Work Text:
The first time Hermine Gottlieb meets Newton Geiszler, she proves too infuriating, too annoying, too cocky for Hermine to like very much; in the same breath, she is too brilliant to not deserve her respect.
"Newton Geiszler, call me Newt," she says, with an easy American accent and an easier grin, holding her hand out to Hermine. Hermine takes her hand and pointedly does not offer her own first name. Newton's handshake is strong and her eyes glint yellow-blue behind thick glasses.
It will be a long six months.
---
It takes all of three days for Newton to start calling Hermine by her first name (in comparison, it takes nine months for Hermine to finally start calling her Newton, long after their "temporary" arrangement has proved to be anything but).
By the fourth day, they've started arguing, then fighting, then having full-blown shouting matches in the middle of the lab; soon, Hermine mutters an insult under her breath in German, and Newton responds in kind, and then they argue auf deutsch. Eventually, the other scientists around them request transfers, and they are left more or less alone; the idea to transfer never crosses Hermine's mind.
Because for all of her insufferable immaturity, Newton Geiszler is one of the most brilliant minds she has ever met, and Hermine Gottlieb is producing her best work in years.
---
The Jaegers win for a while, and then they start losing. Humanity cancels its celebrations. The Kaiju get smarter, get stronger, and even Newton, with her sleeves of rainbow ink (Kaiju grrrroupie, as Hermine growls at her when she's in a foul mood), gets wary.
And if Newton rarely smiles anymore, much less laughs (a sharp, full-bodied sound that Hermine neither is used to nor ever gets enough of), and if Hermine snaps at the few remaining grad students more than they deserve, and if Marshall Pentecost calls them out separately to ask them, impatiently, if their being stationed together will be a problem, then it is just a sign of the stress, and is nothing to be worried about.
And if, one night, the night they lose their third Jaeger in a row, and Hermine knocks her blackboard over with her cane and sinks to the ground in frustration, shaking with rage over her life's work, if Newton crouches down and wraps her arms around Hermine's shoulders, if she whispers reassurances into her hair, if Hermine moves a bit too readily into the embrace and grips Newton's shirt a bit too tightly, then that is just their secret, isn't it?
---
Newt's panic attacks come more frequently now, and Hermine has learned to watch for the shaking of her hands, the unsteadiness of her voice, that signifies an episode, that means, no, I can't do this, get me out of here.
On one such night, when night has officially melded into morning and neither of them have slept in far too long, she guides Newt to the small, threadbare couch in the corner of the lab, and they sit, knees and shoulders and knuckles touching.
"They're defunding the Jaeger program," she says sharply.
"I know." Hermine's fingers tighten on her cane until they're white, already-thin skin revealing bone, tendon, blood.
"What'll happen to us?" Newt asks, almost too quietly to be heard. She looks at Hermine, glasses crooked, blue eyes (shot with yellow, rimmed with green) shining.
Hermine doesn't answer; there's nothing to say.
---
They still argue, they always will, but now it is desperate, teeming with the urgency that positively fills the air in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Newt gets it into her head to drift with a Kaiju.
"It'll tell us a lot more than your calculations ever can," she half-mutters, half growls at Hermine one day.
"You're an idiot," Hermine tells her. "An immature, reckless, idiot."
Newt shoots a cocky grin back. "And that's why you loooooove me," she says in a sing-song, turning back to her dissection table.
Hermine just huffs at her.
---
There are seven Jaegers left now, six, five, four, and everyone feels the weight of the end of the world hanging over their heads.
Hermine walks into the lab and Newt is there, shaking, seizing, bleeding. Hermine's blood freezes, no, boils in her veins, and she drops, tossing her cane to the side and pulling the nodes from Newt's head. Newt writhes against her, and Hermine swears at her as viciously as possible.
Blood, trickling from Newt's nose, stains Hermines shirt. Newt mumbles something incoherent, and Hermine just trembles with anger and with relief and holds her closer still.
---
Newt is ragged, cracking around the edges, a dead baby Kaiju at her feet. Her hair is still wet from the rain, thick waves falling into her face, and her glasses are cracked and splattered with blood. She looks at Hermine, the only color in her face the broken blood vessels in her eye.
Won't lose you again, Hermine thinks, somewhere deep in her mind where she keeps all the things she refuses to think about (like the thoughts that come to her late in the night, when all she can picture is the exact shade of Newt's eyes, the way her jeans cling close to her hips, the way she smiles unabashedly at Hermine when they're too tired to argue, and all Hermine wants to do is--but, no, never).
And if the only way to stop Newt from dying alone is for Hermine to die, too, well. Then they're both fools.
"Y-you'd do that, for me?" Newt asks, a real, genuine smile lighting up her eyes.
---
They drift, and the Drift is silence. Newt's memories flood into Hermine's mind, settling alongside her own like they'd always been there. She can flick through Newt's life at her leisure, now; her first doctorate, the first time she left home, her first tattoo.
(lonely always lonely always so alone)
Curious, she glances at herself through Newt's eyes--an overwhelming sense of warm affection, comfort, lust, rushes through her--
(that's cheating, newt thinks, newt says, newt feels, half-smiling, and hermine knows she's looking through her memories as well)
And then they're aware of someone else, something else, with them. Something huge and brimming with power and rage.
Hermine feels fear, but she does not, and she wonders which one of them is afraid.
The Hivemind flashes through the Drift, too quickly for them to see much, but long enough that as they disconnect, Newt's hand automatically seeking Hermine's, both of them reeling and bloody and numb, they know what they came there for.
"It's not going to work," Hermine mutters, her voice feeling as if it's coming from miles away.
---
On the helicopter ride back, they sit as close as possible. Their minds are elsewhere, but their bodies remember; their hands find each other, and the Drift is renewed, weaker this time, sweeter, easier to control, and what has been kept secret for so long is now almost painfully obvious.
But the Drift is silence, and so they do not speak.
---
Raleigh Becket blinks back into life, a tiny green dot on a holographic screen, and the Shatterdome erupts. Hermine smiles, despite the pain in her hip and her leg and her head, and smiles wider still when Newt throws an arm around her shoulders. The Drift reasserts itself, and Hermine can feel Newt in her head, a soft, safe comfort underlying all of her thoughts.
we did it dude we just helped save the world we're basically rockstars and look at us, just look at us, we helped save the world and who would've ever thought...
They sit together on a table in the mess, in a dark corner, having finally extricated themselves from the congratulatory crowds (no one found it strange that they slipped away together, just as Raleigh and Mako did shortly afterwards, and Hermine wonders how long this perceived one-ness will last). Newt rests her chin on Hermine's shoulder and looks up at her through tired, heavy-lidded eyes. "Hey."
"Hey." There's dried blood on Newt's face, and God knows what else all over her clothes (Hermine makes a mental note to wash it off later, forgetting that, for the moment, there's no such thing as mental notes).
Newt shuts her eyes, smiling in their shared headspace. "Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren't we," she says fondly.
Hermine rolls her eyes and presses their foreheads together.
---
They end up just sleeping together the first night after saving the world, fully clothed and tangled up in each other's limbs. They had stumbled together into Newt's room, collapsed on the bed, and ended up too tired to even get up and shut off the harsh overhead lights. Hermine is the big spoon for the first time in her life, and she smiles, face full of Newt's hair. Newt pulls Hermine's hand onto her hip, and then she's out like a light, breathing steady for the first time in what feels like a week; Hermine is asleep not long after, but not before wondering how their dreams will be affected by the Drift.
---
(They're the best ones either of them have had in years.)