Chapter Text
In this world, Hermann Gottlieb still stares up at the stars every night as a child, but instead of wondering how to map the stars, how long it takes the light to get from there to here, how far away they are and how to figure that out; instead, he wonders if there is life living on the planets orbiting those stars, what kind of life it is, if it’s sentient, if it ever looks back and wonders the same things. He still finds the stars beautiful in this world, he still wishes he could travel to them, but he does not ask the same questions.
In this world, he still looks up at the sky during the day too, not searching into the vastness of space, but focusing a little closer, within his own atmosphere. He still thinks about flying. But instead of watching planes and helicopters go overhead, he stares at the birds, instead of thinking of engines and fiberglass wings, he thinks of feathers and hollow bones. He still wants to be free, he still wants to fly away, but here he dreams of flying with wings of his own instead of the wings of a plane.
But in this world he still asks too many questions and he still hides from strangers behind his big sister and brother and he is still scolded for crying by his father and he still worries his teachers and his mother by being more advanced than other students the same age as him and yet not very good at making friends with these students. He still reads too much and he still irritates and confuses other children by speaking rarely and, when he does speak, speaking mostly of science and the things he has read. It’s just that in this word he speaks of what he has read about cells and the complex evolution of feathers, instead of light speed and gravitational pull.
In this world his mother still dies when he is very young, but in this world it is a slow death, it is months and months and months of medication and doctors and his mother’s bright smile becoming strained at the edges with pain, it is the warmth leeching out of his father’s eyes. Hospital visits and his big brother quietly crying when he thinks he’s alone and his mother getting thinner and thinner and the realization that no, Mum is not going to get better. And he doesn’t understand and it’s terrifying, it is the first true glimpse of darkness and misery in his young life, and no one will explain to him until finally a doctor with a brisk but kind voice does. A mutation in the cells, so that they divide uncontrollably, creating tumors in her brain, inoperable. Then it is less frightening, then he understands what is happening and why it is happening. It doesn’t make things better, because she’s still dying. It doesn’t take the frozen darkness out of his father’s eyes, it doesn’t make Dietrich stop crying or Karla stop being angry or Bastien stop being confused - Hermann tries to explain but it just makes Bastien cry - but it makes Hermann stop being so scared. It’s cells and biology, it is a mistake on a basic level, and it is unbearably unfair, but it makes sense. It awes him, in a sick sort of way, to know just how much biology can alter a life, the life of a whole family, how much power it has over human beings, and he reads all he can get his hands on about cell division and cancer even though it makes his father shout at him, and he’s certain that there is a way to fix this, there is a solution to this disease if he could just find it. Then she dies and he doesn’t read anything at all for three months and he doesn’t say a word to anyone in all that time. This is the same as it is in other worlds.
In this world he is still determined to know all that he can, and he is still, on some basic, unconscious level, determined to control as much of his world as he can; but in this world, instead of doing so through understanding mathematics and physics, he does it through biology. Because biology makes up the basic construction of all around him, and human beings are confusing, sometimes dangerous things, but he can understand them on a basic cellular level, he knows the basic makeup of all life around him, and that is power, just as understanding the basic makeup of movement and light is in other worlds. It’s all based in understanding how things work. It’s still a way to predict what will happen next and why it will happen, and to be able to know what will come goes a long way to calming his desire for control and safety. In school he takes all the courses he can on biology, he scoffs at dissecting a rat but he does it faster and better than anyone else, his hand goes up to answer every question the teacher asks, his fellow students despise him and he tells himself he does not care, and he ends the year with more than a hundred percent. In this world, like others, the school courses quickly fail to satisfy him, and his father refuses to permit him to skip grades, and he still studies on his own, and his teachers still tell his father he is brilliant, and perhaps his father should have his IQ tested, and he does that and then refuses to tell Hermann the results.
In this world he is still lonely in school, he is still teased and mocked and bullied, sometimes quite viciously, he still comes home with bruises his father pretends not to see, but now instead of blocking out the taunts and blows with calculations and equations and nebula, he blocks them out with cell division and neurotransmitters. He still puts up walls between himself and others, for protection, at first, and later because he does not know how to live without the walls, the walls are instinct, and he still builds these walls with ice and glares, he just also builds them with DNA and proteins, instead of particles and predictive models. He still pretends, to himself and to those around him, that the walls are all there is to him. And there is still hardly anyone who ever bothers to try and look over these walls and see who he truly is.
In this world he still dreams of flying, but he knows now that human beings cannot grow wings of their own and human beings do not have hollow bones no matter how fragile he feels sometimes, so he puts these dreams away just as surely as he puts away dreams of being a pilot in other worlds, and instead he escapes at last from his miserable home where the light never returned to his father’s eyes by going away to college in Berlin, as far from his father as he can get. He still puts up walls and he is still lonely, but he studies biology and is one of the most brilliant students there, and that is a sort of freedom, and he pushes himself harder and harder, to learn all he can.
In this world there’s an accident when he is in his first year of university, because some things are constant, and his limp is constant. It is not a result of being in San Francisco or Manila at the wrong time in this world, it is not an error of biology as it is in many worlds - MS or a bout of cancer or rheumatism or stroke or a hundred different kinds of illness - but a vicious car accident one night that leaves him with pain in his hip and a knee that won’t bend the way it used to. He pushes himself through the hospital stay and the subsequent physical therapy as hard as he pushes himself at all times, and the cane makes him self-conscious so he defiantly refuses to hide it and develops a habit of gesturing with it and tapping it against the ground when he’s angry. He is almost always like this. He has to take some time off school, but he studies so much harder after the accident as to make up the time quicker than one might expect.
He is still diagnosed with depression and more than one kind of anxiety disorder before he turns twenty one. It’s all so much chemicals, is what he tells himself here. Another biological error, and in this world he takes his medication regularly because he understands how and why it works and that it is not some sort of insult to his mental fortitude, but in this world he still refuses to think about why this biological error may have occurred. The medicine helps. A little bit. He still does not bother to go into therapy as he is encouraged to do.
In this world he becomes fascinated by the strange and seemingly wrong, mutations and untraceable paths of evolution, strange creatures hiding in strange places. Not because they are inexplicable, but rather because there must be an explanation, everything has an explanation, a solution, everything can be understood (and then it won’t be frightening) and he wants to be the one to explain it. In this world he finds biology beautiful the way that he finds mathematics beautiful in other worlds, he is fascinated and enchanted by the spirals of DNA and the tiny workings of life the way that he is fascinated and enchanted with spirals of nebulae and the tiny workings of particles, and as always, it is not just the beauty that pushes him on, it is the desire, the need to know and to explain and to predict and to have all the world, all the universe, laid out neatly before him - as he can lay out chemical formulae and cell models on a blackboard - everything understood and explained. In this world the study of flight and of the skies and of the things that may be in space is still the true, sparking passion of his heart, but in this world he still subordinates that to other things, things that he tells himself - and is told by his father - are more practical.
In this world, Trespasser still emerges from the Pacific Ocean to ravage San Francisco when he is twenty four years old. In some worlds he is in San Francisco when that happens, but this is not one of them. Here, he is on a scientific expedition with a world-famed and respected biologist to study a rare kind of fish and is pretending very hard to not be seasick when the radio frantically buzzes with the incomprehensible news that San Francisco has been attacked by some sort of monster, like something out of one of those Japanese movies, you know, Godzilla or whatever-
In this world his father is still involved with the PPDC and the Jaeger program before those names have even been thought of, and in this world he still knows he will be a part of those programs even if it does mean going back to being on speaking terms with his father, but in this world he does not code the Jaegers - much as he admires the vast machines - but instead he studies the kaiju. They don’t make sense. But he is determined to make them make sense. He does not admire the kaiju, the way that certain kaiju specialists do in other worlds, he does not find them beautiful or awesome, he does not have the desire to tattoo them on his body. But he finds them fascinating, and brilliant in a horrifying sort of way, and they frighten him and that only makes him more determined to understand them. Once you understand something, it isn’t frightening anymore. That is a lesson he has never forgotten.
In this world he does not wear sweater vests and blazers, because the layers get in the way, you don’t want to be in a blazer when you’re elbow deep in a kaiju specimen; he still doesn’t wear tight pants, because those are difficult to get on and off with a knee that doesn’t bend all the way, but he doesn’t bother nearly as much with the baggy slacks he favors in other worlds. There is a simple reason for this; it isn’t that he does not want to dress in a way that makes him look more professional and respectful and perhaps a little older than his actual youthful age, but rather that it’s a bit more difficult when he is constantly in danger of getting chemicals on himself. Even after he figures out how to neutralize kaiju blue, it still leaves terrible blue stains on everything, and he is far less indulgent of kaiju blue stains than he is of the chalk dust. He is reluctant to wear clothes he would mind being ruined. And besides, the kaiju labs are not checked on by superiors as often as one might hope, as they are deterred by the stench and horror of kaiju specimens; so in this world he often wears button ups and cardigans and sweaters and dark jeans in the lab, and dresses more professionally for presentations and so on. Somehow he never does get in the habit of wearing sweater vests.
In this world, he still begins getting emails from a young scientist calling himself “Newton Geiszler” only a month or two after Trespasser. Hermann is still in school, attempting to finish off his doctorate, but at the same time he is following every report of Trespasser and the study of it that he can get his hands on and trailing his father to a good deal of meetings on what to do about Trespasser, meetings that will eventually lead to the PPDC, although not nearly fast enough in Hermann’s opinion. There is a good deal of debate on whether or not this was a one time incident, and it all seems ridiculously foolish to Hermann. This creature is obviously not of Earthly origins, so where did it come from? And are there more of it’s kind where it came from? And obviously there are more, something as vastly complex as this didn’t evolve in isolation, and will more come attack? And presumably they will, if it happened once it can happen again. So when he suddenly receives Newton Geiszler’s email, it seems very odd, but he is more than glad to find that someone else shares his conviction that this will happen again, and he is impressed by the intelligence evident in the email, so he writes back. And in this world, as in so many others, this initial exchange evolves into a correspondence that spans years and is transformative and essential for both of them. Words about chemicals and mathematics and monsters turn into thoughts and feelings and memories and secret things he never shares with anyone else. For the first time, Hermann does not feel so lonely.
In this world, they both join the Jaeger program and are both influential and respected...for a time at least. He hears of Newton’s work, his brilliant work, and some secret part of him is proud, glows as if the accomplishments were his own. And then they meet at last in Berlin when they are both twenty seven, and in this world, as in most worlds where this meeting happens, it goes very badly. Not for precisely the same reasons, but close enough. And Hermann walks away angry and disappointed and pretending that his heart does not hurt a little bit, that he had not begun to fall in love during those passionate emails, that his heart is not a tiny bit broken by the fact that Newton was plainly disappointed by what he found in Hermann (as everyone is always disappointed by him). Hearts don’t break. Hearts don’t feel emotions. It’s all so much chemicals. He goes home and he goes back to work and a few months later he is flown to America to work on the kaiju carcass there - Yamarashi - and he doesn’t see Newton again for several years. And if he feels a little lonely, if his heart seems to ache again at times, well, it’s all so much chemicals, and he has more important things to do and to think about.