Work Text:
[years in the future, but not many]
Hermann wakes alone at four o'clock on a Tuesday morning. Instead of getting up right away, he lays in the dark and mentally reviews his schedule: there is a meeting with an advisee at eleven (he needs to review his notes of that thesis); there is a brown bag lunch with a visiting lecturer at twelve-thirty (he detests these but has gotten scolded for skipping the last several); the vast bulk of his afternoon is taken up with a graduate seminar on predictive models (attended by only four graduate students, and by far the most enriching class he has taught in these past two years); he will not finish teaching until after six, and needs to stop on the way home to get groceries (because they are out of tea and God knows Newton will not get the chore done if left to his own devices). It is not a full day, not his busiest by far, but it is busy enough that he is disgruntled by the fact that he is now awake at 4:10 in the morning and almost certainly will not get back to sleep before he needs to be up and out of the house at nine.
He dwells on his disgruntlement for a good five more minutes before sitting up, swinging his legs over stiffly, and heaving himself out of bed. Grabs his cane from where it stands against the bedside table, rubs his eyes with his free hand, stands for another long moment trying to pry his brain into useful wakefulness. Goes to the kitchen.
It's not that unusual to find Newton in the kitchen between midnight and dawn. It happens about once a month, at not-quite-regular intervals. Sometimes Newton has, upon being found, already made and drunk coffee and is sitting at the kitchen table with one hand fisted in his hair and the other hand writing furious notes on his research that jerked him out of bed at whatever reasonable hour. Sometimes Newton is washing dishes as stealthily as he can manage, driven out of bed by some unspoken restless anxiety and needing something to keep his hands busy and himself out of Hermann's hair. Sometimes it is like this morning: Newton is sitting on the floor, barefoot and shirtless, backed up against the cabinets, both hands wrapped around a half-empty water bottle.
Hermann stands over him until he looks up. Newton does not bother to scrub the tears away from his cheeks like he used to; Hermann is somewhat relieved to find that Newton has grown more willing to be caught crying. It seems like a good step. Not that crying on the kitchen floor at four in the morning is generally a good sign, but it means he might let Hermann ask him about it this time.
He does; ask him, that is. "What is it?" calm and low and no-nonsense. He has found that if he speaks too gently, Newton will feel pitied or patronized, and will close down further.
"Bad dream," Newton says, voice all cracked and froggy from crying. Hermann has learned that this particular excuse is almost always a lie, or rather, it is code for 'I was awake and obsessing about something upsetting and couldn't stop thinking about it and if my mind is out of my control then what does wakefulness even count for?' He accepts this as a valid enough answer.
"Could we move to the sofa?" Newton knows that Hermann cannot sit on the cold tile floor with him. He is reasonable about this (sometimes in the past he has been quite unreasonable about this) and hefts himself up, following Hermann silently.
The sofa has a plush throw blanket that Hermann rather likes. It is a nice gold color, and looks rather fetching when he drapes it over Newton's lap and chest before sitting down beside him. Newton shrinks down into the blanket, and doesn't lean in against Hermann. Hermann lays his cane across his lap, so that the handle (and his hand) rest on Newton's knee, but that's the only effort at contact he makes. He figures: one does not escape bed with one's partner if one is seeking closeness at that moment. He figures he will not push it, although he distantly wants to.
"I really think you should leave me," Newton says after a long silence.
Hermann does not say: 'This again.' Nor does he say: 'Honestly, Newton, have you gone mad?' He has learned quite well not to say either of these things. Instead he breathes out through his nose, audibly, and waits for Newton to continue.
Newton gives it a moment, snuffles quietly, and seems to be trying to put his thoughts in order. "I'm a really bad person, Hermann. The double event- you know-"
They don't refer to it as the day that we Drifted or as the day that we saved the world or any kind of thing. In fact, Newton seems to separate out what was, in fact, one very long, exhausting day into several discrete segments: the double event is one, the Drift is another, the triple event is yet a third, as if these things did not happen within hours of each other. When Newton refers to the double event it is with reference to that period he was out of Hermann's sight, out in the city, well beyond safety or help, in the immediate path of various monsters who had it out for him personally. Hermann is not especially fond of thinking back on that part of that day.
Still. "Yes?" he says carefully.
"I went into a public shelter."
"Ah." Hermann considers this. He has some impressions from the Drift, noise, color, chaos, fear, packed in close bodies, but he has not given that part of the vast file transfer of Newton's brain any special inspection. He has not sat around thinking about Newton in danger, Newton afraid, Newton being eaten. He has not, he hasn't. He certainly hasn't considered where Newton was, physically, when he made contact with Otachi. A public shelter makes sense with his understanding of the events as they unfolded. But- "Why?"
"Hannibal Chau told me to get out, told me he was going to his private bunker, and told me that the kaiju were coming to find me personally." Hermann glances at Newton, finds that Newton is glaring determinedly in the opposite direction.
"So you went to a public shelter?" Hermann repeats. He feels the need to clarify. He tries to understand what this information means to Newton right now, such that he would ask Hermann to leave. There seems no obvious connection, but with Newton, the connections are often quite subtle. It will take more data to understand.
"I ran, I- I pushed people. I kept saying-" Newton pauses, is crying again, turns his whole body to face away from Hermann, fists both hands in the blanket where it is crumpled on his lap. "I kept saying, 'I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor.' She was chasing me."
Hermann cannot, personally, abide Newton's habit of referring to Otachi as she rather than it, but he has never won that fight before, and doesn't want another round of it now. He wants to understand why he is awake at (now) 4:25 on a Tuesday, with the dark sky beginning to gray outside the glass door out onto the patio. "I don't understand," he says. It's a difficult statement for Hermann Gottlieb to make, especially aloud, especially to Newton Geiszler, but he forces himself. It's necessary at this juncture.
"I put all those people in danger. A hundred, maybe, maybe two hundred people. I led her right to a buffet."
The absurd image of kaiju lining up at a buffet restaurant flashes through Hermann's mind, and he has to stifle a sharp laugh. He immediately regrets it, as Newton turns on him, eyes red and tears streaming freely down his cheeks.
"I'm serious! I'm not a good person, I as good as killed those people, do you not get that?"
This still honestly strikes Hermann as borderline comical. "Haven't you told me on multiple occasions that kaiju do not actually eat people? Didn't you theorize to me just last month that Otachi probed you with its tongue because kaiju communicate through olfactory means?"
"The structural damage to the shelter-"
"Newton," Hermann says first, as an important preface to all the things he feels he needs to get in order. "Newton. Need I remind you of the countless lives you saved later that day?"
"Because I wanted to be famous- because I wanted to be a hero-" Newton sobs, and it is sort of astounding how, even without his glasses, eyes screwed up and face splotchy red, he manages to look self-righteous.
"Who cares," Hermann interrupts quickly. "Who cares why you did it? You did it. No one but you could have done what you did, and you did it, and every single person on this miserable planet has you to thank for their miserable lives. And Newton," he adds quickly, folding a hand around Newton's jaw and turning his face towards him. "Do you think I am still with you for your outstanding moral fiber? Do you think I am particularly interested in who is and is not a good person?"
"You should be!"
"You clearly are, which I am choosing to take as a compliment of my moral standing, thank you very much. But your intentions- your fears- I don't know. What do you want? Do you want me to decide that I hate you now, because you endangered a few lives before you saved a great many more? I shan't, so you will have to be disappointed."
"You can't just decide that-" Newton is moving quickly from miserable to furious, always a smooth and graceful transition, and in Hermann's opinion a rather welcome one. He can deal with an angry Newton much better than with a morose Newton.
"I can," Hermann says firmly. "I am. I am just deciding that. You clearly care a great deal about the lives of those people in the public shelter. You think what you did was wrong. What more can anyone ask of you?"
"They can ask me not to have done it!"
"There, you see, even English tense doesn't have good verbs for what you're trying to say! No one can ask you not to have done something that is done, Newton, it is done. What I see right now is that you are very concerned with the well-being of others, which proves that you are an empathetic and reasonable person, and that is all I want from you. I refuse to hate you for this. If you hate yourself, then, well- well I strongly disagree with your reasoning and your conclusions."
Newton's anger seems to deflate somewhat. "Goddamn it, Hermann."
Hermann deems this a reasonable point to drag Newton in against his shoulder, tuck his head under his chin and stroke his hair a bit. It's as much for Hermann's comfort as for Newton's, though it would take a great deal to get him to admit as much. He lets Newton cry into the collar of his pajamas for a few minutes, soaking the cloth through. He monitors Newton's breathing, waits for it to slow.
"Your standards are different than mine," he says softly, when he believes that Newton has for the most part cried himself out. "I don't know that I would meet them, if you judged me by the same standards that you judge yourself. I didn't-" he hesitates, decides how to phrase this. "I didn't drift with you to save the world. The world can go hang. I drifted with you to save you, Newton, because I refuse to be without you."
Newton makes a small hiccupy noise into Hermann's neck, which seems like as much answer as he's going to get at the moment.
"If my actions are noble despite my selfish intentions, then yours are equally so," Hermann continues, because it feels like this point really needs to get driven home. "And if your intentions are so appalling that I ought to leave you, then I am equally guilty. Do not-" he adds quickly, sternly, "interpret this as me telling you to leave. If you leave I shall be quite destroyed. Do not willfully misinterpret me to the most catastrophic possible reading."
"I don't do that," Newton mumbles.
"You absolutely have done that on multiple occasions. Nevermind. Don't leave me, I love you, you deeply stupid man. I don't care if you're a bad person, you are my bad person, you are the bad person I would let the world burn in order to save."
"Shut up, that is the grossest thing you've ever said to me." Newton now seems to be muffled because he's kissing Hermann's shoulder.
The sun is rising, and later Newton will spring back from whatever dark valley he has found himself in, and he will make the coffee far too strong and sweet, and he will laugh and kiss Hermann with his breath still smelling bitter. Later Newton will abandon his breakfast to go find his notebook and scribble down an inspired idea about cellular structures that he will try to explain to every single person he sees that day, starting with Hermann and followed by two hundred undergraduates and the barista at the campus cafe. Later Newton will come home late and find Hermann cooking and wrap his arms around him from behind and kiss Hermann's shoulderblades and tell him in far too much detail about the introductory lecture class where he accidentally projected his desktop background of a pin-up style kaiju drawing. Later he will remind Hermann that they can take weekends off, now, because they've earned it, because they're rockstars.
Hermann lets him get on with it.