Work Text:
Newton,
There is no point in writing to you. You shall not read this, and even if you did you wouldn’t send a response. I don’t think I even want to send anything to you, nor do I think that I want to read anything you have to write. Not after today. But, I find myself writing. Because in times of turmoil in the past four years, you are the person I have turned to. I don’t want to write to who I now know you to be. I want to be writing to the man I imagined you to be, the man I believed you to be based on what I read in your letters. I thought I knew that man, and while there are bound to be failings in how I imagined you based solely on written communication, I did not expect the failings to be so… vast. I didn’t imagine that you could be so far from what I thought I knew.
But I miss my best friend.
As horribly saccharin as that is and as miserably pathetic as it makes me feel to say it.
And I wish desperately that I could talk to one of the most important people in my life about what has been a monumentally painful and unwelcome experience. I want to be able to write, the way I’ve written for years, to feel the mess of tangled emotions pulled out through my pen and sorted into something that makes sense. But I can’t. Because by far the worst part of this entire ordeal is that I can’t talk to you about it. Not just because you’re the cause if it, but because all this means we likely won’t ever speak again. I can’t talk to the one person whom it would help the most to talk to.
This isn’t helping.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as lonely as I am in this moment.
fuck you.
seriously, what the fuck, dude i mean— Like, yeah i get that things are different when you’re not right there with a person, but i’ve fuckign told you about
and I mean, it’s not like you even tried
ugh
this isn’t
look i’m only writing this because it’s fucking habit at this point, okay? it’s not because i still want to be writing you, because i don’t. you’re an asshole and youre condescending and you’re kind of a massive jerk and yeAH maybe you were kind of sort of my best friend for a minute, or whatever, and i’d kind of been thinking about meeting you for years and having it all go to shit right away kind of ruins everything about all of writing you but WHATEVER. i’m not gonna miss writing you now that i know what you’re actually like.
good fucking riddance.
you know I’m not even good at writing letters? My dyslexic ass has to sit here for ages trying to get all this out AND it doesn’t help that my mind is basically a series of hamsters all chasing any fuckignt hing that will give me a hit of dopamine, and that’s not really conducive to writing, like, paragraphs and shit.
and it’s not that I don’t like reading. or writing. it’s just that it’s effort, okay?
i put in a lot of effort for you.
and like
ugh. never mind. this isn’t worth it.
I still want to talk to you. I greatly wish this were not the case, but it is. Our meeting, six months of silence, all of it— it has not rid me of a desire to speak to you. I find myself struggling in discussions with my colleagues not to make mental notes as to what to consult you about later. I find myself halfway through composing sentences for my next letter in my mind before I catch myself and stop.
It feels awful, to be blunt. I am not particularly talented at poetic expression, at describing emotions in a way that is meant to capture the visceral experience of it, but this feels like the kind of moment that is made for metaphor. All I can say is that each time I accidentally forget everything that’s happened, remembering feels like experiencing it all over again.
That’s why I’m writing this. To try and excise some of that, even if it won’t work. Writing for an audience that doesn’t exist— and worse, that you know hates you is nothing but an exercise in indulging misery, not soothing it.
uhhhh have I mentioned that you can fuck right of?? Like seriously, just fuck right off the entire planet and all of space time, thank you very much.
everywhere i turn it’s jaegers or math or butterflies or…. like. milk. how did you ruin milk??????
how. in the hell. are you everywhere in my brain.
walking down the hall? oh look, there’s a guy who did some coding with hermann. browsing youtube? hey, a video that’s only in my algorithm because of something hermann suggested. looking at my bookshelf? hermann. trying to pick a shirt? hermann. logging ingo facebook— a website you don’t even use— for the first time in months so i can see pictures of my cousin’s nephew’s baby or whatever and seeing an ad for a lawn gargoyle so terrible that it instantly makes me want to save it tot he folder on my phone for cursed shit that that i’d send you if we’d ever actually texted? FUCKING. HERMANN.
STILL.
after six. m o n t h s.
it’s been six fucking months and i can’t listen to half of my favorite songs or wear my favorite sweater and just ugggggggghhhh
fuck you hermann. i want my wistful moody playlists back
I read your latest proposal. You’re fooling yourself if you think the PPDC will ever allocate enough resources for you to pursue it to its full lengths— as much as it’s clearly more advantageous to fund research into how to stop the problem at its source rather than pouring more and more money into defensive measures. They’ve attempted to redirect my work from breach projections and calculations back into Jäger development at least three times. There are still enough people amongst the higher-ups who see things from my perspective that I’ve been able to maintain my work and my team, but even so the majority of our bosses and world leaders seem to think that simply being better at punching and shooting these beasts is a feasible long-term solution.
I can already imagine your incredulous response, exclaiming something about my adulation of the military and my firm position as “Team Jäger”… The sentences dripping with exaggerated shock. At least, I always assumed it was exaggerated. I generally didn’t have too much trouble judging the tone of your writing, but maybe that was one of the many miscalculations that I made when we were actually corresponding.
I have a soft spot for the Jäger program, of course; I worked on its development. I firmly remain in support of them as our best option for holding off attacks and defending cities, but they were never going to be able to last us forever. Not against this relentless onslaught. Our best hope for any kind of finality remains to find a way to try and close the breach, and that cannot be done without the pursuit of more knowledge into that area. Regardless of your various joking comments about Teams Jäger and Kaiju, below it all I know we are both on the side of humanity, of our continued survival as a species, and we both know that the sciences are the best way to achieve that end. To see money, personnel, and other resources funnelled away from that and toward flashy, impermanent fixes is disheartening to say the least.
Though I suppose I shouldn’t be so quick to complain. If those resources are going to go anywhere, I’d rather they go to the Jägers than to some of the ludicrously impractical ideas I’ve heard rumours about.
okay so this is bullshit.
Sorry, I should start that better.
Hey Hermann, how’s it going, it’s me newt back at it again with another letter you’ll never see because you’re too busy hating my guts *finger guns*.
were you aware that this is, as they say, bullshit?
I mean, the wall of life? really?? is the UN serious? are people gonna actually fall for this? I know nothing’s happened yet, but just. fuck. this can’t happen right? the fact that they’re even talking about it seems like a bad sign. like, a really bad sign. AND THEN your dad— frickin,,,, spearhead of the jaeger program when it started out, doesn’t shut it down right away, he’s all “ah, well i am sure they have valid reasons to express concern” and other bullshit and just UHG. I hope you told him what a bad idea it is. I hope you wrote him a painfully formal strongly worded email and cc’d your boss and the pr department all the bigwigs who write out cheques.
I mean. you do hate this too, right?? You totally hate this too. Of course you do. Like, i know i obviously don’t know you anymore, and i definitely didn’t actually really know you since the guy i thought i knew for sure wasn’t who you were when we met, but i still sort of knew you. I knew you enough to know that you’re too smart to think this could ever be a good idea. yeah.
yeah.
okay. I need to stop procrastinating and actually pack. i’m getting on a plane to hong kong in two days… I’m trying not to let the fact that half my team isn’t gonna be making the trip with me bum me out. or lead me to any worrying thoughts about whether the ones staying here are gonna get to keep their jobs for very long. or make me worry about how, reading between the lines of the letter i got, this is the first step of getting the heavy hitters all in one place and while that might be a good thing, all it really means is that no one’s figuring out any answers while we’re all spread out and we’re literally the best hope all of humanity’s got at not dying in horrific (albeit awesome) ways and like… that’s a lot of pressure!
fuuuuck. this really isn’t good, is it?
ugh.
i need to put on some loud music and stop thinking for a while
I should have expected this. If the PPDC is consolidating its science divisions and trying to accelerate the work we’ve been doing, then of course it’s logical to have all as many teams as possible in the same location. It’s efficient. It’s the obvious thing to do in this situation. My job is to predict things and still…
I swore I felt my heart stop when I saw you in the hallway.
I know, it’s a cliché, and a trite one at that, but sometimes clichés are really the best I can do.
I thought
I hadn’t expected
I don’t know if you saw me. I entered the lab while you were speaking to one of your colleagues, and I think you were starting to look at me just as I turned to leave, but I didn’t stay long enough to see if you actually noticed me. Obviously.
I’ve been hiding in my room like an embarrassed teenager ever since, but there’s only so long I can avoid the lab we are expected to share. My only hope is that our other colleagues will provide some kind of buffer.
of course you’re here. Just— of. course. why the hell didn’t I fucking consider that you’d be here?? like. Duh. Smartest minds in k-sci all going to one place, and that’s definitely you… did I think they were just moving the biologists??? was i just too sleep deprived to consider it???? I don’t even know anymore.
Oh fuck.
we’re gonna share a lab.
fuckfuckfuck… do you still hate me? it’s been two and a half years, but like. you definitely still hate me. do I still hate you? Fuck. I SHOULD KNOW THAT, RIGHT???? I’m still mad at you, that’s for sure. and i’m assuming you haven’t stopped being a stuck-up dick, so we’re probably not gonna be bffs or whatever so there’s that… plus we haven’t talked in two years and six months. or i guess almost seven, at this point.
fuuuuuuuuuck. this is gonna be so awkward.
you’ve got the same haircut. six years and you still look like that first picture you sent me.
ugh.
that was dumb. I’m just gonna delete this whole thing.
I’m so glad that you continue to be brash, callous, and infuriating. I won’t make the mistake of forgetting it again.
okay, yeah, i definitely still hate you.
Firstly, I would like to point out that continuing to engage in debates in front of our mutual colleagues is incredibly unprofessional, not to mention immensely disruptive to our work as whole and the only reason I continue to engage with you when you do so is that I assume—clearly incorrectly— that you are actually capable of engaging with me as an adult and a colleague, not as though you’re some petulant child. The fact that you insinuated that I started or escalated the argument today, that you said that I, in your words am “a petty bitch” and “just looking for a reason to fight” with you, is as insulting and ridiculous as it is nonsensical.
Second, I stand by my comments on your use of the communal microwave, and my judgement on the vile concoctions with which you insist on polluting shared parts of the lab.
REASONS YOU’RE WRONG THAT I FORGOT TO MENTION EARLIER
okay, so my phone is at one percent battery and i am totally tempting fate here but i’m just gonna go for it and hope i can get as many reasons out before it dies on me
number one: i have never once seen you eat literally any kind of pizza and you disqualified yourself from passing any kind of food based judgements when you decided your favorite breakfast was plain oatmeal with the tiniest bit of salt, not even butter, just salt— and not even enough to make it actually salty
number two: pineapple is delicious and if you’d actually let me finish a sentence then i could’ve explained that it compleme
I have told you a thousand times to turn your music down in the lab and given that you have yet to listen to me, I must assume you either do not value my productivity or are simply trying to find ways to annoy me at this point. Regardless, as my constant attempts to talk to you about this don’t seem to be getting through I am left with posing my complaints to a blank page in the hope that this will somehow receive my frustration. It’s certainly equally as effective at solving the problem.
okay, for real dude i know it’s you. I can’t prove it yet, but I fucking know that you’re the one who’s taking all my tea bags, i fucking know it. You act all high and mighty but you’re seriously stealing my tea??? and don’t even pretend it’s not you because of the ten of us only you, me, and andi drink tea and she’s got her own so it’s GOT to be you. can’t you get your own? or get it from the mess like everyone else?? I swear, if i have to fucking dig up karla’s email from that one time you were in the hospital and you told her to let me know about it, i will. I will tell your sister to send you ten thousand boxes of your own fuckign tea so you don’t steal mine, alright? That’s where I’m at with this.
If you draw one more inane picture on my chalkboards I swear…
okay, hermann, you need to stop being this uptight about how data is plural. you sound like such an asshole
Marshal Pentecost asked me today if there was any interpersonal issues between you and me that would benefit from HR mediation. I told him there weren’t, obviously. Ridiculous.
Dude, can you believe Pentecost asked me if i wanted to be transferred to a different dome? something about us fighting or whatever… i almost wanted to, like, actually tell you about it, but i figured it would probably be weird. still. can you believe it??
On occasion I find myself wondering how much longer our jobs will last. Mostly, I wonder about this in the context of how much longer a K-Science division will be a necessity, as clearly the best-case scenario for being let go from the PPDC would be a conclusive end to the threat the kaiju pose, but the longer we go without closing the breach, and the more budget cuts there are to the Jäger program as a whole and the science department in particular… Well. I wonder how much longer it will be until my position is one of those left behind. Where do I stand on the list of prioritised employees?
Where do you?
As much as your presence in the lab is often grating, and as much as your cavalier approach to lab safety and cleanliness is disconcerting and even appalling, I cannot in good faith claim that working with you does not yield results.
I don’t know. Our colleagues’ departure will be a loss to this effort. I know the majority of us made it through this latest round of cuts, and three empty desks won’t make that much of a difference in a room that once held ten, and yet.
And before you (or the imagined iteration of you that actually receives this letter) call me cold and heartless, yes. I will miss Andrea, Vedansh, and Antoine. I am not nearly the unfeeling monster you seem to think me.
Shit man. i honestly don’t know whether I should be relieved or sad. I’m kinda both???? I mean, i’ll miss everyone that’s leaving, obviously, but like. i dunno. I still have a job! I still get to try to save the world. That did not feel like a secure thing a week ago. i honestly wasn’t sure ANY of our jobs were a sure thing…..
I bet you weren’t worried. you’ve probably got an algorithm that tells you whose gonna make it or whatever.
then again you did yell at me about a lot more stupid shit in the past couple days so………… maybe you’re not immune to the stress of budget cut season.
I’m not gonna say i’m glad you made it.
like, i am, duh, but i’m not gonna say it. it’s bad enough that you’re still the person my brain goes to when something happens. like, i’m writing this, so it should go wihtout saying, but you’re still my go to person to talk to about stuff.
I need to work on that. seriously.
anyway, layoffs suck. budget cuts suck. the un continuing to talk abut the wall as though it would actually work sucks.
At least without andi around i’ll be able to prove youre the one stealing my tea bags
Even in your absence you find ways to annoy me. You left Hong Kong nearly fifteen hours ago and I have been forced to interrupt my work a total of twelve times because of you. The first two times were to clean off the ridiculous drawings you continue to leave on my chalkboard. The one of a Jäger with a butterfly had its merits, though it would be better suited, as I have suggested of your past artistic endeavours, to somewhere other than my chalkboards. Aside from that, I was interrupted once to help Dr. Yeung find forms in your inscrutable organization system, once because Marshal Pentecost seemed to think that I would have some degree of insight into the gaps in your latest report, and an entire eight times to help decipher your atrocious handwriting. Apparently I am the only one of our colleagues who can do so.
I do not like being treated as the resident expert on Newton Geiszler, and I especially do not like that I had answers to the various questions asked of me today. I lay the blame entirely on your shoulders, both for whatever actions of yours have made people assume I know these things, and that I have in fact learned what they assume I know.
I cannot believe I am saying this but I deeply hope these next three weeks pass quickly.
okay ONE i hate airports so much and i’ve been stuck in one for the last three hours and i’m bored and i want to dieeeeeeeeuh.
TWO airport pretzels have really gone downhill but somehow I can’t stop eating them? idk man i’ve had like three and each bite i taste is the grossest thing ever.
anyway. airports suck and i’m bored, rihgt? so i’m catching up on all the emails that i missed while i was listening to people who know less than me about at least six different subjects (but lets be real, probably way more than that) tell me and the other two EXPERTS they invited there why my ideas won’t work. but whatever… it turns out that i’ve missed like a billion emails from everyone in the lab about you. which. okay, one? amazing, i can’t wait to use that against you. two? holy shit dude i hate you so much how are you somehow even more annoying when i’m not around????? not to mention that i had to spend like eighty percent of this whole trip also explaining your ideas on top of mine because the dumbass jagweeds somehow didn’t think that the guy fuckign modeling the breach would be an important guy to invite to the thing about what “the future oft he kaiju threat” is gonna look like. jsut because i’m an amazing genius with 6 PhDs who can (mostly) understand the boring math shit that comes out of your mouth doesn’t mean i like talking about it. fuck.
oh, and, happy birthday man. my flight’s still delayed and even once it takes off it’ll be another 10 hrs until i’m back in the dome, so i’m not gonna actually get the chance to say that to you, but maybe i’ll send you an email or something instead of just typing it here idk.
You would think that being able to predict the attacks with increasing reliability would decrease the resulting burden on my nerves when they do arrive. We’re as prepared as we can be under the current conditions— I am ensuring that we are as prepared as we can be— and yet I still spend the entire duration of an attack filled with dread. There is also concern, for the lives of those in the vicinity of an attack, and for my own life when the attacks come close to Hong Kong— but above all there is dread. Dread as to the damage that the latest kaiju will cause, but more than anything, a dread that my calculations are incorrect and that people (more people) will die because of it.
To some extent, I can tell that our other colleagues are also affected by this pressure. They talk about it, in offhand comments if not directly. Each year Shatterdomes lose funding and personnel and it is a race against the clock to provide a solution. It is a logical and reasonable assumption that everyone would feel the pressure of that.
I can’t tell if you do, though.
Knowing that I don’t read people well is not normally something I find troubling. Inconvenient, yes, and often something that makes my life more difficult than it otherwise would be, but I’m used to it enough that I don’t dwell on it. The exception, frustratingly, seems to be when it comes to you.
I can never tell whether the lead up to an attack, or an attack itself, makes you anxious or concerned, or any of the other things that I would reasonably assume the situation holds. I don’t know if this is because you are genuinely unperturbed, or you’re just good at hiding it when you are and attempting to put everyone else at ease. You have, very rarely, made small comments that would imply you feel the pressure of our situation just as keenly as anyone else. But, then again, the context was always at least partially joking and I don’t know how much truth I should read into it.
Then there are occasions like today, when you enter the lab with the latest addition to your tattoos when I wonder whether you take the threat that the kaiju pose seriously at all, or if you still insist on seeing them as something to be idolised and admired while they ravage the globe and kill vast numbers of people. If you are, really, just as childish and immature as you insist on acting, and if your rock star façade is more important to you than the work we are doing to stop these beasts.
That is unfair of me. I’m frustrated, but I do know that you take our work seriously. And I know that your tattoos are not meant in support of the kaiju. I find them distasteful, but I know that. I do believe you when you explain your reasons for getting them, I just do not find such reasons to be sufficient for getting images of what very well be the destruction of our species indelibly inked onto your skin.
All I really wanted to say in writing this was that you are contradictory. And that trying to unravel that contradiction frustrates me.
You never talk about Vanessa. like, i know she exists, obviously, you mentioned her like twice back when you didn’t hate me and we actually told each other things, but like. i dunno. you never really said much about her it was just like “i was at my friend vanessa’s birthday party” (ah, to live int eh days when either of us were able to leave work for more than sleep…) or like. a super passing mention. but other than that i know literally nothing about her and that feels like really weird??????? and I have no idea if I’m allowed to ask about her. i’m actually pretty sure i’m not allowed to ask about her, at least not now…. you barely tolerate me acknowledging that i know your siblings exist.
WHICH IS ANOTHER THING! Obviously you told me about your siblings and parents and stuff, but i feel like in order to actually know any of it I’ve had to like, kinda play detective and connect the dots on it all. idk, it’s weird. cause like. you don’t lie about it. And you’re not hiding stuff exactly…. like, you’ve straight up said that you and you’re dad don’t get along. but… i don’t know!! Is it just cause I want to know stuff about you that i’m aware of much i don’t? or like, i’m more aware of the gaps in what you share and i’m thinking more about how few personal details you actually come out and say??
or wanted. wanted to know about you. past tense.
No, fuck it, you’re never gonna see this and while normally i’m in no way above lying to myself i’m kinda done with it right now. i want to know stuff about you and i kinda don’t. know things, i mean.
except that then I’ll talk to tendo or caitlin or whoever and realize that i actually know a lot, comparatively, so yeah. I don’t really know what to do with that?? i’d chalk it up to the letters that shall not be named, except that a good portion of it i’ve learned since then. so is it just that i pay more attention???? am i just around you more than they are?????? I DON”T KNOW. WHAT EVEN IS THIS.
Anyway. Vanessa sent you a package and it showed up at the lab for some reason and it got me thinking. I didn’t even know how to ask about more personal stuff when we were, like, actually friends, let alone now… i mean i asked about some stuff cause i’m me and i was pretty into you but i always felt like you’d just stop writing if i pushed things too far.
uuuuuuuuuhhhgggg…. i’ve been awake too long i feel like i’m overthinking everything and going in circles
If I find one more of your sample stored in the food fridge I cannot be held accountable for my reaction.
for fucks sake. dude, i will ACTUALLY murder you if don’t stop subtweeting me in your fucking reports to pentecost. i read them too!! i know when you do it!!!
I don’t know why I still write these. I know why I started, and it is useful as a way of venting my frustrations with you without starting arguments in front of our colleagues. Or, at least, if I am being completely honest, not subjecting them to more of our debates than they already witness. But sometimes I sit down to write one of these out of some impulse I would have thought long gone by now. The impulse to share my thoughts with you as someone I only knew at a distance and had not yet met.
I would think that five years would have quashed, or at least dulled that impulse, but it would seem not. Or perhaps it’s just stronger because of the time of year. I have spent the last year and a half since coming to Hong Kong celebrating every holiday alone. In Lima, someone else at the Shatterdome had the idea to organise group celebrations, even if they were small, for all the Jewish staff members, so even if I wasn’t close with most of them, there was some sense of community. There doesn’t seem to be enough time for relaxation to allow for organizing such a group here.
Whatever its source, the impulse to write to you remains, though I don’t actually know anymore what I would say to the version of you I once knew.
At the very least, I hope you have found some time to mark the new year, if you are inclined to do so. Shanah tovah, Newton.
Can you believe I’m 33? you rpobably can, you’re probably all “yes newton that is how time tends to work, and given that it has been a full twelve months since the last anniversary of your birth it shouldn’t be surprising that bgraegrsghqffffff i’m an uptight killjoy”. but like, i’m THIRTY THREE dude!! i’ve been in my thirties for three full years. I’m getting old.
But the point of this wasn’t really supposed to be that i’m 33, though, it’s more that, like. I got to thinking, and the kaiju attacked when i was 23. we’re coming up on the 10 yr anniversary of k day in august. which is, uh, kinda terrifying in its own right BUT it also means that i’ve known you for like nine and a half years.
which is a long time dude
i don’t even know what i feel about that, or what’s the point of saying it but… yeah. it’s a long time.
Dr. Lightcap told me today she’ll be resigning in a few weeks. She’s already resigned officially, and it’s been approved by the Marshal, so she’ll be leaving the Shatterdome next Friday. She is primarily a pilot, of course, but we worked together, albeit at a distance, on coding the early Jägers and I’ve helped her with upgrades to the Wei triplets’ drift interface, so she said she wanted to tell me directly. She also requested that I not share this information with anyone else until she has a chance to announce it more broadly. I will respect her wish, but I don’t feel like I can adequately process the thoughts this news brings up without at least the illusion of a second party.
It’s not exactly that I will miss her as we did not socialise, or that I worry for the state of the Shatterdome in her absence. The latter is part of it, obviously, she did excellent work both as a ranger and a scientist. She did confess to me that she has felt for some time that she needs a break from piloting, that she was always better suited to work behind a desk. Who am I to begrudge her that? But, no. I need to process my thoughts because her departure has sparked a new variation on an all too familiar line of thinking: we are losing ground.
I don’t mean against the kaiju, but with national governments. With the UN. Within the PPDC itself, even, where our dwindling funds are much more readily allocated to supporting Jäger pilots than they are to the science division. And that shouldn’t even be a choice, it only is because we have less funding to go around as more and more people champion the Wall. We should not have to choose between the machines which stave off monsters and the people working to find a permanent solution. We should not have to chose between the immediate survival of individual humans and the long-term survival of humanity as a species. And yet, that choice has to be made, year after year, while both sides of this false dichotomy suffer.
I don’t need to tell you this. You’ve expounded at length saying much of the same. Perhaps with more profanity. But even if you know it, I need to say it for my own sake, to have somewhere I can put these thoughts and feel the satisfaction of expressing them.
My last conversation with my father ended in a shouting match.
As I left my conversation with Dr. Lightcap, my main thought was a bleak one. How much longer do we have? It struck me suddenly, as I was walking to my quarters, sprang unbidden to the front of my mind without context or explanation.
I still don’t know what I mean by it, who I meant by “we”. K-Science? The PPDC? Humanity as a whole?
I don’t know. But I certainly feel the repeated shrinking of our department keenly. Dr. Teramura’s resignation last month means that our last two loses have both been voluntary, rather than the result of budget cuts. I’ve found myself thinking about who would leave next, if this will keep happening until no one remains.
I’m going to stay, at the very least. I’ll stay if it means I am left working alone in the lab as these monsters rage against the building around me. Even if it’s futile and hopeless, I will give everything I have to stopping this threat.
Do you ever feel like maybe we might not pull this off? Not like. Okay. So before i always kinda knew that not managing to stop the kaiju and be the rockstar that saved the world was totally possible, and like. doing that never felt like a sure thing (though if someone’s gonna, I’m for sure gonna be one of the people who does it), but… it felt different, yknow? it felt like we were doing a pretty impossible thing but that everyone was on the same team and trying o get it done and even if we might not do it and it was stressful and terrifying and i didn’t totally get enough sleep there was still energy and optimism and like. i dunno!! like we had a pretty good chance at kicking giant monster ass!
but like. now i’m sleeping less and we’re on budget cut number a billion and more people are quitting or getting laid off… and it sucks. I still can’t believe caitin left. nasim i kinda saw coming, and izzie. But caitlin… she kinda felt like honorary ksci, yknow? and she’s been here since this whole whatever first started. and now she’s gone. is anyone a sure thing anymore??? well. i mean, you, are obviously. and me. but only cause you’re a workaholic whose a little in love with your breach algorithms and i’m me so i can know without having to guess how likely it is that i’ll stay. anyway. with nasim and izzie gone, plus signy getting laid off, we’re down 60% of our original lab capacity. it’s just us and em and jin left and it feels so weird and empty and depressing, honestly! going to the lab and seeing a bunch of empty desks and lab stations is depressing.
and THEN on top of everything there’s the wall.
which.
okay, so. like, i KNOW this is a lars gottlieb hating zone and has been for a while. i mean, even if you hadn’t straight-up told me that you guys have a strained relationship I could’ve figured it out. literally everything you told me about him scuh-ream-ed “this guy was emotionally withholding but, like, in that way where his kids think it’s normal because you don’t have any other example set for you and also he’s probably low-key homophobic”. imo, at least. feel free to tell me if i’m totally off-base. Or not. Cause, you know, you’re never gonna see this….
whatever, point is. even if i knew your dad was kinda jerk and stuff, i just. would not. have bet on him switching over to team wall full time. or the un going all in on funding it and actually starting constuction.
i mean it’s not gonna work!!!!!!
I’ve told them it’s not gonna work in a number of very clear unsolicited reports on kaiju and the damage they do. WHY IS THIS WHAT WE AS A SPECIES IS THROWING OUR WEIGHT BEHIND???????
i dunno, dude. it’s just feeling a lot harder to feel like we’r the ones people are rooting for now. and i still want to think we can do this but… i dunno. i need to sleep. see ya tomorrow i guess
I’m trying to sleep and I have "Mambo No. 5" stuck in my head, you terrible, foul, absolutely horrendous gremlin of a man.
WHAT IF i just stole all your chalk one day. would that be too much of a problem?? cause i want you to be annoyed, not stop you working for a whole day. on the other hand, do you just have a chalk closet somewhere you can just go get more from? idk……
Your behaviour today was unacceptable. Marshal Pentecost is our superior, and that means he is entitled to our respect, and part of that is respecting each other in his presence and that you do not antagonise or insult me in front of him.
STOP. MOVING. MY. SAMPLES. they need to be refrigerated and i dont want to have to hike all the way to storage and back to do it!! WE”RE THE ONLY TWO PEOPLE HERE. THERE”S SO MUCH SPACE!!
I know you’re behind all my chalk vanishing. You are extremely lucky I keep an extra box in my desk.
someone used data as singular today and i corrected them. what have you done to me.
I find myself forgetting that there was a time when we were not the only occupants of the lab. I have long since passed the point when it no longer seemed strange to be in the room with one other person rather than three— in both less and more time than I would expect, somehow. More time, because we have gone through so many cutbacks and reductions to our team that it’s almost surprising there’s any required adjustment at all. Less time, however, because change of any kind to my status quo tends to required adjustment on my part, and halving the number of people in the lab is not an insignificant change. However, I found that I ceased to be affected by it sometime in early October, only a few weeks after our colleagues’ departure.
And now, after six months of sharing the lab with no one but you, I’ve realised that I struggle to conjure a mental image of what the room looked like when there were more desks and work stations. When there were more bodies to occupy them. I know how the furniture was arranged, and if I focus I can even say which desk was whose, but the clarity of any mental image is fading. I can’t find it in me to feel much about this. I’ve just observed it, with as much objectivity as one can expect when it comes to my own experiences.
It’s not that I didn’t care about the other people we shared a lab with. And I do have positive memories— and memories with other kinds of emotions attached to them— associated with this space, around the hours upon hours of strained work. I just don’t find myself feeling remorse, or loss, or whatever other emotions might be expected in this context.
I find myself wondering how much of this is attributable to you.
I do not
By that, I don’t mean
Your presence is a constant. It is an unpleasant constant, at times, and an irritating one. One marked by frequent interruptions to my work and a truly disgusting amount of unwelcome kaiju viscera in my workspace, but it is a constant. I appreciate constants.
You are the person with whom I interact that most in Hong Kong. That became the case very early on, even as we worked on totally different projects. Whether reinforced by the continued losses to each of our teams or incidental to them, that has become increasingly true as years passed. I may not understand why this is true, I may even resent it at times, but I cannot deny that it is the case. Even now, my conception of the lab as a physical space is tied to your presence in it.
I do also come to appreciate your presence you outside of just that constancy.
That appreciation is complicated, and don’t really know how to accurately describe it, but I owe it myself, at least, if not also to you, to acknowledge its existence and commit it to paper.
I am glad to have a constant in my life, and I am glad that constant is you.
i wonder if we could have a seder in the lab.
i know we’ve only got like a week and a half until passover so we’d probably have to scramble to get everything we need, but i bet we could pull it off. i’ve for sure seen horseradish around and kosher wine and matzah can’t be that hard to get, right? like, yeah, i’d have to ask you firsts nd you’ll probabyl bitch about lab safety and we’ll end up doing it in some weird abandoned room instead but you wouldn’t say no right?
I don’t even know what you’ve been doing for passover. or any other holiday… i mean, i’ve been doing like the bare minimum and feeling really bad about it since preeeeetty much 2019 so no judgement if it’s not much.
Point is, we spend most days in the same room for hours on end without seeing anyone else so going off and having some kind of depressing solo celebration seems dumb. they tried to kill us and we’re alive, so let’s eat, dude.
you know, I’m glad you’re the one who made it this far. i mean, if i was gonna pick anyone to be in the same room as for hours on end without seeing anyone else, it might as well be the guy i’ve known for almost a third of my life. And. Okay. i know we have an unspoken pact to never admit it, but… I like you here, okay? You being here is nice. we work well together, and you know way more than anyone else in this whole department about the breach. and that was true way before the department was just the two of us.
i mean, you’r still prickly and annoyingly uptight and just. so worried about what anyone in a uniform thinks of you, but you’re not nearly as mean as people think, and you’ve got a sense of humor when you think no one’s looking. like, for all that you say you know i’m just doing stuff to piss you off or get a reaction (which i’m not, btw, like… 70% of the time. maybe 60%), you totally do that too!! LIke, you kinda give me this look out of the corner of your eye when it’s happening and you think i don’t notice but i do!! it’s annoying, but it’s also very you, you weirdo.
You are a pedantic little shit though. and you’re weird about numbers, and I don’t get why you’re so into chalkboards, or why you hold chalk like that??? like. okay, i cant describe it, but thats not how anyone else ever holds chalk??? at least that i’ve seen. Also i’m pretty sure i’ve gotten you to start mixing the freeze dried fruit from the mess into your oatmeal just by making fun of your weird salt thing enough and that’s a) hilarious and b) incredibly sexy of me
So… yeah. your annoying, we should have a seder, and i’m glad you’re here.
Like. I know we’re still not… whatever. but i’m glad that you’re the person i’m stuck with, yknow? and that’s gotta be worth something.
I’ve just read Marshal Pentecost’s announcement. I can’t seem to properly form words about it.
I knew
There is a
I don’t want to talk about it.
I know that we will. When I get to the lab you will doubtless accost me with a tirade of recriminations of everyone involved in lieu of a greeting, and that you will expect some kind of engagement or at least acknowledgement from me on the subject.
But I deeply don’t want to engage with it.
I want to skip over acknowledging this latest blow and go straight to continuing our work as though nothing has changed. I could not tell you why this, of all changes, is the line in the sand which I have decided I cannot cope with, but it is. And I do not want to face it.
Scheiße.
I need a drink.
Dude, we are so getting drunk tonight. I know you’ll be all grumpy and claim you don’t want to or that’s it’s irresponsible or whatever but come on. we’ve got one last chance to stop this shit before the world definitely ends in a very not-fun way and basically all of it is riding on us. i know you’re thinking about it too. and tomorrow we’ll pick ourselves up and power through the hangovers and do whatever we can to stop it, but tonight…
tonight you let me drag you to a bar and drink cheap shots and crapy beer and we get shitfaced.
Newton,
I am writing what I hope will be the last of these undelivered missives so that I can get my thoughts in order and prepare exactly what I mean to say to you. Contrary to what one would expect, I find whatever information and insight I gained through the drift make the prospect of talking to you more challenging, not less. How do you act on mutual knowledge that you have never actually discussed?
I can hardly start by confessing my feelings, which would otherwise be the most straightforward course of action, as you are doubtless as aware of my feelings for you as I am of yours for me.
Well.
I say that, despite the fact that “awareness” feels entirely inadequate to describe my current situation. “Awareness” is what I’ve had in the past, when romantic partners have told me how they feel, when I’ve had an outsider’s understanding of their feelings, and assurance of their presence due to my trust in them and how they act. This is entirely different.
This is not awareness, this is knowledge, a direct knowledge and understanding formed by a kind of experience of them. That extends to other aspects of the situation, too. Your feelings were not presented to me labelled as such, I had to identify them as I would my own.
They are, somehow, separate from my own, though.
I find that reassuring, especially since things other things I’ve gained since our drift seem much less clear cut. I can sort out that the compulsion to consume one of the horrid energy drinks filling a good third of the lab fridge’s top shelf comes from you. Likewise, my increased knowledge of lyrics to various rock and pop-punk songs, and an understanding of what the genre “pop-punk” even is. I can’t tell how much of my recent thoughts about fictional robots are yours and how much are my own, stirred up my your much more active interest in the various properties they hail from. I could remember which side of our usual lunch table I regularly sit at without focus, but I can’t tell whether I take my tea with milk tastes or with two sugars since they both taste correct. It has been… disorienting. To say the least.
I’m getting off track.
I am in love with you. While I do not know precisely how you chose to label your feelings, you clearly reciprocate to some extent. I would like— and I hope you would too— to act on this. I do not know how to do that, since I can’t seem to find he right way to begin the conversation.
Do I ask you out?
That seems highly simplistic, but perhaps simple is what is needed. We are well beyond the point of a first date in terms of how well we know each other. I’d intended our initial in-person meeting to be something of that sort, even if we never explicitly discussed it in those terms, and that was over seven years ago.
What does one say on a first when knows someone as well as I know you? What can I expect you to say to me that you haven’t managed to in our letters, or our time working in the same lab? Do we simply skip the formality of a first date and begin a relationship? Have we somehow done so already, without discussing it, simply by drifting?
I don’t know. I am going to ask, though, tomorrow, in the lab. I am going to ask you even if the questions are unnecessary or the answers should go without saying, because at this point my desire for certainty overwhelms my misgivings.
With any luck my misgivings will be unfounded.
Hermann
Hey Hermann,
I know, I know, you’re probably really surprised to see this on your desk. I’m right across the room from you after all, at least most of the time, and anyway it’s a fucking letter. Who am I? Us in our 20’s?
Yeah… that probably wasn’t as funny as I meant it to be, huh.
Look, the reason I’m writing this thing (on actual paper with a pen, and putting effort into spelling and shit instead of just vomiting thoughts into my notes app or word doc) is that I don’t know how to do this.
I know that things are supposed to be easier? Or whatever? After drifting. I mean, you’ve literally been inside my head dude— which, side note, has anyone done research into neurodivergent drifting? Cuz if not someone totally should. I’m betting that drifting with you was way easier than drifting with someone neurotypical would be, though a lot of that might just be because it’s you and obviously we’re compatible. BUT did we have a greater statistical chance of being compatible because neither of us is neurotypical? Plus I’m curious about how autism and ADHD mesh as compared to autism and autism or ADHD and ADHD, or like, any of the other different non-typical neurotypes out there! Like, even within autism it’s gonna be way different person to person and what does that mean for drifting? I know I’m getting really off topic, but we should really do a paper on this now that we’ve got the time.
But yeah. The drift. I’ve literally been inside your head, you’ve been in my head, I should know how to do this by now. How to talk to you about all the stuff I want to say without feeling insecure and anxious and terrified that we’re gonna have another fight and I’m gonna lose all of this. I don’t think I could take it if that happened. I mean. You’re kind of my favorite person, Herms. You have been for ages.
But at the same time, I feel like I don’t know where I stand with you. It’s not that we fight all the time— that’s fine, actually, I’d honestly hate it if we stopped since the times that we’ve been the most polite or professional whatever have been soooo much worse than anything we’ve debated over or bickered pointlessly about. And I know you’ve got my back, I know that you like me enough to trek out to the middle of the bone slums and drift with a fucking kaiju for me. But beyond that…
Are we friends, Hermann? We’ve got to be, right? After all that. After five years working in the same lab, not to mention the drift. I saw some of how you think about me and… I don’t even know how to describe it, really, it just feels… warm. I know we had all of 2.5 seconds before we were tossed headlong into hive mind central, but I can still more or less remember everything I saw. And the glimpses I got of myself from your head, it felt, like, comforting somehow. Safe. And I don’t think it’d feel like that if we weren’t… something. Something kind of like friends, I mean.
So we’re friends, but I don’t think I know how long we’ve been friends or when we stopped actually hating each other and only acting like we did. Not that I ever hated you hated you. Don’t get me wrong, I was totally pissed at you for a while there, but it was more… hurt? At everything I thought we were/could be and then weren’t.
Which I guess brings me to the point of all this.
I really like you, Hermann. Like. Really like you. In a way that is not entirely platonic and/or devoid of a desire to mash my face-parts into yours (really sexy way of putting it, I know). And maybe you know that already. Maybe you’ve looked in my head and seen all the stupid, embarrassing, sappy stuff I’ve thought about you since we started working together (and since way before that, honestly) and you want nothing to do with it, or you’re still thinking it over, or you’re hoping that you misinterpreted it… But yeah. I used to think I could put off saying it because we all could die, and what would be the point then, but now we’ve saved the freaking world and we’re big damn heroes so I’m kind of out of excuses.
So yeah.
There it is Herm.
I like you. I’m actually kind of like… way past the point of like and closer to the territory of head over heels in love with you. And just saying that totally feels like it’s gonna make you hate me but there it is.
Okay, I don’t know how to end this now.
Please don’t hate me.
Newt
Newton, you ridiculous little man, of course I don’t hate you -Hermann
dude who signs their texts???
Someone who is texting a person for the first time and is therefore unsure as to whether the other party has their number
omg
we’re texting.
I have so much cursed shit to send you
wait
you said you didn’t hate me. does that mean you got the letter?
Yes, and I would appreciate it if you could please tell me wherever it is that you’ve been hiding all day so that I can actually talk to you about it
nah, there’s a ladder involved, I don’t want to make you deal with that
When you say you don’t hate me, does that mean, like…
It means your feelings are reciprocated, that I assumed you’d found that out already through our drift, and that you should really /tell me where you are/
holy shit
okay
okay, I’m coming to you, I’ll be at the lab in ten
you’re there right?
Naturally
Though it might be prudent to move to one of our quarters, there are aspects to how I’ve pictured this interaction that are not appropriate for a workplace setting
holy SHIT
was that innuendo???
is Hermann Gottlieb sending me suggestive texts????
you literally said stuff you wanna do to me wouldn’t be sfw
dude this might actually be the best day of my life
It wouldn’t be necessary if you were actually here for me to talk to
dude i’m literally on my way to you right now
don’t go anywhere, til i get there, okay? we can figure out the your place or mine question after
Very well
See you soon, Newton
see you soon ;)