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Three months after the breach is closed, Hermine Gottlieb goes home. She doesn't realize she's counting, but it's exactly forty-seven days after she arrives back in Berlin that Newton Geiszler shows up on her front doorstep, soaked to the bone and shaking and speaking rushed German.
"Can I come in? I'm gonna come in. I've been off and on planes for the past day and I am just--I'm gonna come in."
The sight of Newt in her kitchen, dripping wet and exhausted-looking as she is, makes Hermine happier than she would care to admit, so she makes two cups of coffee and puts on her best scowl as she sits down.
"What are you doing here, Newt?"
Newt peers up at her from over her coffee mug, eyes slightly warped through her thick glasses. "Hello to you too. And, okay, look." She chews on her lip and sighs. "I don't know if it's the drift or what, or if maybe, in some weird, screwy, messed up part of my brain, I actually started to like you, but I missed you. Jesus Christ, Hermine, I missed you, and that feels good to say."
The entire scene is so surreal--she's home, and the Kaiju are gone and the world is safe for now, and her ex-lab partner is sitting in her kitchen at half past midnight, soaking wet and half-asleep and telling her these things in as sincere a voice as she can muster--that Hermine has to put her coffee cup down, put her head down on her arms, and laugh. She laughs, and she doesn't know why she's laughing, but she is, it's a thing, and it's a thing that's not gonna stop on its own.
"Hermine?" Newt asks cautiously. She puts a hand on Hermine's arm. "Are you okay, a-are you crying or laughing, because I need to adjust my reaction accordingly."
Hermine looks up at her and wipes her eyes. "I missed you too, you idiot."
Newt smiles hesitantly. "I'm very confused by this whole situation, if I'm gonna be honest with you."
"I believe it would be more a cause for concern if we weren't confused by this," Hermine says, still grinning. She takes Newt's hand in her own, and if things were surreal before, they're downright bizarre now, but Hermine can't seem to make herself care, because Newt's hands are small and warm and every brush of skin brings back memories of their shared drift.
Five and a half months after the breach is closed, after Newt and Hermine shared minds with each other, they sit in a small, dim kitchen in Berlin and smile.
---
"I feel like I should be saying something about the fact that I just kind of showed up here," Newt says, but she's brushing her teeth while she says it, so Hermine ignores her and makes her repeat it after she rinses. "I don't know how I was gonna end that sentence, I just feel like I should be explaining something, but...." She shrugs.
"I understand," Hermine says quietly. She looks at Newt, tiny, strange, lost little Newt, in baggy shorts and a ratty hoodie, and feels once again the pull of shared memory.
Newt must feel it too, because she cocks her head to the side and looks at Hermine, a strand of dark hair falling in her face. "I missed you," she says again.
---
Newt sleeps like the dead, her body figuring out how it fits against Hermine's and staying there until morning, her face half-buried into Hermine's shoulder, an arm slung around her waist, their ankles crossed. Hermine, for her part, tries to sleep, but ends up just watching Newt, tracing mental lines over the contours of her body in the darkened room.
Hermine finally falls asleep, having counted approximately half of the freckles that spread across Newt's face (and only having lost count three times). Her sleep is restless, her dreams vivid and not entirely her own.
In the morning, she wakes up from the worst of the dreams and Newt is looking up at her with half-lidded eyes, strikingly blue in the early dawn.
"You too?"
---
Newt moves in, because neither of them can think of a better situation, and anyway, she already had most of her possessions when she showed up at Hermine's front door. She moves in, and they keep sharing a bed, and one morning before either of them are fully awake, Newt leans up and kisses Hermine, and Hermine doesn't pull away.
They start taking walks together, despite the rapidly worsening fall weather. Newt wears hoodies pulled up against the wind, and Hermine wraps a thick scarf around herself ("Oh my god, you're such a nerd," Newt says gleefully the first time she sees it). They both get teaching jobs at the local university, and Hermine waits every day outside of Newt's lecture hall until her last class is done.
Hermine starts growing her hair out, and Newt smiles as she cards it with her fingers, and insists on braiding it when it gets long enough.
They fight, they argue, they seeth. They get drunk on the floor in the dark and ignore each other for days and have fantastic sex. Newt comes to Hermine with wide-eyed hypotheses, and no matter how far they drift apart during the night, they always wake up holding hands.
---
They heal, slowly but surely. They heal.