Work Text:
After the bruises are tended to, the bones set back in place, the critically injured rushed to med bay overflowing with Shao Industries’ best infirmary staff, their dead recovered and accounted for; after the screams of joy subside into ones of pain and grief to quiet down into whispers and then calls, growing into conversation as the remaining pieces of their machinery started ticking again—only after that does Liwen sit down. Her whole body is aching, her polished nails chipped and dirty with blood and grime, and she’s drenched in sweat, but at least she can breathe.
She sits down, a little bruised but better off than most people inside or outside the Shatterdome. Liwen can't think of the people she knew here, or in Tokyo, or Sydney, or anywhere her infected drones made any sort of damage. She can't think of her staff. Of Dr. Newton Geiszler, six-times PhD. That way lies madness.
Most of the standing pilots and technicians are milling around, but little by little hurried walks have turned into scrolls and limps and arms have been emptied of supplies and helmets to fold around each other or wound around waists in a show of love or support, or both. Some throw her a glance, some adding a smile and a bow. It takes her a half hour to slide off the gear box she's collapsed on, and Liwen breathes. She sets her spine and her shoulders out of habit, in the same, easy way she shrugs on bespoke couture every morning like armour, and walks to the mess hall.
She learned where it was, easily slipping back into something reminiscent of her college years as Liwen and Gottlieb worked themselves to exhaustion, followed him there quietly at ambiguous times between night and dawn. During this stretch of hurried emergency work, a long handful of hours all mixed together, Liwen would scoop dried fruit and nuts in metal canteens while Gottlieb stuffed his coat pockets with oranges and brewed himself black tea over-steeped to a colour that made Liwen’s sensibilities bristle.
Today though—today Liwen forgoes almonds and cashews and Macadamia nuts, bypasses anything that looks green in any way, and grabs one of the biggest paper-wrapped cheeseburgers she can find in the hot case. And a bag of fries.
And water, because there are limits, and Liwen’s throat is parched.
She finds herself a quiet spot at the end of a long table, close enough to the door she can run out if needed. Liwen will never grow out of this, she knows. Just like she doesn't quite tear into the paper but slides a (filthy, she hasn't washed her hands, why hasn't she washed her hands?) finger under the sticker written in six different languages to open the bag.
The smell hits her immediately, slightly charred meat and melted cheese, grease and salt and after they save the world, Liwen’s eyes water one more time as she bites in. The beef oozes grease into her mouth, the bun slightly sweet but toasted just enough to crunch a little. Liwen groans, puts both of her elbows on the table, and lets a tear roll down her cheek as she chews.
I deserve this, she tells the version of herself who eats exactly twelve almonds for breakfast, and not one more, after sixty minutes of yoga. This is my medal, Liwen thinks as she gulps down water after a mouthful of too-salty fries, after saving the world, after saving the world, after ten years of steamed fish and bok choy and egg foo young. The world could have ended without her having eaten those fries, a little past crispy as mess food always is; without Liwen being able to dip French fries in ketchup and sriracha and Kewpie.
Liwen knows she must—she looks like a mess, she can smell herself and feel the smear of sauce on her cheek. Her hair feels tacky against her scalp. She can't bring herself to care. Most of her staff is dead or injured, there's no one to remind her to sit up straight or to alert that her white gold earrings clash with the silver necklace she wears. None of this matters. She sobs around the next mouthful she takes of her burger, and it bubbles out into a giggle that makes her laugh until her eyes are full of tears again.
She’s in the middle of her next bite when Gottlieb scrambles to sit next to her, all clatters from his cane to the chair he pushes and the canteen full of that awful brown tea he sets down, and mutters, “All right, chips, lovely, is this mayonnaise, thank you, if I may—”
Gottlieb doesn't wait for an answer and takes a handful of her fries, soaks them in Kewpie and scarfs them down in one bite. He has the same shreds of decency left as Liwen, and he brings a handkerchief up to his mouth as he chews and swallows.
In an act of pity, friendship, crewmanship, or what-have-you, an act of We saved the world together, of many other things she can't for once word in any of her many languages, Liwen pushes the torn-open bag of fries towards Gottlieb, and he nods his gratefulness in rapid succession in that very anxious, English way of his. His hands are shaking when he goes to sip at his tea, clouded with milk. He sounded out of breath talking to Liwen, or at least attempting speech; he reeks of sweat and cologne as usual, of blood and ashes as they all do. But Gottlieb smells like a sea-wet dog and too many cigarettes, and his hair is plastered to his forehead with both sweat and rain, his dark coat wet and dripping to the industrial floors of the mess hall.
Liwen drinks her water and waits for him to be chewing on another mouthful of fries, gives him a way out of speaking, of formulating a reply and letting it out with what little air he has left in his lungs.
“Doctor Geiszler has been retrieved.” She says—says, doesn't do him the affront to ask when his handkerchief is still bloody at the stitching.
Gottlieb nods, once, twice; one hand restless between his canteen of tea and Liwen's fries, the other tight around his communicator. He nods a third time, gratefully, and drinks more of his tea. When they started working together, Liwen told him she didn't enjoy talking more than necessary, and Gottlieb opened and closed his mouth half a dozen times, pointed his finger at her, and smiled as he said, “Excellent.” So she says nothing now. She doesn't ask how it went.
His handkerchief is still bloody at the stitches and Liwen pictures Gottlieb well enough, going back and forth among the rubble of the helipad, cigarette after cigarette between his lips as he watched the cloudy skies for the helicopter carrying at least Doctor Geiszler and Ranger Lambert, and possibly the entire population of an ill-known, murderous alien civilisation in Geiszler’s head. Gottlieb had called him infected, and he’d muttered about it sometimes, working on peeling an orange with the dull blade of a Swiss Army knife he apparently kept in one of the inside pockets of his coat.
The mess hall is filling up around them, soldiers and aircrew and mechanics and pilots finally relieved of their post or brought back to a more stable state of being. Some of the cadets—pilots are coming in slowly, a tall white boy bandaged up but pallid still supported by a pretty Latina girl. They get a round of applause they smile awkwardly to, and neither Liwen nor Gottlieb join in.
She’s close to finishing her burger when Gottlieb says, “I will never apologise for not letting you shoot him.”
He says it in one breath, like he’s been rehearsing the sentence over and over, and Liwen wonders if she has lines next. As things are, she nods, swallows, and takes a few of her fries back.
“I will never forgive myself for letting my work be used this way so easily.”
Gottlieb's lips make a thin, grim line, greasy from fries, and he doesn't say anything. Did he speak himself hoarse as they rolled out Geiszler? Was he conscious, or unconscious, or that somewhere in-between where he has been for as long as Liwen has known him? But even then there’s a difference between the brilliant, jittery, annoying genius she hired and the cocky thing with a distorted voice that spoke to her in the R&D department.
Liwen shoves half of what’s left of her burger in her mouth, and wipes her mouth with the palm of her hand.
“We have won a battle,” Gottlieb blurts out suddenly, “But not the war.”
He eats some more of her fries, his eyes somewhere in the distance. Liwen swallows the rest of her burger. She has seen the photograph and the letters that Gottlieb keeps scattered on his desk. She has seen the profound delight on his face as he approached Geiszler.
“My great-grandmother always told my mother to never fall in love during a war,” Liwen says, more flatly, more cutting than she means to, or than Gottlieb deserves.
When she chances a glance at him he is smiling, just a little, still clutching at his communicator. They probably had tests to run on Geiszler, medical tests that no one but the high brass would be allowed to attend; questions to ask him.
“She was a wise woman, Miss Shao,” Gottlieb says, quiet and bittersweet. “But this war led us to where we’d never even thought of.”
Liwen should tell Gottlieb someday, apologise on her knees for asking that Newt not contact him. It wouldn't have changed a thing, she knows. Or at least there is no way to say whether it would have, which amounts to the same anyway. She should never tell him. She should…
“Were you close, you and Doctor Geiszler?” she repeats, because she asked Geiszler but—
“Very,” Gottlieb says curtly, hunched over the spoils of their shared meal, the last swallows of cold tea in his canteen. “We have known each other for twenty-two years. Newton—Doctor Geiszler—Newt, is the love of my life.”
He says it with a sincerity that leaves her reeling, though Liwen supposes it makes sense. Twenty-two years. Some of the pilots who saved the world today haven't been alive this long.
Liwen was eight when the San Francisco attack happened. She imagines she wasn’t much older when Gottlieb met Geiszler. She’s thirty now, when she realises neither of them would have met, had the breach not opened. Three cities destroyed, tens of thousands of lives lost, and Liwen stops wondering why Gottlieb looks to be mentally sagging under a much heavier weight than them all.
If it hadn't been for the Precursors returning, Gottlieb and Geiszler would have never met. If it hadn't been for those twenty-two years, Geiszler would have a bullet in his skull.
And then Liwen fully understands the enormity of the strength Doctor Hermann Gottlieb possesses. He needs it, she reasons, to carry the weight of his love for Geiszler in a burning body that is overworked by twenty-two years of war.
It almost has her in tears again, a flow of gratitude overcoming her exhausted body, that Gottlieb used this undying strength to save the world instead of—of. Liwen crumples the bag that held her burger to let some of the emotion out, watches it settle unhappily on the table like some sort of critter.
“I’ll admit those don't quite compare to Belgium,” Gottlieb says, tiredly, as he sets the wrapper inside the torn bag of sauce-soaked, cold fries.
The absurdity of the statement, given the atmosphere, the weight of the communicator in Gottlieb’s grip, makes Liwen laugh before she can stop herself. Gottlieb huffs out next to her, contemplating the dregs of tea at the bottom of his canteen.
“Fish,” he adds with a frown. “Proper fish, not the fare we’ve gotten these past two decades that has been grown in tanks. I miss—I miss—”
“Sushi,” Liwen offers. “Xun yu—”
“Oh, cod and chips, and kippers…”
He trails off with two fingers to his mouth and his eyes half-closed, lost in thought or in memory. Liwen can barely remember eating real fish, before the news on Blue poisoning spread, before the oceans became looming and dangerous. She used to ask her mother, as a teenager, what it was like when there wasn't a war. Her grandmother would say quietly that there were always wars.
“When are we meant to fall in love if there are always wars, then?” Liwen had wondered when she was fifteen, safe inland at the time, staring at the nape of Jiao’s neck during a physics class. Plans of university in Shanghai had been scrapped for Peking, safer inland, and Liwen was running through her masters too fast to try and catch up with the war, too fast to try and catch the little wisp of hair that never stayed inside Jiao’s ponytail.
Liwen was awarded her masters in engineering at the age of nineteen, and the Jaeger program was decommissioned six months after that, like some cruel twist of fate. They were losing, anyway. The very man slumped next to her right now, leaning back against his chair, predicted the end of the world then, not that Liwen had any idea back then. Gottlieb’s predictive model had only been revealed months after the war was over, to a quiet, stunned audience who had realised at the same time as Liwen just how close they had all been to the end, the apocalypse.
She had first-row seats to the second time Gottlieb predicted the end of the world.
There will be interviews and explanations for months to come, as there have been for years now. But this time it won’t be about her work and her ideas. It will be about her role in saving the world, Shao Industries’ role, her link to Geiszler if anything gets out—
That way lies madness.
Liwen rubs at her eyes, thinks of that cowlick on the back of Jiao’s neck, the curl of it shaped to the golden ratio. She got married to a Swiss man and moved to Switzerland, Liwen heard a few years ago. She hasn’t thought about Jiao in years. There has been necks kissed since, curls of hair pushed out of the way and tugged on. Liwen has been in and out of love.
When she looks at Gottlieb, she isn’t sure he has ever been out of love. Even now, Geiszler lost somewhere in his own mind, or infected by the Precursors, or shoved down so someone else could fit in his body. Maybe that's what the drift is. Something you can never really pull yourself out off, a leap in a body of water that never dries off your skin. Maybe that’s what drift compatibility is.
“What do you miss most, from before the war?” Liwen asks quietly.
Before the war; before meeting Newton Geiszler.
“Time.” Gottlieb says, his face sagging further. “I miss having time.”
That's a luxury that can't be rationed nor bought on the black market, and Liwen understands. They can breathe, but for how long?
Liwen is turning thirty this year. She feels like she has lived several lifetimes already, the most recent one having just ended. There will be a pre-Drones and a post-Drones just as there was a pre-Kaiju Era that ended in 2013. There are always wars. This way leads madness. There's Tokyo wedged in there, the rush of piloting even remotely, a lifetime of its own, endless seconds before the Hostile clawed its way up Fuji-san; before the word KILLED flashed across everyone's eyes, across conn-pod screens and holograms and Liwen is sure, on televisions all over the world.
Someone at another table lets out a shrill laugh at a something or some other. Time passes, keeps passing, because the world did not end.
“What of you, Miss Shao?” Gottlieb asks suddenly, hunched over the table, turned on his side to face her. He gestures at the greasy wrappers leftover from their hurried feast.
The fries have gone cold, but Liwen takes a handful anyway to chew on while she waits for Gottlieb to elaborate. He won’t if she speaks, she learned. If she asks him what he means, he’s likely to get flustered, elaborate, until he’s pushed to answer.
Liwen doesn’t feel like pushing tonight.
Eventually, Gottlieb opens his mouth once, twice, before saying, “You’ve let me bore you with my talk of… Of seafood, of all things.” He smiles, that smiles that makes him look closer to a young forty and less like an exhausted man nearing his fifties. It blurs his wrinkles of worry into a look of fondness; turns the lines of his perpetual frown into ones of laughter. “Last meal on Earth. What do you pick?”
Liwen lets out a disbelieving laugh. “A little morbid, given our circumstances,” she says politely. Nonetheless, she gives it a thought. “How many courses?”
“How many—” Gottlieb chuckles. “Three would be traditional.”
“Traditional would be six, counting rice—”
“Starter, main, pudding.”
Giving him a sideways glance, Liwen takes another fry to chew on. “You seem to know your answers already.”
“Pickled beets, Shepherd's pie, and a slice of Prinzregententorte with a cup of tea,” Gottlieb answers immediately.
“Pickled beets?” Liwen tells him with a frown of disapproval. Gottlieb gives her a haughty little look. “Chow fun with grilled beef, and minestrone.”
Gottlieb hums his agreement as Liwen bites on a handful of cold fries soaked in sriracha. “And for dessert?”
Liwen chews, and turns her head to look at Gottlieb, amused and relaxed but for the hand still holding tightly onto his communicator. She isn't one for sweet things, and she could tell him that and let the conversation be over. Or she could make him laugh, this man made of knots as if to better hold onto all he’s put on his shoulders and on his back.
“Honestly?” A pause, just for Gottlieb to blink his unfairly long eyelashes once. “Pussy,” Liwen tells him around her mouthful of cold fries.
Her efforts don’t disappoint. Gottlieb stares at her for a second before he dissolves into wheezing laughter, slumping further on the table, his elbow nearly landing in ketchup-soaked paper. He’s coughing with it, blushing with all his cheeks but just the tips of his ears. Liwen smiles, just watching him try to regain his precious composure.
“Buggering hell, love,” Gottlieb says in a low voice, rubbing at the arch of his nose. “Warn an old man next time.”
He’s smiling nonetheless, and Liwen is thinking of something to add when Gottlieb’s communicator goes off, Ranger Pentecost’s voice coming on.
“Med staff is done with him, Doc.”
Gottlieb has been scrambling to get up since the device beeped. “Well. Very well.” His eyes are lost somewhere, beyond Liwen, beyond the mess hall and probably even the entire Shatterdome, all of Earth, possibly the Milky Way. “Thank you, Jake. Ranger Pentecost. Thank you.” Gottlieb has his cane in hand, his damp coat shrugged back on. He nods at Liwen three times and gives her a weak smile. “Thank you as well, Miss Shao. For the meal and the company.”
Liwen sits up straighter. “The pleasure was mine,” she tells him with the required politeness, but genuine affection.
One, two, three jerky nods of his head, and Gottlieb is off again, his cane clacking against the concrete floors of the hallways, his communicator buzzing faintly after he’s rattled off something into it. Liwen watches him walk away until he's nothing but an indistinguishable silhouette in the halls.
She knows he’s headed for Geiszler, without knowing exactly where that is. Liwen knows Gottlieb is off to battle again, determined to win the war, uncaring of his own wounds, unperturbed by the demands of his body and spirit.
Liwen knows Gottlieb is headed directly whichever way madness lays.