Chapter Text
Dr. Newton Geiszler comes to awareness wearing a suit.
It’s not total awareness, which is a feeling he doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to. Everything comes to him muffled, secondhand. And his vision is blurry, they don’t need the glasses, and they don’t want them either. His glasses are bulky and nerdy and ruin the image they’re trying to present, so they left them on his nightstand in his PPDC quarters. He doesn’t look like himself at all, which is almost something of a comfort to him. He certainly doesn’t feel like himself, and he doesn’t need the dissonance that looking the same would cause.
But the suit. It’s not fitted properly, likely because he’d gotten it at a Goodwill and hadn’t worn it in years. He remembers getting it for some gala he’d been required to attend, something about showing the brilliant minds of the PPDC that anyone who endorsed them would be funding. He thought the whole thing was bullshit and didn’t particularly feel like putting himself on display for rich assholes, but Hermann wouldn’t ditch and he wouldn’t let Hermann go alone, so he’d bought the stupid suit and gone to the stupid gala.
If he wasn’t so utterly miserable he’d find it hilariously ironic that the suit he’d worn while mentally trashing capitalist assholes is the same suit he’s wearing to start his journey towards capitalist asshole. The precursors don’t really get irony, and they didn’t care to listen to his explanation of it. Being annoying is the only weapon he has in his battle against them, and they learned that rather quickly. After figuring that out, they dedicated themselves to figuring out how to push him back into the recesses of his own mind, so far back he couldn’t even reach them, let alone anything in the outside world.
Which is why it’s a weird and utterly shocking out of body experience to fall asleep in his PPDC quarters and wake up having accepted a job in the private sector with some weapons manufacturer in Shanghai. He frantically searches his memory and that’s even weirder, having memories of events he doesn’t remember happening in the first place. But he remembers Liwen Shao contacting him, informing him of her work on drone Jaegers, and how his experience could be instrumental in making them effective against the Kaiju he’d spent his whole life studying. He remembers the alien and invasive amusement and satisfaction at the thought of using the humans' weapons against the Kaiju to reopen the Breach. Irony.
He remembers accepting the job without telling anyone at the PPDC, quietly resigning and booking the next flight to Shanghai. He remembers securing a penthouse apartment a few blocks away from Shao Industries. Luxurious, fancy, way more expensive than anything he would ever move into. He hates it, knows its stupid and irrational because this is one of the nicer aspects of the whole messy situation and he should enjoy it while he can. But he can’t bring himself to. It’s none of the controlled chaos of his PPDC quarters and lab, sleek design and high end furniture replacing old battered couches and tables splattered with Kaiju guts. It isn’t him and he hates it and he hates them. He hates them.
His bedroom is the only part of the penthouse that has any sort of personalisation, and the first time he sees it he throws up in his waste bin, much to the utter disgust of the precursors. They view humans as disgusting, lesser beings, insects to be crushed out of existence to make way for the superior species. Newt thinks it’s disgusting to have a tank with a kaiju brain inside of it sitting in his bedroom, but their only response to his perfectly sound argument was to send him careening down and back into himself.
Now, they pull him back up and let him break the surface, gasping breaths as his senses snap into functionality with a jerk. He’s in his bedroom, sitting down with Alice in front of him. With the brain in front of him. With the source of his greatest agony and only pleasure in front of him. He can feel the Pons headset in place and he knows what’s happening. They always drag him up for this. He thinks it strengthens their hold on him, has long since believed so, as he can feel himself sinking further down into himself after every drift. It doesn't matter. There's nothing he can do to stop it. He wasn't strong enough to stop them from the very beginning.
He distantly hears his own voice chattering to Alice and he wonders if his tendency to ramble wore off on them. Then he feels his hands cradling the remote, thumb brushing over the button. He has only a couple seconds to brace himself before they hit the button and the drift initiates.
Electricity, pure Kaiju blue, races down his spine and he can feel himself arc forward in the chair. The room spins away from him and he finds himself standing in an empty void of never ending black. Above him, the Anteverse sprawls infinitely upwards, burning reds and oranges interspersed with purples and blues. The precursors stand above it all, untouchable as ever. Between him and them, Kaiju dance through the empty space. From so far away, they’re significantly less intimidating. The precursors look down at them, one keeping an eye on Newt specifically and he can feel himself tensing up. He knows even if he tries to move his body won’t respond.
He has no idea how long he’s stuck there, watching planets burn until they’re nothing but ash, watching Kaiju rip and tear and wreck and destroy. Eventually his room swims back into unsteady focus, although he’s only distantly aware of it. He can feel the after effects of the drift swamping him, can feel the exhaustion and the alien relief at seeing his home and the completely human response to the endorphins that drifting with Alice pumps him full of. He can feel the blood dripping steadily down towards his chin and the relief that he can’t see what colour it is. He feels himself get up, the precursors perfectly steady, and go out to his kitchen counter on which sits his laptop and tablet. His exhaustion means nothing to them, the nosebleed doesn't matter to them. He watches his hands type out codes that will bring about the end of the world, and there’s nothing he can do about any of it.
He folds in on himself, going far down.
Dr. Newton Geiszler comes to awareness in an unfamiliar room.
It’s empty, as far as he can tell. He’s sitting in a chair, strapped down to it with metal cuffs around his wrists and ankles. Looking down at the cuffs around his wrists, Newt can see the skin underneath is bruised and shredded, dried blood caked onto it. He slumps in the chair, pulling forth what few memories he can. He remembers Hermann trying to stop him, he remembers… He remembers choking the life out of his best friend, watching his eyes grow duller, watching his own fingers tighten their grip and knowing they’re going to kill him and then everything will be over because he wasn’t strong enough.
He remembers after, watching his magnum opus pulverise Tokyo, wondering how many of the 36 million people there he’d ruined the lives of. He remembers the Mega Kaiju coming up to him, its enormous maw scant inches from him, and part of him wishes it’d just crush him, destroy the building he’s standing on and send him hurtling down. He remembers watching it tear through Jaegers and their pilots, sending them through buildings. He remembers it leaving the city proper to head for Mt. Fuji, knowing its plan is to set off Mt. Fuji which would then in turn set off the Ring of Fire, perfectly terraforming the world for the precursors. Knows that’s its plan because he remembers long nights spent painstakingly working on its coding and remembers the precursors working from their end to ensure it knew its goal and was capable of accomplishing it.
He remembers his tablet showing a rapid cascade failure, and then the whole screen going bright red as the word deceased blares up at him. He remembers the hot, overpowering and invasive anger as the precursors scramble in his mind, all of them knowing there is no plan b and all of them knowing they’ll have to come up with one quickly or all the progress they’d made that day would be lost. He remembers they never got the chance, because Ranger Lambert sneaked up behind them and knocked him to the ground.
He remembers the precursors snatching control all the times he’s woken up in the couple weeks since he’s been here. He remembers the Pentecost kid coming in one day, telling him they were going to take the fight to the precursors directly, that they would strike first. He remembers spewing hate at anyone who dared set foot inside, not that many did. Nurses came in to feed him through an IV and make sure he didn’t drop dead. Pentecost came in a couple times after that first time, asking for information on the precursors and Newt nowhere near present enough to answer him.
Hermann has not visited him.
And he can only think, of course he hasn’t. Why would he? Newt almost killed him, almost ended the world. Hell, he probably still has bruises around his throat in the shape of Newt’s fingers. Even Newt himself thinks it’d be a terrible idea for Hermann to be here. He shifts in the chair, stretching muscles as best as he can given his position. From what he’s gathered from his memories, he’s going to be here for a while.
Some indeterminate amount of time later, the large metal door slowly swings open. Newt looks up and sees the familiar form of Jake Pentecost. A chair, much more accommodating than the one Newt is in, was placed in his cell some time ago for any visitors. Thus far, Jake has been the only one to use it. It sits a nice, cautious distance away from Newt, despite the fact that he’s strapped down to his own chair which is nailed to the ground. Now, Newt watches as Jake steps towards the chair and lowers himself into it. He looks tired. Newt can’t blame him. He’s pretty tired, too.
The young ranger sits and simply stares intently at him for a while. Newt can feel himself starting to shift restlessly and then can feel his limbs gain a thousand pounds each, ceasing all movement. He’s stuck watching Pentecost watch him, and it goes on long enough that he can feel the precursors twitching against his skull.
Eventually, Jake leans back casually in the chair, meeting Newt’s mismatched eyes evenly. “You in there, Geiszler?”
Newt opens his mouth and the precursors come out. “You should know the answer to that by now, Ranger Pentecost.” Jake just looks at him, an eyebrow raised but face perfectly blank otherwise. “Dr. Geiszler hasn’t been present for some time now.” Newt can feel himself sinking further down, unsure if it’s just the exhaustion of absolutely everything or the precursors shoving him away to prove their point.
WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WANT WITH YOU, they say, and he can feel it thundering in his head, knows he’d be lifting his hands to his ears if he still had either of those things.
I know, he whispers back, so much quieter. They speak with the voices of thousands, a multitude so vast that tens of hundreds of thousands of drifts with Alice will never be enough for him to fully grasp it. He couldn’t ever overcome them, would never be strong enough, he wasn’t at the beginning and he certainly won’t be now after a decade of them slowly eroding away at him. He’s sinking, falling endlessly down and he's long since given up on ever crawling his way back up.
Far away, muffled by several layers of empty space, he can hear Jake tsk. “See, personally I agree with you. But your man Gottlieb insists that’s not the case.”
An electric jolt shoots down Newt’s spine and there’s no way for him to know if the precursors are fucking with him or if that was all just his reaction to hearing that name followed by those words. It sends him violently upwards either way, and he bends double over the chair, heaving breaths as if he hasn’t tasted oxygen in months. In years. He looks up frantically and sees Jake sitting there, both eyebrows now arched along his forehead. His expression is still unreadable, but in the moment Newt couldn’t care less about Jake Pentecost.
“H–Hermann?” His voice is scratchy, years interspersed with disuse and more sound than his poor vocal chords were ever intended to handle. It cracks on every syllable, sounding as broken as he feels. Jake’s expression has shifted once again, slight but much more easily interpreted this time. His eyebrows are no longer raised and he looks a little less tired.
There’s a furious pounding at the door before either of them can say anything more. Jake gives him a quick once over before heading to the door and disappearing through it. Newt is left to ponder what he said. He’d assumed Hermann had cut himself off from Newt, as would’ve been the most logical response, and was out in the world being the badass rockstar scientist that saved the world twice. Knowing Hermann, he was probably elbows deep in the Shatterdome’s new plan to take on the precursors. But even then, he should be in his lab doing his badass science, not anywhere near this decrepit cell watching his would be murderer. Certainly not insisting there was some distinguishable difference between Newt and them, as if they weren’t some amalgamated piecemeal mess, like Hermann was trying to defend him or something. Maybe the precursors were playing some big elaborate hoax. Maybe he was hooked up to Alice right now, and this was the torment they'd decided to inflict. Maybe he was dead and this was hell.
The door opens again and Newt’s gaze immediately snaps back upwards. The figure stepping through it has him even more convinced that this is in fact hell. Hermann slowly closes the door behind him, a solid thunk echoing through the cell as it slides shut. Newt wants to look away, look to the floor, at his bloodied wrists, at the wall, anywhere but at Hermann. He watches Hermann make his way to the chair that Pentecost had been in five minutes before. His eyes linger on the bruises around Hermann’s neck, he can feel the precursors holding his gaze there despite how desperately he tries to pull it away. They only grant him mercy once Hermann starts speaking, his eyes sliding to the empty space next to the older man’s head.
“Hello, Newton.” His face is strained.
Newt feels his lips quirk up into a smirk. “Hello, Hermann.”
Hermann looks him up and down, his gaze lingering on Newt’s bloodied wrists, his mismatched eyes, the nosebleed that started as soon as Hermann walked into the room and that Newt knows is an electric blue. Newt wants to squirm under the scrutiny, he can feel the precursors crawling through the grooves of his brain and he wants them out , he wants to crack his skull against the wall until the blood runs red. His eyes roam about the room before eventually coming to a halt as they hit one of the corners. He can feel his lungs seize and his breath comes out in a whoosh.
Previously unoccupied space is filled by a hauntingly familiar tank. His own handwriting is sprawled across it in red sharpie and he feels sick. Inside, Alice floats carelessly and Newt’s heart aches. He remembers actually naming her, scrawling it on her tank and drawing hearts around it like a lovesick teenager. His feelings regarding her are a twisted and mangled mess and he doesn’t even know how to start untangling them.
He can hear Hermann's chair creak as the man shifts in it a little, and looking back towards him Newt can see he has leaned forward slightly. His eyes lock onto Newt’s and hold them, and Newt is utterly incapable of pulling them away. “Newton, is that really you?”
Newt isn’t sure how to respond. He has no idea how to explain what he is now, and he doesn’t think he really wants to try. Certainly not with Hermann. He can feel the Kaiju blue in him burning. “Yes. It never isn’t.”
Hermann looks at him funny and Newt can’t help laughing. Honestly. Hermann is a scientist, surely he must know it wouldn’t be so simple. They’re a roiling beast, twisted together and tangled up in each other and Newt’s long since given up trying to uncross their wires. “Somehow I doubt that,” Hermann says dryly.
Alice’s piercing gaze has him pinned to the spot. Hermann’s piercing gaze has him pinned to the spot. He can feel his arms spasm convulsively in their restraints. His eyes dart to the bruises around Hermann’s neck. Bruises his hands put there, bruises there because Newt’s fingers had wrapped around Hermann’s throat and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. His eyes quickly dart away. He licks his lips before croaking out, “Hermann, I…” He doesn’t know how to do this. He doesn’t know that he wants to do this. Hey Herms, sorry I tried to murder you, no hard feelings right? Aliens, am I right!
Hermann must read into whatever expression is on his face, Newt knows he noticed his glance towards the bruises, because his face softens and he says “Newton. That wasn’t your fault.”
And suddenly Newt is angry. He’s incandescently angry, and if he weren’t literally out of his mind he’d maybe admit it isn’t entirely fair of him to be, but in the moment he doesn't give a shit. He’d spent the past ten years locked away in his own head, feeling his neurons giving commands to his body and feeling the precursors give commands to his neurons and hoping all the while that someone would notice he was rotting away inside himself. No one did. Now, because he’s suddenly here after ten years, Hermann can read him like a book? But when he’d needed Hermann to be observant, actually wanted him to be for once, he’d been too caught up in whatever experiments the PPDC had him working on. And he hadn’t been there.
He can feel his muscles clenching and tensing up, can feel the metal restraints digging into his wrists and agitating the raw skin already there. He can’t tell if he’s moving his body this way or if it’s the precursors and for once he doesn’t really care. He can feel his face twist up into something ugly, something he’d never put on it before and Hermann’s expression hardens in return, like he’s bracing himself for war.
“Newton.” His voice is soft, disproportionately so compared to the sharp lines on his face. “You are stronger than this. You are stronger than them.”
And Newt’s head flings backwards as much as it can as he laughs hysterically. He can feel blood gushing from his nose and he knows it’s electric blue, he hasn’t been human for years, and he’s burning. He hears the sound of the chair screeching against the concrete floor, and looking back down he can see Hermann has stood up in apparent alarm. One hand is clenched tightly around the handle of his cane and the other is outstretched towards Newt, as if to help, as if he could help.
“Sure, Hermann! Of course he is! You’ve got the bruises to prove it, right?” Hermann’s mouth opens and closes for a moment, and he knows the slip up didn’t go unnoticed and Hermann probably thinks he’s dealing with the precursors and he is , he is dealing with the precursors and he’s also dealing with Newt and he’s dealing with whatever the fuck they are now, a little bit of him and a whole lot of them all smashed together into one form and no clear divisions at all. The laughter, forced and hysterical and aching, eventually subsides as Newt slumps back down in his restraints, and he can feel himself floating away, away and down, always down down down. “I haven’t been strong enough for ten years, Herms. He never will be.” His eyes slide over to Alice’s tank, watching her bob up and down hypnotically and he feels himself fraying around the edges, going fuzzy. He can feel his left eye burning and wishes he could reach up and rub at it, aggravate it until the burning spreads out in web like strands into his skull and reduces the precursors to ash.
He wants to startle at the feeling of hands and fingers on his face, but he can’t even twitch his fingers. They aren’t giving him a single inch. And even if they were, he doubts he’d get far with the restraints. The hands are gentle, anyway, and they move with the assuredness of familiarity. Nothing like the coldly impersonal touch of the nurses that periodically check up on him, making sure he doesn’t die in the chair they’ve strapped him to. No trembling fingers, as if he’ll snap at any given moment and bite them off, and he would, he will .
He feels a cool cloth running under his nose, wiping up the Kaiju blue, and then moving to his eye. He’s suddenly far too tired to be as concerned about his eye bleeding as he knows he should be. Hermann stands above him, one hand wrapped around his cane as always, the other holding a handkerchief. If he were in even a marginally better state of mind, he’d be laughing at the fact that Hermann carries around a handkerchief, like it’s the 1900s and Newt’s some southern belle that’s suffered a fainting spell. The thought of it only makes the silence ache that much more. He thinks Hermann maybe says something, but he doesn't catch it, can feel the room slipping from his grasp like sand.
He does jerk when Hermann cups his face, his shock at the contact and the precursors’ revulsion for it aligning in a stab of nausea as he tries to move away. He doesn’t have very far to go, however, and the flinch doesn’t deter Hermann, who determinedly meets Newt’s mismatched eyes.
“I will be back, Newton,” Hermann says, voice as gentle as his hands on Newt’s face.
Newt’s eyes roam over to Alice’s tank once more, and Hermann glances over his shoulder to the corner she sits in. He then slowly turns back towards Newt, concern written clearly on his face. Newt wants to ask why he’s there, why he’s talking to him at all, why he isn’t angry with him. He wants to ask why Hermann would bother coming back. He doesn’t say anything, unable to articulate the swirling mass of emotions huddled in his chest and unable to speak past the invading forces clogging up his throat. Hermann strokes his thumb across Newt’s cheek before dropping his hands and retrieving his cane from where it sits leaned against the other chair. Newt hears a few taps of his cane hitting the floor before he’s gone, either losing consciousness or getting pushed down by the precursors, but gone all the same.