Chapter Text
Hermann receives the first letter when he is eighteen years old.
It comes in the mail in the summer, when Hermann is on “break” from his studies—when he is ruining his vision squinting at online articles on his laptop screen from the safety of his bedroom rather than by trying to read in poorly-lit corners of the university library. He is in the process of doing so—ruining his vision, that is—when his mother taps on his door and says, “Hermann, there is something in the mail for you.”
Hermann frowns, stands stiffly from his desk to take it. His mother doesn’t try to make it easier for him, doesn’t step farther into the room or stretch her arm out, and Hermann never knows whether to feel grateful or to resent her for it as he limps over to lift the envelope from her waiting hand. He sniffs, looks at the front of it. There’s his name, handwritten in a messy scrawl in ink that bleeds a little, and then the address of Technische Universität Berlin, followed by several forwarding addresses in varying fonts. He’s surprised it reached him here at all.
The return address simply says N. Geiszler, followed by an address he doesn’t recognize from somewhere in the United States.
He really has no idea what it might be. He doesn’t know any N. Geiszlers, nor any Geiszlers at all, and despite the small start of a reputation he is gaining here in Berlin and perhaps the rest of Germany among the Applied Science community, he doesn’t know who might be writing to him from America. Much less writing to him...freehand. Emails, perhaps. Refuting his theories or trying to challenge his findings. He gets those every now and then. But handwritten letters?
He returns to his desk and opens it carefully, unfolds several sheets of loose paper covered in the same untidy scrawl as the envelope.
The first lines read, in fluent German, “Dear Mr. Gottlieb; I know we don’t know each other, but I just finished reading your paper, Multitask-Based Trajectory Planning for Redundant Space Robotics Using Improved Genetic Algorithm.”
For a moment, Hermann thinks it really is a rude, dismissive response to his work, only with the added insult of being painstakingly written by hand.
But then the next line says, impossibly, “Obviously, I was absolutely blown away.”
Hermann blinks in surprise, clears his throat, and settles in to read the rest with renewed interest.
What follows is, to Hermann’s absolute shock, a long, rambling, impassioned letter that goes through Hermann’s most recent paper point by point, marvelling at its ingenuity, rhapsodizing over the possible implications of the results, asking incredibly provocative questions about further research. The writer challenges some of Hermann’s points, but only in a way that Hermann himself challenges his own work, and sometimes in a way that Hermann should have but clearly failed to. It’s chaotic and occasionally somewhat hard to follow, with smudged words and messily misspelled words, but it’s...stimulating. It’s captivating. Hermann’s cheeks are hot and red within minutes.
Somewhere near the end of the letter, the writer makes a throwaway comment about being a “fellow young post-grad student,” and Hermann will never admit to how quickly he drops the letter to pull his laptop closer, typing in the name that he scans the end of the letter for. Newt Geiszler.
There are depressingly few search results, but those that do come up are informative enough. Newton Geiszler, one of MIT’s finest and youngest. The first article he pulls up shows a grainy newspaper photo of a startlingly young, bespectacled man shaking the hand of MIT’s president with a grin, taken two years ago. The photo is too small and low quality for Hermann to really get a good look at him.
He is so flustered by his burning desire to do so that he closes the tab immediately and turns back to the letter.
The rest of it is much of the same, and despite its length, Hermann has read through it before he wants to be finished. This is a startlingly narcissistic thought for him to have, but it’s true nevertheless, and Hermann can’t stop himself from reading through it a second time, heart in his throat. Now that he knows it’s coming from this—this Newton Geiszler, this seventeen-year-old prodigy, it feels. Different. Hermann was already flustered, reading such a complimentary response to his work. He is embarrassingly more so knowing it comes from a brilliant young man whose smile shines even through a digitalized newspaper photo.
“So?” his mother asks, later that day when they’re sitting stiffly around the dinner table, just the two of them with Hermann’s older siblings already living away from home and his father always tied up at work. “Who was the letter from?”
“Ah,” Hermann says, spooning food into his mouth just to avoid having to speak for another few moments. “It was, er. A doctorate student from MIT. He had some comments on my work.”
“Hm,” his mother says, and that’s the end of that conversation. She has little interest in his studies unless it’s news of commendation from a reputable source. He does not think seventeen-year-old Newton Geiszler will count.
It certainly counts for Hermann.
He writes back that same night, hand shaking a little as he holds a pen over crisp white paper. He writes “Dear Newton Geiszler” before he panics, scratches it out, and throws the paper away. This boy—Newton—had addressed him the same way, had started with dear, but it somehow feels too intimate. He instead painstakingly carves out the letters, “Mr. Geiszler,” like a professor about to chastise an unruly student, and then stops short and wonders how he’s even supposed to proceed.
Does he say thank you? Does he let on how much something like this means to him, a young man struggling to attain even half of what his father expects of him? No—of course not—but what if he did? What would Newton say? Would he respond, tell Hermann he can’t believe no one else says these things to him, tell Hermann he’d say it again, say it to anyone—everyone—who doubts him?
Hermann shakes himself and puts it out of his mind. He refuses to be pathetic.
That said, does he pretend as if he knew who Newton was all along? He’s never read any of Newton’s papers; he mostly writes in biology, sometimes biochemistry, from what Hermann saw in his search. Not Hermann’s area of expertise at all. But then, Newton had shown extraordinary understanding of Hermann’s work. It almost makes him bitterly jealous, knowing Newton can understand Hermann’s paper well enough to have a complex, discerning opinion on it, while Hermann would barely be able to make heads or tails of high-level biology literature.
Instead, it just makes something wobble in his sternum.
In the end, he decides to be as honest as he can be without humiliating himself, though not without changing his mind several times first as well as halfway through the letter. He thanks Newton with genuine gratitude for both his kind words and his stimulating counterpoints, and then gets caught up in arguing back, or sometimes conceding that more research must be done. It’s invigorating, having this kind of conversation with someone who is not hellbent on proving him an idiot in his field.
At the end of his letter, he can’t help but add, “You seem to have comprehensive knowledge on this topic, but I know Applied Science and Engineering are not your main areas of study. How did you stumble across my paper? If you don’t mind my asking.”
He accidentally signs off with “Yours truly,” and has to scrap the entire last sheet of paper, rewrite it word for word, and then ends it with, “I look forward to your reply. Hermann Gottlieb.” Even that feels like gross overexposure of his feelings.
He folds the paper into thirds, slides it into an envelope, and seals it before he can think on it anymore, red in the face. And then he rips it back open to add a note about his current mailing address, his address as it will be starting in the fall, and his email address, just to be safe. Then he seals it, addresses it, and. Sets it on his desk.
Next week, he tells himself. He’ll mail it next week, so as not to seem completely desperate.
He caves by the end of the next day.
~
It’s two weeks until Hermann receives a letter back from Newton Geiszler, and every minute of it is hell. He’s not sure when or how he turned into this ridiculous, desperate creature, starved for attention—or maybe he does, but he will never admit to it—but he finds himself cursing the postal system for days on end. And then, by the middle of the second week, he starts to worry that Newton didn’t get his letter, or that he hadn’t expected a reply, hadn’t wanted a reply, had somehow changed his opinion of Hermann between the time he wrote his last letter and now. It’s a horrifying thought, regardless of how unrealistic. He can’t stand the thought of such utter humiliation.
But then a letter does come, and it takes every ounce of Hermann’s restraint to not rip it from his mother’s hands. He opens it with uncharacteristic zeal in the privacy of his room, nearly slicing the papers inside with the letter opener, and feels his chest swell at the satisfying thickness of the sheaf of papers within. It’s at least triple as thick as his last letter.
As it turns out, two thirds of it are pages and pages of academic research—a paper written by Newton, for one of his Masters-level courses. It’s on the “Electric and magnetic fields in the astrophysics of wormholes”—space talk. It’s right up Hermann’s alley, though he doesn’t understand how it can be up Newton’s.
He delves eagerly into the letter.
Newton, he quickly discovers, has extremely varied taste. He’s aiming for a PhD in bioengineering—but only to start. He has interest in many things, admits he can’t seem to settle on just one, so he keeps taking classes in all of them. Recently, Newton says, he’s been on an “astrobiology bender,” which apparently branched out into astrophysics over the course of the past semester, and which is now leading him into space robotics. And Hermann, he says with all the confidence Hermann does not feel, is obviously a notable voice on this subject.
“And maybe I had heard of you before,” Newton writes, as if it’s a sidenote, barely worth mentioning. “So I was eager to get into some of your stuff.”
Hermann blushes red and moves on to the part where Newton rips into the counterpoints in Hermann’s last letter.
Afterwards, Hermann reads Newton’s astrophysics paper, and although some of it goes a little over his head, he still finds it compelling and captivating. This time, unlike the last, it’s easy to get straight into writing his response—he has things to say about Newton’s research, holes in the conclusions he couldn’t help but see, applications for the findings in his own work he can’t help but want to explore. He’s not sure how much Newton will understand about Hermann’s points on the intersectionality between his work and Newton’s, but then, Newton has only impressed him so far.
Feeling warm under the collar, he tells Newton as much.
“And, I suppose, the letters just became...regular, from there,” Hermann says, cheeks hot and red as he averts his gaze from his sister’s on the screen of his laptop, three months later.
Karla hums, and Hermann looks at her nervously, spots the thoughtful look on her face, and quickly looks away again. “How positively romantic,” she says, arching one sharp eyebrow. She inherited those eyebrows from their mother, and uses them just as efficiently.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hermann says, sniffing uncomfortably.
He and Karla are not exactly best friends, as far as friendships usually go. They are leagues closer than anyone else in their family is, but there remains a sort of distance between them, aided by the physical distance between Berlin and London, where she teaches and does research at Cambridge. They’re four years apart, and thus did not become anything even close to friends until Hermann was into late adolescence and started being interesting to her.
But they’re the only two members of their family who seem to be capable of anything like affection, and, Hermann supposes, strictly speaking Karla is his best friend. They call each other regularly, keep each other updated on the goings-on in their lives, occasionally review each other’s work. Complain to each other about their parents.
Hermann has only been back at school for a bit over a month now, which is why they’ve been talking for as long as they have, catching up on all of the new gripes Hermann has about their father since being home on break. It’s late, now, past midnight, and both of them are usually sensible enough to end their calls at an earlier hour, but Hermann had a lot to say. Two months in his family home makes for hours of conversation.
Which of course has led to the late hour, which had loosened Hermann’s tongue too much, and he had let slip about the letters, and now, to his embarrassment, he has been forced to relate the entire series of events to Karla, and she is giving him this horrible look, all inquisitive and indulgent. As if Hermann is a cross between a young child and an interesting experiment.
“What,” he snaps, flustered.
“Nothing,” Karla says mildly. “I just wonder what you could possibly be writing to him, if you’ve been exchanging letters so frequently for this long, but can only call your sister every couple of months.”
“You could call me, you know,” Hermann says, rubbing at his cheek as if that will make it stop flushing. “Anyway, it’s all academic. I send him excerpts from my papers, you know, and sometimes entire articles I’ve written, and he does the same. We rip each other to pieces, quite frankly.” With a healthy side of praise, if he’s being completely honest, which he’s not. They devour each other’s work like hunters take down their prey—relishing the fight as much as the feast.
“Is that so,” Karla hums. “Interesting, considering you told me he’s a bioengineer. Not much overlap between your areas of study, is there?”
Hermann sniffs. He doesn’t know why he tells his sister anything, if she’s just going to be...difficult. “He’s extraordinarily well-read,” he says, not quite sure why he feels the need to defend Newton.
“Yes, but last I heard you had no interest in much outside of Mathematics and Engineering,” Karla points out, still smiling.
The Gottliebs do not smile much, as a whole. Hermann wishes Karla would remember that.
“I’ve started taking an interest,” he says, well aware of how ridiculous and revealing that is.
“I’m sure,” is all Karla says, her eyes sparkling with something Hermann does not like and does not want to know more about.
It is, quite frankly, rather difficult for Hermann to keep up with Newton in their letters. They don’t stick to Hermann’s areas of expertise, which requires Hermann to do absurd amounts of extracurricular reading late into the night just so that he can sound competent, as Newton always sounds competent and, in fact, completely effortlessly knowledgeable. It’s embarrassing, the amount of extra work he puts in.
He’s begun sending his papers to Newton before he hands them in, too, which requires even more work so that he can get Newton’s thoughts on them before they’re due, but evidence suggests it to be worth it. His professors seem to notice. His arguments are clearer, they say. Less holes. Better analysis.
He tells Newton this. He’s not sure why, but he suspects it has something to do with the fact that Newton keeps sneaking in little facts about himself, hints at his daily life, passing mentions of things he likes outside of academia, the number of energy drinks he had to consume to finish a paper in time—not coffee, though, he can’t stand the stuff. Hermann rarely, if ever, reciprocates. He told Karla it was purely academic, their correspondence, and that had been true. Until now.
In his next letter, Newton responds that he’s been receiving the same kinds of remarks, and that his professors don’t seem to understand his sudden desire to change all of his paper topics to things relating to the intersection of astrobiology and astrophysics. He adds a little smiley face on the end. Hermann’s heart skips a beat.
Four months into their correspondence, in response to Hermann’s mathematical projection of his certainty that human exploration of space will be safe based on certain contributions to robotic engineering, Newton writes:
“But listen, Hermann, there’s no such thing as 100% guaranteed, or even 99.9%. Once you get into this level of mathematical projection, it’s just that. You can never counter that a set of unique or specific circumstances won’t cause any event to happen. No matter how much you say it’s 99% probable that something won’t happen, it’s not a fact that out of every 100 people, 99 will be okay and 1 will get crushed by the weight of space or flying debris or whatever. Nature is noise in probability. No matter what your sample size is, you can’t predict it. Haven’t you ever seen Jurassic Park? Life finds a way, and all that. And, you know. So does death and disaster.”
It’s then that Hermann falls a little bit in love.
(He does not tell Karla this.)
~
It’s a slow process, getting to know Newton beyond his academic interests and opinions. A glimpse here, an inference there, is all that Hermann can really glean from his letters in the beginning, and it’s not for lack of trying. Newton is brilliant, his mind works in incredible ways, sometimes too fast for his pen, and he has a great deal of passion for many things, but that’s all Hermann really knows at first. Other things he slowly puts together—that Newton is stubborn, and a harsh critic, but that he accepts that he is wrong when it’s clear that he is with surprising grace. That he loves debate, but rarely finds people willing to engage him in it. That he, like Hermann, struggles to gain respect from his peers and professors due to his age, even when they recognize his intelligence.
“Maybe it’s because my voice is so grating,” Newton jokes in one letter, and Hermann files that fact away with the same deliberateness that he does every new tidbit of information, like a man taking notes for an examination.
With difficulty, he avoids searching for information about Newton online. It’s an absurdly romantic notion, but he finds that he wants to learn about Newton from the man himself, especially after Newton makes it clear that few people judge him fairly in his daily life. Hermann thinks that, at the very least, he owes Newton the courtesy of letting him speak for himself.
Hermann is, additionally, completely terrified of seeing Newton’s face. Thus far he has only seen a single small, blurry picture of Newton at age fifteen, taken from an odd angle. This is all he dares to see. Aside from what he remembers of that photo—dark hair, glasses, a bright smile, and little else—his mental image of Newton is relatively unscathed. Instead, he can believe he’s merely enraptured by Newton’s mind, by his brilliance and the lilt of his written voice, the way he wields both German and English and spins both languages into theories and arguments and praise. This is infinitely less embarrassing than something as base and childish as a crush. So he doesn’t look.
Instead, he listens. And occasionally, when he is feeling particularly brave, high on the receipt of another letter from Newton that makes Hermann feel clever and appreciated, he asks. Never pryingly, and rarely outright, but he hints and alludes. He writes that Newton’s vast knowledge of so many subjects makes him wonder if he started studying the sciences very young. He writes that he can’t imagine Newton has any time for any other hobbies outside of academia.
Dude, Newton writes, in English now that he knows Hermann speaks it. Somehow, the use of ridiculous slang in the midst of intellectually invigorating conversation always makes Hermann smile. I started university at age fourteen. How much younger do you want me to be?? But seriously though, yeah, I was partially raised by my uncle, who was got me into electrical engineering really young. Like, seven years old young. That’s kind of why I’m really into your robotics stuff :) My uncle’s German, so he’s read some of your stuff too. Just saying.
And, You’re saying you don’t think I can multitask? Joke’s on you, I have tons of hobbies! Though I’ve kind of had to put some of them on the backburner...for now. Anyway, I grew up on monster movies and manga and stuff, and that’s kind of why I’m really into biology and other sciences. Also I’m in a band! Did I mention my parents are both musicians? Music runs in the family. The band’s not popular or anything, but it’s fun. You should check us out sometime :)
“He didn’t actually tell me the name of his band, though,” Hermann tells Karla in another video call. Somehow, their conversation always comes back to Newton. Hermann pretends, steadfastly, that it is Karla’s fault and not his.
“Well,” Karla says slowly, as if Hermann is very stupid. “You could ask.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hermann says, warm under the collar at the thought of it. “How embarrassing.”
Karla sighs. “I had always hoped I might have passed on some of my social skills to you before I moved out.”
“No such luck,” Hermann says drily.
“He’s your friend, Hermann,” Karla says, and for some reason that makes him blush. “You’re allowed to ask him the name of his band, especially after he volunteers the fact that he has one and that you should listen to their music without any prompting.”
“I don’t want to seem...overly interested,” Hermann says crisply, and clears his throat. “Besides, he didn’t even say what type of music they play.”
“I’m sure the mystery haunts your every waking moment,” Karla says, and smiles.
Hermann sniffs, and does not admit that she’s right.
Newton asks about Hermann sometimes, too, much more forthright than Hermann is. He usually shoots Hermann’s inquiries straight back at him, asks about his childhood, his hobbies, his background. Hermann doesn’t think he’s an interesting person, and worries constantly about oversharing or coming off as overly familiar besides, but he answers honestly, if sparingly.
He says that his father’s a leading robotics and engineering expert, and that’s why he’s grown up in those fields, despite his specialty being abstract mathematics. (He does not mention how much he hates that that was thrust upon him, that he hates how he now has to live up to his father’s expectations while constantly living in Lars Gottlieb’s shadow.) He mentions that he rarely has time for hobbies, but he enjoys astronomy, and occasionally reads for pleasure when he has spare time. (He does not mention his frankly disturbing relationship with his telescope as a child, or the cheap Victorian-era paperbacks that lie in stacks under his bed, tucked away even in the absence of people who might see them.)
He doesn’t go into family drama, or guilty pleasures, and he certainly doesn’t go into the fact that he had wanted to be an astronaut right up until he realized he would never pass the physical exam. Those things are not what Newton wants to hear.
Despite Hermann’s reluctance to get...personal, the tone of their letters changes over time regardless. A year goes by of their constant correspondence—a letter every two weeks, like clockwork—and what began as two colleagues on similar academic footing analysing data and arguing over implications turns into something else, something fond. Hermann begins to understand how Newton’s mind works, starts to be able to guess how he’ll respond to something Hermann says before he even writes it. He says so, teasingly, in his letters, every time he says something he knows will send Newton into a frenzy.
Hermann teases.
And Newton teases him back, mercilessly. Hermann doesn’t seem to have to share anything about himself in order for Newton to pick him apart and exploit every weakness. At the beginning, Hermann is taken aback by this, thinks instinctively that he’s being made fun of—which, from past experience, he usually is. The first time he reads a letter in which Newton tells him he has terrible taste in scientists—this comment in response to Hermann sharing some of the leading figures he admires in his field—he nearly throws the entire letter out, his stomach squeezing in cold disappointment.
He only reads the rest of it so that he might know where he went wrong, and is shocked and embarrassed when Newton’s rant about scientists with greater scope, more pizzazz, ends with the words, “I’m kidding, obviously. Those guys you mentioned are geniuses. Let’s discuss Cociarelli’s latest paper on brain-computer interface next letter! But also you better check out the names I mentioned if you haven’t heard of them. Expand yourself, man!”
Newton does not clarify that he’s teasing every time he says something of that nature, but Hermann learns to infer it. He learns to expect it. He learns, appallingly, to enjoy it.
He learns to expect a great many things from Newton, from bad American slang, to long-winded diatribes about the fact that no one ever listens to him, to poorly-drawn diagrams of things he can’t quite seem to capture in words. He expects stains on Newton’s letters to him, and vaguely off-colour jokes, and overzealous self-confidence that is only slightly above what he actually deserves.
What Hermann does not expect, somehow, is a little note at the end of a letter, well into their second year of correspondence, that says, “Hey, have you ever even seen my face? You seriously have no pictures of yourself online...what the hell haha. That’s totally not fair because there are a bunch of pictures of MIT’s wunderkind out there, and also I have a Facebook account like a normal person!! But I don’t know if you’ve seen them which is why I’m bringing this up because I’ve definitely looked you up (and found the internet lacking!) but I don’t know if you’ve ever done the same. Anyway is it weird if I say I want to see your face? We’ve been writing letters for over a year and we’re friends (right? haha kidding but we are friends right) and I have no idea what you look like! I did see a picture of your dad though and may I just say, I hope you don’t take after him. (Unless you do in which case, I’m sure the look is better on you.) Anyway. All of this is to say, I’m sorry for including an unsolicited picture in this letter, you are not obligated to look at it, I just figured I couldn’t ask to see your face without offering my own first and also I didn’t want to chicken out by the time you wrote back. So there it is. If you don’t want to look at it, don’t, and never mention this again, or I will die. This already feels weird and vaguely creepy enough as it is. Your friend (right???), Newt.”
Hermann’s heart thuds in his throat. With slightly shaking hands, he picks the envelope back up and peers inside—indeed, there is a square of what looks to be photo paper inside, left there when Hermann slid out the letter. He can’t see the face of it, just the edge, a bit of the white back. It taunts him, right there at his fingertips, and tempts him as much as it terrifies him. He had already decided to never look at Newton’s face, but only because he wanted to so badly. And Newton has literally offered it up to him.
Newton has sent Hermann a picture of himself, and Hermann is desperate to know what kind of photo it is. A headshot, like the one on Hermann’s student ID? A graduation photo? Something more casual, a candid photo taken by a family member or a, a bathroom selfie? Hermann thinks he might be sweating.
He almost decides not to look at it. Newton gave him the option not to, and if Hermann doesn’t look at it, he’s not obligated to reciprocate, something he isn’t sure he wants to do. And he is equally uncertain he wants to know what Newton looks like at all, after a year of imagining a vague face behind the voice in Newton’s letters. What if he isn’t what Hermann expects? What if...seeing him breaks the spell, somehow?
He turns the envelope over so that the face of the photo is away from him, and then gently attempts to shake it out into his hand. He hasn’t even made a decision yet. Or maybe he has. He isn’t going to look at it. He won’t look at it. It’s—it’s too much. Too intimate, too, too—
The photo flutters out of the envelope, slips between his fingers, and lands face-up on his desk, right in front of his eyes.
And there he is. Newton Geiszler. Staring up at Hermann, bold and shameless and—
Oh, good lord. He’s attractive.
It’s a good-quality photo, though Hermann knows that even most phone cameras will take a decent photo these days. He’s outside somewhere, sitting on the top of a picnic table with his feet planted wide apart on the bench, elbows on his knees. A lazy, overconfident pose that suits Newton perfectly. He’s wearing a dark graphic t-shirt that stretches over broad shoulders, and black jeans with rips at the knees that cling tight to his legs, bunched up at the ankles above heavy combat boots.
Hermann doesn’t bother spending much time looking at his outfit, though, not when there’s so much to look at just in his face.
Wild, unruly brown hair. Rounded cheeks, a little stretched by a soft, lopsided grin. Chunky black glasses over bright eyes that Hermann can tell are startlingly green even from a relatively small photo. A shadow of stubble over an angular jaw.
Hermann’s mouth goes dry as he stares, transfixed. For a long minute, he can’t look away from Newton’s face—the tilt of his mouth, the curve of his cheek, the dark smudge of his eyelashes. And when he tears his eyes away from that, there are other things to look at. The breadth of his torso, the bracelets wrapped around his wrists, the pull of the fabric of his jeans over thick thighs. His nails are painted black. There’s a tattoo peeking out from the sleeve of his t-shirt.
Hermann had not thought he had a type. Now he realizes he does, and it’s this infuriatingly handsome young man staring up at him from a photograph, looking like everything Hermann has never been allowed to be, much less have.
It’s disgusting. It’s humiliating. It’s horrible.
Hermann has a crush the size of Jupiter.
~
Despite the many unfortunate and unsavoury things that have happened to Hermann in his lifetime, he has never quite known agony like the kind he faces when it comes to responding to Newton’s letter.
“Karla,” he says, calling his sister despite the fact that it’s five in the afternoon on a Tuesday. He’s lucky that Karla picks up at all, that she’s not in the middle of a lecture or an important work meeting. She seems to be doing her shopping—he can hear someone complaining over expired milk. “Newton sent me a photograph.”
“Did he? Are they nude photos?”
Hermann splutters, face red. “No, of course not! Why would you even say that?”
Karla hums mildly. “Because I understand people better than you do.”
“It’s a perfectly respectable photo,” Hermann tells her, although he feels as though he would have been equally affected regardless. “I just. I wasn’t expecting it.”
“And? How does he look?” Karla says. “And don’t lie to me. I’ve looked him up, so I know what you’ll say if you’re telling the truth.”
Hermann burns with the fire of a thousand humiliated suns. “I refuse to answer that question.”
The silence that follows is distinctly satisfied, and Hermann can picture his sister grinning as if his refusal is answer enough. He supposes it is.
“Right, so, why did you call me?” Karla asks. “And may I take this opportunity to remind you that I told you to only call me on the phone, long-distance, in the case of an emergency.”
“This is an emergency,” Hermann hisses. “Karla. What am I supposed to say?”
Karla gives a single, sharp laugh, which somehow throws Hermann into even greater of a frenzy.
“How am I supposed to respond?” he asks, perhaps somewhat desperately. “I— He has sent me a photo, Karla, without any warning, and what am I supposed to say to that?” Especially when Hermann has stared at it for what may be hours, cumulatively, pinned as it is to the corkboard above Hermann’s desk in his flat. “Do I address it first thing, before I say anything else? Or do I leave it until the end? I—I don’t even remember what the rest of Newton’s letter said at this point. I can’t be expected to have an intelligent rebuttal in whatever argument we’ve been having when Newton has sent me a photo.”
“Oh, Brüderchen,” Karla sighs. “You make me so sad sometimes.”
“This is a genuine problem, Karla,” Hermann says stiffly. “I don’t know what to say, and I am asking for help.”
“I know, that’s what’s making me sad,” Karla says. “Honestly, Hermann, I have to go, I need to get home and make dinner and mark papers. Congratulations on the photo, though.”
“I hope you know that I hate you,” Hermann tells her. She hangs up.
At his desk in his room, Hermann puts down his phone, takes a deep breath. He glances up at the picture in front of him. His cheeks redden, and he quickly looks away.
“Dear Newton,” he writes—he does that now. Says dear. He second-guesses it for the first time in months, now.
And then he chokes. He doesn’t know what to say. Should he just pretend he didn’t look at it, and say nothing, as Newton offered? It’s a tempting option. He could just avoid this entire embarrassing fiasco.
But he has seen it, and he doesn’t want Newton to think he misstepped. The only thing worse than Hermann’s own humiliation is Newton’s at his own expense.
“Dear Newton,” he writes, “I think perhaps I’m in love with you.” Just for the satisfaction of having written it. Then he quickly rips the paper into absurdly small pieces, throws it out, and gets out a new sheet. Anything would be less embarrassing than that, he thinks. It makes it easier to move forward.
“Dear Newton; You’re right. I had never seen a picture of you before. I thought it might be inappropriate for me to pry. But now I have, for better or for worse. And I must admit, it’s a very,” and he grasps for a fitting adjective, desperately, “flattering photo.” Oh, good god. This is the worst thing Hermann has ever had to do. “It’s not how I pictured you, when I bothered to imagine a face at all, but I think it’s...not incongruous. I’ll admit I was a little surprised at first, but I think I can imagine the person in the photo writing to me all this time.”
God, now Hermann is imagining it, Newton hunched over a desk scribbling out letters to Hermann late into the night as Hermann himself sometimes does, lit only by a yellowish lamp, mouth curled into a smile as he pens out teasing taunts and brilliant theoretical analysis. Maybe dressed in soft pajamas, this late at night, or just a worn t-shirt and boxers—
Hermann shakes his head furiously to dispel the thought, writes out, “Unless you’ve just sent me a photo of a random man and it isn’t actually you. Although, since you say there are photos of you online, I suppose that wouldn’t be a wise choice if you want to avoid my calling you out. However, as there are no photos of me to be found, as you say, you’ll have no idea if what I send you is actually me.”
And that brings Hermann to the next stage of his agony: sending Newton a picture of himself.
There is no greater embarrassment than choosing a single photo to send to someone to represent oneself. Hermann doesn’t have many photos of himself—never thinks to take any, and his family certainly isn’t the sentimental type, even if he was willing to ask his mother for them, which he’s not. He doubts Karla has any more than he does, and he’s cross with her right now and doesn’t want to ask.
And he is not going to...to stage a photo to send. He’s sure that Newton would be able to tell, and Hermann would never live down the humiliation. No, he. He has to be able to find something.
But all he can find from the past several years are...graduation photos, mainly, and his passport photo when he got it renewed the previous year. Through several internet searches, he finds two or three pictures that feature him in a group, mostly on student research teams, once in the background at a lecture given by his father. Recalling Newton’s letter, he squints between his father’s face and his own. There is certainly a resemblance, he thinks. Around the ears and mouth. Hopefully...hopefully not too much of a resemblance.
Hermann holds no misconceptions about his physical attractiveness, but he can’t help but, well. He doesn’t want Newton to find him repulsive, is all. And his father is not a particularly handsome man.
Briefly, Hermann entertains the thought of printing off one of the group photos, circling his face, and sending it to Newton like that. He might be able to get away with it as a joke—if Newton believes him capable of making jokes—and the picture would be too small and grainy for Newton to get a very good look at him. Also, in one of them Hermann was having a good enough day that he wasn’t using his cane, and although it’s not something he’s ashamed of, he doesn’t necessarily want that to be Newton’s first impression of him.
But alas, that seems like an unfair trade, and Hermann doesn’t want to have to go through this process a second time if Newton complains.
After the most agonizing deliberation possibly of Hermann’s life, wherein he looks at every single picture of himself he can find and immediately abhors every last one and starts to wonder if his face has always looked so strange, he just. Chooses. The hour is getting absurdly late on his third day of putting this off (when usually he’s written and sent his reply by now), and Hermann’s eyes are burning from the amount of time he’s spent squinting at his computer screen in the dark, and he’s beginning to go from embarrassed to angry. He’s not getting anywhere. And he knows he’s not getting out of this. So he just chooses.
He picks a photo he digs up from a professor’s Facebook page, of all things. It’s from the previous year, when he’d been asked by his supervising professor to be a guest presenter in one of his undergraduate classes. He’s standing behind the lectern—cane out of the way, conveniently—but his torso is still visible, his hands tightly clasped on top of it. He’s wearing his basic school clothes, collared shirt and vest and jacket, and he looks very serious and focused, mouth twisted in what almost resembles a grimace. Hermann hates the photo almost immediately, but he hates it slightly less than every other one he’s seen in the past three days, so he prints it out onto heavy cardstock, cuts it out, and sticks it into the envelope forcefully, face burning red.
It feels absurd. This whole thing is absurd. He hates it with a burning passion. But Newton asked for it, and although Hermann is unreasonably scared that he’ll regret this for the rest of his life, he is coming to realize that he cannot refuse Newton anything.
Which just makes him feel more embarrassed, all things considered.
“As it turns out, I did not have many photos to choose from to send to you,” he writes to Newton the next morning, after a night of fitful sleep. “I did my best with what I had to work with. If you make fun of me, Newton, I swear to god, they will not be able to find a body. I feel absolutely ridiculous as it is.” And then, with a sniff, he adds, “I hope you do not find me too similar in looks to my father.”
He does not entertain fantasies of Newton finding him handsome—comes to terms with the fact that it is highly unlikely. But he truly just hopes he doesn’t say Hermann looks like his father.
~
Two weeks pass, and Hermann is in a constant state of inner torment. He knows it’s melodramatic of him, but every day that he does not find a letter in his mailbox, regardless of how fast the post would have had to be for it to have already arrived, he feels like he is one day closer to death. And yet, at the same time, he feels like he will burn the envelope immediately upon seeing it, with how much he doesn’t want to see the reply. It’s very confusing, and very mentally and emotionally taxing.
The second week is harder than the first as the sick anticipation builds, but Hermann realizes he did not actually know the meaning of true agony until those two weeks pass and still a letter does not come. For the past year and a half, their letters have been like almost supernaturally consistent. As much as Hermann doesn’t want to see what Newton has said upon seeing Hermann’s face, he at least wants to know that Newton had something to say. Silence is...by far the worst possibility.
He doesn’t get truly worried until the third week. By the fourth, Hermann has had what he can only describe as a minor breakdown where he stayed up all night spiralling into increasingly dark thoughts, followed by the beginning of the grieving process.
“It’s just that Newton is...my best friend,” he says to Karla, dejectedly and once again late at night. He’s been calling her much more often recently, and he blames that on Newton, too. “He’s my closest friend.”
“I know, Brüderchen,” Karla says, uncharacteristically sympathetic.
“This is why I wanted your help,” Hermann says spitefully, rubbing his sore thigh. “I only wanted to not be embarrassed, and now—”
“Well, it’s for the best, frankly,” Karla says. “If he’s going to stop writing to you after—seeing your photo, or whatever has stopped him, then I’m glad you’ve found out sooner rather than later. He’s obviously a right bastard.”
Hermann purses his lips and swallows thickly. “I suppose,” he says, voice soft and hoarse. “But a part of me still wishes I would have never sent one at all. And I could have just. Written to him in ignorance. Forever.”
“My god, Hermann, listen to yourself,” Karla says, and Hermann flushes hotly. But then she just says, “I’m so happy to know my brother is, in fact, in possession of real, actual human emotions. This is the most normal I’ve ever heard you.”
“Shut up, you,” Hermann says, sighing and lowering his head in shame.
He supposes he can only be glad it happened before Hermann could fall too hopelessly in love with him, and accidentally say something to give himself away. Newton ending their correspondence over that would be significantly worse than this, he thinks. Though this is still rejection, he supposes. It doesn’t sit well in his gut.
Of course, he is thus absolutely shocked when a letter does come in, written in that same messy scrawl as always. He rips it open before he even remembers that he didn’t want to see what was inside.
“HERMANN!!!!!!!!!!!” is written in bold, bleeding ink along the top of the page, in lieu of a normal greeting. Followed by “HOLY SHIT!!!!!!” Hermann isn’t certain what this is in reaction to, or what tone it is supposed to be read in, and he isn’t sure he wants to find out.
He reads on regardless, with the knowledge that he will never know peace if he does not.
“Dude. Oh my god. Okay first of all, I want you to know that none of this is my fault, I am absolved of all blame. Also, your face??? But I’m getting ahead of myself! I’m an innocent party here and I can’t believe this is happening to me or you or the sanctity of our letters.”
After that first paragraph, Hermann still has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Okay. FIRST OF ALL, I’M LATE! I’M SO LATE AND I’M MAD ABOUT IT BUT IT’S NOT MY FAULT.” Here he liberally uses large, bold, capital letters that take up far too much of his page. “I was in the hospital! My body betrayed me, and then my neighbor conspired against me! Okay what happened is that I had to get my appendix removed, hahaha. It was actually terrible, would NOT recommend. Okay so like that was like two weeks ago? And presumably your letter came like the same morning I was getting a goddamned SURGERY? And I was there for three days because I was dying and stuff, it’s fine. I know you’re worrying but don’t, dude, I promise, I am back in business. Who needs a freaking appendix anyway am I right.
“Alright so that happened, and I was high on the good drugs, and I guess I was expecting your letter to come in (it was a few days later than usual???) because I called my neighbor, while high, to ask them to bring me my mail AT THE HOSPITAL. And they did but your letter wasn’t in it and I was like oh I guess he hasn’t responded but then you kept not responding and I got worried because, haha, I sent you an unsolicited picture of myself in my last letter and I thought maybe you hated me now. Or something. It was a whole thing and I’m not proud of it.
“Anyway eventually I was going to like send you another letter or something, either pleading or demanding to know what your problem was or maybe both. But then my NEIGHBOR came to my HOUSE and was like, haha, Newt, I think this got mixed up in my mail when I was grabbing yours for you that one time, whoops! THEY STOLE MY MAIL HERMANN! For TWO WEEKS!! I almost called the police.
“The point is, nothing is my fault, nothing is ever my fault, I am blameless and perfect, and now here I am, fully two weeks late, but I will admit I am one extra day late and this is why:
“HERMANN. YOUR FACE.”
It is at this point that Hermann very nearly throws the letter out to save himself the embarrassment of whatever must come next. He’s weak-kneed with relief that Newton didn’t mean to be late in replying to his letter, that he didn’t halt all communication upon reading Hermann’s last letter, and he’s even pleased that Newton was so similarly troubled by his belief that Hermann didn’t reply to him, and that he’s so apologetic at having made Hermann suffer the same fate. But that doesn’t mean he’s not terrified to continue reading the rest of the letter.
But he does, because he knows he could never survive not doing so. Even if it’s not pretty.
“Hermann. Your FACE! It’s. I don’t even know what to say about it. That’s your face! That’s my friend Hermann’s face! Are you giving a presentation or something because that’s so cute. In your fancy little outfit. But oh my god dude your FACE???”
Hermann has no idea what he means.
“Also I can’t believe you called my picture ‘flattering’ like dude I’m so. Okay actually scratch what I was just about to write haha. But seriously. That’s a cute thing for you to say and you should say it again. You’re right! It’s a good picture which is why I chose it.
“Your picture is also good and your face??? Is kind of weird like in a good way like those CHEEKBONES DUDE god. You definitely don’t really look like your dad haha. It’s a good face!!”
Tension drains from Hermann’s shoulders like a physical weight melting away. Thank god.
“Honestly dude like I don’t even know what to say. I’m just. So happy to be looking at your face :)”
Hermann will never, even under duress, admit how those words (and that blasted, immature smiley face) make his eyes...burn a little. He’s gone through a series of strong emotions, is all, in the last few minutes. His body is reacting...strangely.
He sniffs, reads on.
Most of the rest of the letter is a response to the usual conversations they have in their letters, peppered with continued apologies at being late, threats towards his neighbour, and occasional exclamations about Hermann’s face that Hermann still doesn’t fully understand. At one point he says, “It suits you perfectly, you Victorian scholarly bastard,” which he’s not sure isn’t an insult, and at another point he says, “Every time I look at it I laugh? Which sounds bad but I swear it’s not. It’s just like a, ‘HA! THAT’S MY DUDE HERMANN!’ It makes me so happy.” This makes Hermann blush, even though he doesn’t know what in god’s name Newton is even talking about.
And at the very end of the letter, Newton writes, “Despite what a huge disaster this whole thing was, I declare Project Picture Exchange a success! Which means you have no excuse to not send me more! Or is that a weird thing to say? That way you can confirm it’s actually you, haha. Not that I doubt you, unless saying I do will convince you to send me more pictures of yourself. Once again, I feel like that’s a weird thing to say. Okay, signing off. Your friend, Newt.
“PS - thanks for not saying I look. I dunno, not like a scientist or an academic or whatever. I get that a lot haha. Anyway yeah thanks :)”
Hermann has to put the letter down for a few minutes while he lies down after he reads it the first time, just to...process all of his myriad emotions about it. Then he goes to his desk, where, in a fit of pique, he had thrown Newton’s photo into the drawer so that he wouldn’t have to look at it after believing he had been...spurned, so to speak. Now, he takes it out, looks at it for a long time, and blushes very deeply for no particular reason other than that Newton said he had a good face, while Newton himself has the best face Hermann has ever seen. It’s appalling. Hermann briefly hates how attractive he is.
(He does not, indeed, particularly look like a typical scientist or academic. But Hermann knew Newton’s mind long before he knew his face, has been awed by Newton’s mind, and really, that’s all he ever needed to know. The face—and every other physical detail about him—is just. Icing on the cake. A very—horribly—delectable...cake.)
(Hermann disturbs even himself.)
Hermann looks at Newton’s photo so intensely that it nearly turns into fury for several minutes, and then he goes back to the letter to set about rereading it obsessively before responding. He’s already formulating a response.
Placations, and then shop talk, and then...the photo issue. Tit for tat, he will say, strangely emboldened by Newton’s request. If Newton wants another picture of him, he’ll have to offer up something of himself first. It’s appallingly flirtatious. Hermann can barely believe he’s even considering it. But— He does rather want another picture of Newton. The one he has is bound to get old eventually. Even though it certainly hasn’t stopped doing it for Hermann yet.
And then he’ll go to sign off the same way Newton has been, with an amiable “your friend,” and then maybe, if he’s brave, if he’s foolish enough, he’ll leave off the end, and just write “yours.” And then, to distract Newton from that, he’ll add, “PS - I appreciate your saying I don’t look like my father. He’s an ugly bastard and I won’t hesitate to say so.”
Or maybe he’ll do none of that.
Not until he’s had a drink or two, at least.
~
“Hermann!!!” is once again how Newton’s return letter begins, which Hermann is beginning to think of as a compliment. After all, he lives to rile Newton up, as easy as that is.
“Dude, I can’t believe you’re trying to con me into sending you more pictures,” he continues, and Hermann smiles a little, red in the face. He’s been perpetually embarrassed about his last letter for two weeks, but with this response he’s not yet regretting it. “Honestly, it’s so unfair, because you could just look me up online! You have unlimited access to a bunch of pictures of me if you wanted them! Including ugly ones! While I, on the other hand, have to beg and plead and risk humiliation just for one picture of your face. The injustice… And also!! You have the option of seeing VIDEOS of my face, if you looked up my band. I know you completely ignored me mentioning it the last time but there are recordings of gigs and things on YouTube and there is NOTHING on you. Nothing! So. I will NOT send you another picture, and instead I’ll just leave you with that. Do with it what you will.”
Once again, Newton does not actually mention the name of the band, as if he hasn’t fully committed to wanting Hermann to see them. It’s endearing, if frustrating.
“In other news, you calling your dad an ugly bastard absolutely made my week. I was in tears, dude. Funniest fucking thing you have ever said. I’m assuming you two don’t get along?”
This makes Hermann pause. Up until now, he has only ever hinted that he doesn’t exactly have a close or affectionate relationship with his family, and as far as he knows has never specifically said that his relationship with his father is particularly strained. He’s kept his cards close to his vest, so to speak, when it comes to those private matters. But Newton is asking. And Hermann...well. Newton is his friend. Hermann thinks maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, to share a personal matter or two with him.
But before he does that, Hermann goes in search of the infamous Band.
It’s quite a bit of work, all things said. Some cursory Google searches bring up no information, other than a series of photos of Newton from MIT publications that make him blush furiously. (Regardless of the quality of the pictures, Newton remains ridiculously attractive, and Hermann shamefully bookmarks more than one of the pages he comes across.) So he turns to Facebook, since Newton mentioned in a past letter that he had an account. And since it’s difficult to do much without a profile himself, Hermann is forced to make one, though he uses his mother’s maiden name in lieu of his actual last name to avoid being found there by anyone.
It takes him a while, still, to find Newton, most likely because his profile is under the name Newt Geiszler rather than Newton. Hermann finds this rather ridiculous and unprofessional, but also very much like Newton to do so, and he blushes at the fondness it evokes in him.
Most of Newton’s photos on his Facebook profile are private, which means Hermann can’t see them without “friending” him, which he is most certainly not going to do. But there are a few public photos that Newton has been tagged in. And, more importantly, there is a video that he’s been tagged in—a shaky recording of a band playing at what looks like a grimy bar, under the name Kaiju Blue.
Hermann clicks on it.
He nearly has an aneurysm.
It is, quite possibly, the worst music Hermann has ever heard in his life. It’s noisy and cacophonous and obnoxious, and Hermann truly, truly hates it. And the absolute worst thing about it is the fact that it’s coming from the most attractive boy Hermann has ever seen.
Newton is right in the front, immediately recognizable in his chunky glasses and blinding grin. He’s off to the side a little, behind a keyboard, which he is playing with vigour, bouncing on his toes. And he’s singing into a microphone—he had never mentioned he was the lead singer—and he was not wrong, that time he mentioned to Hermann that his voice is grating. It is, rather, especially in a higher range. His jaw is scruffier than it had been in the photo he sent to Hermann, and he’s in a sleeveless shirt, proudly displaying tattoos on his upper arms that Hermann can’t make out from such a distance in such poor lighting. He looks a little ridiculous, a very clearly young man in a seedy bar yelling into a microphone, but good god Hermann has such a crush on him.
And honestly, he can carry a tune, and he obviously knows his way around a keyboard. And in lower tones, his voice loses the somewhat shrill quality, and instead is rough in a way that makes Hermann’s mouth dry. The song is still terrible—it’s really bad—but Hermann can’t stop listening to it. He can’t stop listening to Newton’s voice and looking at his joyful face as he performs and the way his shirt stretches across his chest and. Hermann swallows thickly, compulsively. Perhaps this was a mistake.
Within the hour, Hermann has bookmarked four other videos of Kaiju Blue performing at various decrepit venues, singing songs Hermann absolutely despises. He has also bought their entire album. Hermann starts to think he might be losing his mind.
Overall, just in general, he thinks he may be losing his mind over Newton Geiszler. He spends his days idly thinking about Newton’s last letter, or his own reply, or when he might expect a response. The days surrounding the arrival of a new letter are always a mess of anticipation, and then an embarrassing frenzy when it finally comes as he rushes to devour it, and then absolute fixation until he has penned a response and sent it off. Those few days are almost entirely a write-off, every two weeks. And the frequency with which Hermann pulls out Newton’s photo just to look at it is truly disgusting. And the amount of time he spends doing extracurricular reading just to keep up with Newton! It’s humiliating. He worries, constantly, about his performance in school slipping due to this...this obsession, even though he has seen no evidence of this.
And it’s been going on for so long. He always thinks that eventually the excitement of it all will wear off, that he will stop having such a strong reaction to Newton and his letters, but it’s been a year and a half now, and his feelings have grown, if anything, stronger.
His new preoccupation with Newton’s face is only making it worse. Hermann hasn’t had a crush like this in, well. Ever, maybe, unless he counts that boy in his class when he was nine—Jorg, with the curly hair and freckles—but that had ended in Hermann’s nose pushed into the dirt and his glasses broken, so. He has not pursued any such passing fancies since then. Until now, when he’s been quite blindsided by it, really, he couldn’t have expected—
Hermann blows out a heavy breath. Presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. Sneaks another peek at the photo of Newton on his desk. It’s really— He’s just such a handsome man. It makes Hermann a disturbing combination of sick and giddy just to look at his face. And perhaps he should be more concerned about the strength of his feelings, and how disastrously they will crash and burn, inevitably, if he continues to nurture them. There’s really no other possibility.
“It might not be that bad,” he tells Karla, during yet another ill-advised late-night update wherein he reveals altogether too much about feelings he should really work harder to keep private. “After all, Newton lives thousands of kilometres away. Across an entire ocean.”
“Right,” Karla says. “That solves everything.”
“It doesn’t solve anything. It provides...insurance. There’s a, an enforced distance, a detachment. It’s the only reason I’ve allowed things to go this far at all.”
“This far,” scoffs Karla. “Hermann, if you’re going to pretend you’re not in love with him, you might want to change the language you use to talk about him.”
Hermann blushes deeply. “I’m not— I’ve never even met the man, Karla. He lives across the world.”
“Mhmm,” Karla says, all-knowing, like an Eldritch abomination.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hermann says, and sniffs. “It’s not like I’ll ever even have to meet him in person.”