Chapter Text
Dreams were not unusual. They were, in fact, incredibly common. There was evidence, first assumed from observation, then later confirmed with scientific accuracy, that nearly all sentient beings entered a dreaming state of some sort or other.
Newton would know how it all worked. The man was a veritable treasure trove of biological information. He absorbed it like a sponge, sought it out, but more importantly he held on to it; so many unusual things were stored in his labyrinthine mind, it was honestly ridiculous. The things he knew… incredible, really.
Niche, though. Newton was the proverbial trump card of any theoretical pub quiz night, but only if they asked really very specific questions. He couldn't necessarily say what the capital of Greece was, or find Majorca on a map. Hell, he struggled with what could definitively be called the basics most of the time, but that hardly made him any less brilliant.
Hermann was getting swept off track, though. It was the nature of dreams to be that way, especially those that wove between two minds instead of one, making Gordian knots in the darkest hours of the night. His dreams had changed significantly After, becoming less of a logical, frighteningly real reflection of his everyday life and more… well. More.
Alice In Wonderland- not the full title of the book, of course, but people were ever so fond of butchering that sort of thing. Most of the famous ‘quotes’ were in fact misremembered, so that when someone recited the true line they came across as ignorant. Wrong.
Hermann's mind certainly understood that feeling. He understood it very well indeed. He had learned ever so long ago that being right didn't mean shit when faced with the court of public opinion, especially when the drooling masses weren't clever enough to even understand…
…that's what made your big old brain so fucking sexy… I've been telling you that forever…
Newton, even in thought, was brightly coloured and just a little too smug to be tolerable. Hermann had, often and with extreme prejudice, wanted to strangle the man, but honestly that had been part of the appeal.
Told you so.
Even in dreams he was an arrogant little bastard. Too arrogant for his own good, especially when he turned out to be right about things…
Alice in Wonderland… Hermann had followed that self certain, passionate and exciting white rabbit all the way down into insanity. He'd done it long before the Drift, before the Hive, unable to resist the thrill and the challenge of it all.
You found my big old sexy brain exciting.
A fat caterpillar, smoking on a toadstool. Creatures that spoke entirely in riddles, and a book that was, apparently, both a dream and an allegory for the passing from childhood to the so called ‘real’ adult world. Hermann had absolutely no time for bizarre literature, or answerless riddles, but the pop culture of it all had infected him somewhere along the lines.
Infected… that was the right word for it. It was right for a lot of it, and terrifying to think about besides. Awake, those thoughts were neatly packaged into a container and buried in the proverbial safe, locked behind layers upon layers of steel, but sleep was indomitable. Fatigue was, ironically, indifatigable, and with sleep came dreams, and dreams… Well, they made fools of even the most stalwart of defences.
Wonderland… a place where logic became madness. A fool was compelled to consume what said ‘eat me’, despite having no idea of the consequences. Bodies grew and stretched to alarming proportions, only to shrink down to the size of a thimble as the world became terrifyingly vast…
I couldn't…
The brain in the jar. It was eat me and drink me swirled up into a horrifying tangle of urge and compulsion. It was a temptation of the worst kind, a honeypot. Water in the desert, or a ladder leading to apparent safety that was sure to be a trap, but with the water rushing in that unknown horror quickly became more appealing than the absolute surety of drowning.
And they had been drowning, as the world came to a terrible finale around them. It wasn't a dignified thing, because no matter the desire, or the self control, all living things would claw and gasp on water at the end. No man could will himself different when the vulgarities of human nature became too ugly to comprehend; Hermann knew that for a fact. He'd tried.
So much time wasted fighting to be something different, something less than what he truly was, because the homogenous masses saw different and thought wrong. He'd danced like a monkey, or perhaps like a man suspended by the neck, sliced parts of himself off and stuffed them under the bed in a guilty attempt to fit in, but no matter how carefully he cropped and moulded himself he never quite slotted into place like the rest of the world seemed to do so easily.
Normal people, it seemed, could smell it on him, or perhaps his bleeding edges were just that little bit too obvious. It hardly mattered, because despite Hermann's best efforts they always seemed to know that he was something different. Other in the worst possible way.
Stand up straight, be a man, meet my eyes, no, don't flap your fucking hands, boy, you're not some creature on display at the zoo-!
How often he'd felt like it, growing up. Animals at the circus, where the lights were too bright and the noise too loud. Hermann had been forced to stand up straight and be a man, he'd been forced to wait in a crowd claustrophobic enough to be suffocating while wild eyed horses leaped through great rings of fire. The press of bodies gasped and screamed, faces set to ‘happy’, but all Hermann could see was terror. The lash and the spurs that drove a petrified animal to act against its nature…
Tiny bodies, horses and the Hive… it was easy for the dream to stray into dark waters, because despite it all there was a twisted kind of empathy there. Hermann couldn't for the life of him understand those bewildering everyday people, his so-called peers, but he understood Newton and he understood Them…
He had empathised so keenly with those beautiful, painted horses. Terrified and terrifying, necks pulled painfully low by a rider (master, father) who cared only for obedience and how things looked. They didn't understand why they must dance through fire, and when they acted in line with their nature, reared and shied away from something their whole being shouted was the most deadly of threats… they were punished. Punished for being and feeling, forced into line by a master whose ambition was impossible to understand.
In the odd, twisted place of dreaming, father became master and master was the voice behind the Hive. Bodies that grew and shrunk and changed at another's command, mad eyed animals launching into battle against their very nature- it was suddenly so very easy to tumble down that rabbit hole and into the creature, into the damaged, perpetually searching creature that had once been degraded to nothing more than a slice of monster in a jar.
Too smart, too loud, too different-
It should have been impossible to comprehend the alien might of a being with so many limbs and senses that made no sense at all. It should have been the ultimate cognitive dissonance, a mismatch of epic (kaijuu sized) proportions, but they had both spent their entire lives lost in the mire of not quite right.
Hermann, whose mind knew exactly what he wanted his body to do, but was cursed with faulty, damaged hardware- a strange, vicious cycle of spasticity and odd, ataxic movements. He knew how to move, knew how to be, but despite his best efforts he simply couldn't. Willpower alone would never be enough to counter that inescapable bloody fault in the system, caused by a coin flip of happenstance.
Heads or tails… Hermann might well have been an entirely different person if his unborn self had done just one thing right and not tried to enter the world arse about face. The first taste of the real world, and it had been the consequence of his own failings trying to suffocate him into nonexistence.
A changeling, maybe. The person he was supposed to be, the son that would have made his father happy, had been strangled, flatlined before he ever got a chance to take that first, miraculous breath. What the doctors had managed to revive had looked the part (had grown to look so very much like father), but inside he was something else entirely.
The Hive made a terrifying amount of sense, because of it. They had already done most of the legwork; Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb had blended together long before the Hive. Maths Man and his Secret American… the lines had blurred over time. Doctor Gottlieb If You Please had, somewhere along the lines, morphed into Hermy-Herm and an endless slew of asinine nicknames.
Familiarity and fondness, walls disassembled brick by agonising brick until two tiny, lonely islands could build a bridge out of them. The Angry Germans had become the Doctors G had become Newt and Hermann, and throughout all of it they had been constructing a strange little universe of two.
They were their own Hive in miniature, and that was the thing that saved them. Newton might have gone in alone that first time, picked up the twisted jar of Drink Me monsters and stuffed it in his fool mouth, but Hermann was still there. A suicide note made verbal, Newton had been thinking of him even as he pushed the big, red button…
Made my brain itch from the second I met you. Horny for your smartass, dry as the fucking desert sass even when I wanted to punch you in the fucking face…
Hermann supposed there was no accounting for taste. Why anyone would want him for his brain when his brain was quite literally the thing that was wrong with him made no sense at all, but then again that was the nature of dreaming.
Unfortunately, the eyes of the Hive would not be distracted by paltry things. Human sentiment and ridiculousness (horny for his intellect, of all fucking things!) had no place in the Antiverse. The chittering masters, architects of twisted conquest, existed to consume. Cellular biology; they were a virus, seeking to invade and transform. There was no individuality, no outliers; the Hive absorbed and evolved. It made monsters. Endless monsters.
Eyes upon eyes upon eyes and colours that didn't exist within the visible spectrum; things that Hermann's mind had never been shaped to comprehend. He was vast, he was massive, a bleeding, desperate, dying thing scratching down into the dirt to find that tiny, curious beacon of otherness that had reached out with curiosity instead of violence. Senses that made no sense stretched out along impossible limbs, digging out that one, bright spark, perhaps to taste-
The sudden rush of vertigo, the wash of confusion; he was looking down down down into a ragged hole, one miniscule creature alone in a ring of other, disinteresting things that looked the same but weren't. At the same time he was that small thing (NewtNewtNewt), postictal and terrified but also in awe, looking all the way up at the thing he'd let out of Pandora's Box.
His-mine-ours-Theirs- The hideous, flayed raw cognitive dissonance of it all, coupled with the flash of terror that was being seen… It startled him awake with a gasp and an aborted cry, disoriented in the dark.
The electric wash of adrenaline, some weird biological safe word buried deep within his psyche, had him scrambling up to sit before he was even truly awake at all. The world was a confusing smear of too large shadows and imagined but visibly real monsters, and the terror of it all had him pinned like some unfortunate dead thing ready to be vivisected.
It was also the final straw, one that had him retching over his lap before he even had the wherewithal to realise that he had a lap-!
“Ugh, fuck. Fuck. Brain soup wake-up…”
The other part of him, the one that wasn't heaving hot liquid onto the floor (monster-kaijuu-Otachi spitting acid-!), moved. Not even awake yet and Newton was alert and bloody laser focused on the horrible situation that was occurring. It was a shared dream, not just the sick tangle in Hermann's head, but he seemed perfectly capable of keeping his dinner where it should be.
“So many meds. I'm on so many fucking drugs right now, you have no idea.” Newton answered the thought, because Hermann was entirely incapable of forming words. Everything was spinning a lazy quarter turn to the right, then skipping like a record back to centre so that it could do it all over again-
“Don't think I could puke right now even if I wanted to, drugs say fucking no.”
Hermann supposed that was okay, given that he was throwing up enough for the both of them. He couldn't even work out where he was, and the singular concrete thought in his mind was that tinned tuna looked nearly exactly the same coming up as it had on his plate.
“Gross.” Warm arms, one still partially wrapped in stiff plastic, threaded around from behind, supporting him as he gagged. A hot, living body pressed close against his back despite the horrible spectacle. “You're gonna put me off tuna for life.”
The irony was, Hermann didn't even bloody like tuna, especially the hideous brown mess that came out of a tin. Unfortunately his brain, mixed up into a scramble with the human disaster that was one Newton Geiszler, had developed all manner of awful cravings… the things he'd been compelled to put in his mouth since the Drift…
“Kinky.” Familiar and unafraid of potential backsplash, Newton plastered himself all the way along Hermann's back, chin on his shoulder, a secure, inescapable bolster against the endless bloody retching.
The urge to bite back something absolutely cutting was strong and automatic, but not quite strong enough to overpower his body's desire to turn itself inside out. He hadn't even been awake long enough to feel properly sick before the main event started, and mixed with the vertigo and leftover confusion from the dream- a wholly unpleasant situation.
“Just breathe through it.” Newton was, as the man himself would say, entirely unbothered by vomit unless it was his own. He was stalwart in the face of repulsiveness, and that, more than useless platitudes, helped Hermann feel just a fraction better. “Body'll get the memo once you're all puked out.”
Somehow Hermann doubted that, given the situation, but Newton was the biologist and was probably right.
“I'm always right, Herms.”
Damn the man! He bloody was right, though; once Hermann stopped trying to unravel the ugly knot of mine-ours-theirs and focused entirely on his breathing, things did settle, at least to an extent.
“Yeah, there we go. Told you I was right.” Insufferable little know-it-all. Newton was really very lucky that Hermann was the type of masochist that enjoyed him that way. Still wanted to throttle him with really quite stunning regularity, but that was just how they functioned as a pair.
“God.” Hermann wiped his mouth with the cuff of his jumper, which was another abominable habit picked up from the obnoxious little troll currently attached to him like a barnacle. He would have been more disgusted at himself if the jumper in question hadn't already been thoroughly contaminated and, in actuality, it originated from the wardrobe of the aforementioned barnacle…
“Meh, you've had my puke literally all over you, like, really recently. Also pretty sure there's not actually anything left to tick off on your ‘Newt's nasty fluids’ bingo card by now. Double also, it's just puke. I'm not scared of a bit of puke, even if it does bring back memories of Friday night kebabs, tequila and regret.”
Not Newton's memory, at least where the kebabs were concerned. That particularly unwise drunken overindulgence was distinctly British…
Typically, just the thought of greasy, greyish meat of highly suspect origin had Hermann back retching, despite there being exactly nothing inside him to vomit out. He didn't even know which one of them started that thought.
“Can we not- not talk about food. Please.” Not when it was such a monumental effort to turn his mind away from how very food like tuna still looked on the rebound, and said rebound was entirely all over him. Hermann had vomit on his socks, and that delightful little sensation was probably never going to wash out of his psyche. He gagged yet again just at the thought.
“Eesh, yeah, probably a good idea.” Newton's firm hold braced him through the worst of it, despite Hermann being the only one of them not nursing several still healing fractures. The pressure on Newton's ribs was almost certainly painful, but Hermann was weak; he was too miserable to give up the security of those steady arms around him.
He had probably only been awake for a handful of minutes, for all that it felt like both a lifetime and no time at all. The disorientation was still almost entirely present, but some of the disassociated confusion had lifted, leaving him unpleasantly aware of how terrible he felt.
“Bloody hell.” It was probably just the shock and leftover vertigo, coupled with the sheer effort of flailing himself awake to vomit so very spectacularly, but Hermann felt chilled right down to the bone. He was slick all over with an unpleasant cold sweat, and somewhere between the salvos of retching a full body tremor had started up like so many tiny earthquakes.
“You're okay. We're okay.” Newton's chin was digging into his shoulder in a way that should have been uncomfortable but was, in truth, actually incredibly grounding. Hermann could feel him breathing, present and alive despite all the terrible things that could have (had) come to pass. “Shitty post mind-fuck vertigo just happened to get you for a change. Probably because I'm still drugged right up to the eyeballs and then some, actually. Vicarious vomming! Hah!”
“Try not to take too much pleasure in my suffering, Newton.” They both knew Newton was doing nothing of the sort; even before Hermann had been able to feel it, he'd known that the other man cared. The verbal jabs were all part and parcel of their dynamic, and it made them both feel better to drop into old, comfortable patterns in times of stress.
“In case of emergency, apocalypse or imminent vomit, break glass. And by ‘break glass’ I mean ‘sass Newt into oblivion’. Yeah, I see how it is.” Despite how unpleasant it had to feel, given how damp Hermann had managed to make himself, Newton gently bussed their cheeks together. “Though you're normally way better at not puking on the floor… kinda suspicious that you caught that in the Drift, won't lie.”
“Oh lucky me. What a wonderful talent to inherit.” It would be an outright lie to say Hermann had never vomited somewhere inappropriate, but he was normally better at predicting such disasters.
He usually woke up long before there was any real risk of him decorating his floor or, heaven forbid, his person, with gastric contents. He would typically wake up the moment he felt even vaguely queasy, but on this occasion he only really started to feel sick about half way through the main event.
“Reaction puke is different to the whole ‘body says remove this poison from my person’ type thing. We know the whole cognitive dissonance grossness is a giant pile of wank, dude.”
Not how Hermann would have put it, but pretty on the nose regardless. The hideous psychological experience that was being in several places and being several different beings at once- no thank you. It was arguably worse in the odd, subconscious place they sometimes reached. Prior to the Drift the format of their dreams had been absolutely nothing alike, so the new, clashing dreamscape of their minds combined was sometimes disorienting in the extreme. Throw in the echoes of a hostile alien hive mind…
“Yeah, ultimate wank trifecta right there.” Newton eased back just far enough to free up a hand, which he used to push back Hermann's repulsively sweaty fringe. It was entirely possible he was clandestinely checking for fever in the process. “And not a good wank. A really awful one. Unsatisfying, dry, probably interrupted in the middle by something grody…”
“Please don't finish that thought.” Hermann had, once upon a time, withered from embarrassment whenever Newton decided to get… colourful… with his metaphors. Even in private, such things had been borderline scandalous. Now, too many years, too many disasters and the literal end of the world later, he wouldn't know what to do with himself if Newton didn't launch headfirst into depravity at any given opportunity.
“Heh, you love me.”
Well of course Hermann fucking did! He wouldn't have risked eviscerating his psyche for anyone else. He certainly wouldn't have tolerated someone other than Newton bloody Geiszler making off-color comments when one of them was covered in regurgitated tuna.
“Yes, Newton. I wouldn't put up with you otherwise.”