after all. This time you pull back and say, "Dude," and he looks momentarily uncertain but then more sure, like there's something he's remembered, and before he can say anything you kiss him back, seal the deal, you've ended it, you've started it, here goes.
Fifteen is you having the audacity (and inclination—you always liked him a little bit skewed, a little off from that perfect mould he tries to be) to tug his incongruous bow tie straight before the two of you walk onto a stage. He raises his eyebrows in surprise and grumbles just a little, and then he reaches out and fixes your tie, and you're sure you hear one of the people milling around backstage chuckle at the sight. (You don't mind, and neither does he, for once, you think; maybe he got at least one good thing from you.)
Sixteen is freaking out when you have to handle kaiju blue, and it's bad, it is, you're the lead scientist on figuring out to purify the groundwater on pacific coastlines and you're not supposed to act like this, you're not supposed to hyperventilate and drop things, if you were your own superior you'd send your ass home and maybe even fire you. And the two of you don't work at the same lab anymore and he's not there to help you, so you exile yourself to your office and slide down to the floor against one wall and shake through it all, flashes of fear you don't remember ever having, fear you didn't have when Otachi was dragging her tongue along your face, fear so different in flavor from what you felt when you ran from Leatherback across Hong Kong.
You hate it, and in that moment you hate him for maybe giving this to you—but you remember his wild eyes in stumbling into your apartment in the middle of the night with his brain firing on all your manic cylinders, and you can't, not really, it's just misplaced ire.
Seventeen: he still can't stand your trip-hop, and he still lets you know this when he visits your new lab, vocally. It makes you laugh that he does, because it seems that some things must stay the same: even in this brave new world where there's no monsters tearing through from another dimension and the apocalypse isn't quite nigh, Hermann Gottlieb still thinks your music choices are stupid, and that's more reassuring than any stopped clock could ever be.
Eighteen—
Eighteen is you standing in your flat as he reaches towards your keyboard—you still can't play it, the muscle memory is gone along with all your sense for it, you've lost the talent like you didn't think you ever could—and picks out your favorite Bon Jovi song, slowly, pressing down the keys in careful succession, not even looking at his hands. He has never touched a piano in his life, and you know, then, that's you, and you want to shout at him that's me you stole it from me you stole part of me but the words don't come and you just end up downing your wine and sitting down hard in the nearest chair, hands clenched so hard the knuckles stand out pale.
You think give it back, I want it back but you can't say that to him, not when yesterday you sat down and drew the Hong Kong skyline you could see outside your window in a minute flat.
You (the two of you) were in the drift two minutes. It fucked up (changed, okay, fucked up isn't wholly fair) both of your whole lives.
Nineteen, he finds the sketches you've been churning out in your spare time, fascinated by the way your hands move as though of their own volition, the way this feels practiced, done for the nth time and not just for the third time in as many days. His eyes go hooded, but you're certain you catch the hurt—and you don't apologize, because it seems stupid and you're bad at apologies anyway, but you want to, you know exactly how that goes.
His fingers trail over the pages, and he does not say anything else.
Twenty is something you will never tell him or anyone else, because it freaks you out far too much and makes you wonder if you're only going to grow more unstable, fall from stardom to straight-up madness; you wake up one morning certain that you have a wife and she should be next to you, even though you've never in your life believed in or wanted a marriage nor, indeed, had a partner serious enough to consider it.
(The twenty you do tell him is, I don't hate asparagus anymore, which is totally him, because it's a ration food and you ate too much of it once and the sight used to make you want to puke.)
You decide to stop counting after that, because you've made your point to yourself and to him (and not, you sincerely hope, to anyone else); you've stopped being separate, the whole two-halves-of-a-whole thing was true, and you're stuck with parts of you both cut and pasted into each other's psyche to join the mess that was already there.
But enumerated or not, the list keeps going—things you stole from him, things he took from you, things you both have shared. You start describing a memory of London and stop because it isn't yours and he rolls up his sleeves like you do before promptly jerking them back down again and you smell things that aren't there and both of you really, really need to see a doctor or a psychologist but neither of you think you're going to properly get help, and—
—and it manages to be, well, manageable, somehow, when he moves half-way across the world for you (you say I didn't ask and he says yes, you did and rolls his suitcase into your spare room). You try to move on, you and him and flashes of the Anteverse in between having your brain jumbled and probably kind of damaged, in between nosebleeds and struggling more than usual through your work because your methods have to be different, now. You're repairing, finding your sea legs in this, ha ha, brainstorm. Humans learn, they adapt, that's what you know and preach.
So when you start counting again and start all the way back at twenty-one, the first thing you list is this: the two of you need each other to find yourselves again, to build new identities that aren't so far removed from what you knew.
Together, melded and looking for dividing marks: twenty-one, the twenty-first effect of the drift, is he's stuck with you, and you with him, and maybe that's all right.