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If anyone in the lab can be called clumsy, it’s Newton. The man is terribly accident-prone, always with his mind wandering off in four directions at once, never fully aware of his surroundings.
Hermann is always aware of his surroundings. Hermann is careful.
But not, evidently, careful enough.
He’s tired, that’s the excuse he’ll give for it. He rushes to the coffee maker to fill his cup before it’s finished brewing, taking the most concentrated coffee for himself before Newton can get to it.
“Dude!” Newton complains, as if he doesn’t do this to Hermann every chance he gets.
“What is it you keep telling me?” Hermann says dryly. “You snooze, you lose.”
“Oh, you coffee-stealing bitch.”
With a laugh, Hermann turns to walk back to his desk. He raises the cup as if making a toast, while Newton blows a raspberry at his back.
He steps away. The cup tilts. The scalding hot coffee sloshes over the rim, and down the back of his hand.
He gasps. He doesn’t voice a sound, as pain surges through him. He bites it all back, clenching down hard, with one hand on his cane, and the other on the handle of the coffee cup.
It tilts further in his reflexive grip, and even more coffee washes over his hand. This time, he can’t help a small cry of pain.
“Hermann!” Newton is in front of him in a single flying leap. “Holy shit, coffee, hot, put it down!”
Hermann looks around in panic, but he’s too far from any flat surface to have a place to set the cup.
“Just drop it!” Newton yells.
Teeth clenched, Hermann protests, “It’ll break!”
“What, are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?!”
Despite his sudden increase in volume, Newton is almost frighteningly gentle as he turns the cup upright and pries it out of Hermann’s fingers. Then, with a pointed glare, he throws it across the room.
The cup shatters, of course, and Hermann flinches. No amount of pain justifies that sort of tantrum.
But Newton forgets about the cup the moment it leaves his hand. He curls his fingers around Hermann’s, hissing in sympathy at the splotch of scarlet spreading across his skin.
“C’mon,” he says. “Gotta cool this down.” He drags Hermann over to the sink, which is something of a relief, in all honesty. He’s choosing cold water instead of some nonsense remedy like butter. Maybe Newton has some sense after all.
“You don’t have to—I’m all right,” Hermann says, as his colleague forces his hand under the water.
“Liar.”
But he isn’t lying. Now that he’s past the surprise, he’s quite able to control his reaction. It still hurts, but it’s manageable. The story of his life.
“Just hold it here,” Newton orders. He keeps his hand on Hermann’s forearm, a support rather than restraint, and Hermann doesn’t know what to make of the kindness. Weren’t they sniping at each other just a moment ago? Shouldn’t Newton be taking pleasure in this karmic punishment, burned by the very coffee he dared to steal?
“Better?” Newton asks, after they’ve stayed there considerably longer than Hermann would have on his own.
“Yes. Thank you,” Hermann says quietly. It’s faded to almost nothing, even if the skin is still angry and raw.
“Not seeing any blisters coming up,” Newton observes. He pats Hermann on the shoulder. “That’s a good sign.”
“It’s just coffee. Not even that hot,” Hermann says.
“Hermann, you burned the shit out of yourself, and don’t try to tell me you didn’t. Don’t move away from that water.” Newton pulls away, returning shortly with the first aid kit.
“I can do this myself,” Hermann says halfheartedly as Newton pulls out the necessary supplies.
“Fuck off, I’m helping. I am so great at first aid, dude. I’ve been a certified SafeSitter since I was twelve.”
“How inspiring. I suddenly find myself overcome by the magnitude of my faith in you.”
“Don’t be a dick.” Newton pats his hand dry with a paper towel, careful not to prod at him with too rough a touch. Hermann is fascinated. Newton is never so delicate except in his work, delving deep into his beloved kaiju tissues.
He wraps clean gauze around the burn, still gentle, but with reassuring confidence. Those childhood first aid courses are nothing to sneeze at, apparently. A strip of medical tape completes the job, and then Newton raises Hermann’s hand to his mouth and kisses his fingers, just at the edge of the bandage.
“A-ah?” Hermann says, with the sinking feeling that he’s misread some vital social cue and is about to find himself the butt of a joke he doesn’t understand.
Newton looks up at him. Magnified by his glasses, his eyes grow to a truly enormous size.
“Shit!” He sounds like a teakettle approaching its boiling point.
“What, er—w-what…”
“I didn’t mean to do that!” Newton yells. But he’s still bent over Hermann’s hand, still clasping it tenderly, his neck craned at an awkward angle to meet Hermann’s eyes. Surely if he didn’t mean it, he’d have straightened up, dropped his hand, and laughed it off like he has every other seeming sign of affection over the years.
“Newton?” He’s at a loss for words. No one has ever done anything remotely like this to him before. He feels like Elizabeth Bennett in the hands of Colin Firth.
Wait—he’s getting his names mixed up. Gott im Himmel, Newton has him flustered. The nerve of that man, behaving in such a way and throwing him all off kilter. Hermann removes his hand from Newton’s sweaty grip and steps back, attempting to maintain some level of dignity in his demeanor.
Newton finally remembers to stand up straight. He points a finger at Hermann in challenge, then reconsiders and lets it fall.
“Yes?” Hermann prompts.
“Shit.”
“You’ve already said that.”
Squirming with embarrassment, Newton mutters, “It’s just a thing, okay? A thing we do in my family. I didn’t mean to, like…” He gestures wildly at Hermann’s bandaged hand. “It’s force of habit or whatever. You put on a band-aid, you get a little kissy.”
“I beg your pardon?” He can’t believe what he’s hearing. Not that Newton doesn’t come out with some off the wall sayings every once in a while, but a ‘little kissy’ is not very punk rock, is it?
“Look, when I was a little kid, I was always scraping my knees and getting pecked by grackles and stuff, and every time I got hurt, my Uncle Illia would put a band-aid on me, and then he’d kiss it to seal the deal. And then this one time he forgot the kiss, and I was like three years old and already set in my ways, so I got really mad and yelled at him like, ‘Where’s my little kissy?!’ So now we all do it, me and him and Dad. It’s not weird, okay? I mean, I’m sure whenever you got hurt, your dad…” He frowns, considering what he knows of Hermann’s father. “Your…mom probably used to kiss it better?”
“No,” Hermann says. Neither of his parents was much inclined toward physical affection. They weren’t uncaring, but they didn’t bestow kisses on scraped knees.
“Man, every time you talk about your childhood, it gets worse.” He reaches for Hermann’s hand, but doesn’t quite touch it. “Feel better, at least?”
“Oh, yes. Thank you.” He can’t say that the kiss has made much difference, but he does appreciate Newton’s quick action in a crisis. “But you didn’t have to break the cup.”
“You didn’t have to keep holding it!”
Hermann opens his mouth to argue that not to at least have attempted to avoid spilling all the coffee would have been far worse than letting his hand get burned, but he realizes how that sounds before he can get the words out. Why does he think making a bit of a mess is so unforgivable?
Newton is right. His childhood was…in certain ways, less than ideal, and might perhaps continue to have some effect on his adult behaviors.
He hates when Newton is right.
“I’m not clearing up your mess,” Hermann snaps. “You broke it, you get the broom.”
“Fuck off, you ungrateful prick! See if I help you out next time you’re stupid enough to do this to yourself!”
“Oh, whatever will I do without your little kissies?”
The shards of ceramic lie there in a pool of dried coffee, scattered across both sides of the dividing line, for three full weeks before they find something else to fight about.
Months later, when the clock is stopped, the scientists are among the first to break away from the End of the World Party. A canceled apocalypse is far less momentous than what they’ve discovered in each other.
Hermann leads his poor battered Newton to the lab and sits him down on the maths side, where there’s less chance of some unaccounted-for toxic substance doing him further harm. Newton follows him without question, still smiling as broadly as he has been since the moment he slung his arm around Hermann’s shoulders in a wordless announcement that everything is changed.
Hermann soaks a clean cloth in rubbing alcohol and carefully cleans the dried blood from under Newton’s nose.
“Yours was bleeding, too,” Newton points out.
“I’m not worried about that. Let me take care of you.” He needs this. He hasn’t been settled since he found his Newton in the grip of a seizure, in the first of many near brushes with death that day. And Newton deserves the care, after everything he’s done.
Hermann peers at his handiwork, gently turning Newton’s head this way and that to be sure he’s gotten all the blood. Then, satisfied, he kisses the tip of Newton’s nose.
Newton laughs in surprise and delight. Hermann smiles in return as he moves on to Newton’s scraped cheek. Newton whines at the sting of alcohol, but remains still while Hermann cleans and bandages the wound. Hermann rewards him with another kiss. Newton giggles.
Next comes the gash across his forehead. That one looks as if it might scar.
“Does it hurt?” Hermann asks as he dabs it clean.
“Like a motherfucker.”
“Poor darling.” He has to stick on three plasters before the whole thing is covered, but at least it isn’t deep enough to need stitches. He kisses Newton’s temple, one, two, three times, then looks him over for further signs of injury.
“Anywhere else?” he asks, when nothing immediately springs out at him.
“Yeah, Doc. I’ve got his pain in my mouth that won’t go away.”
“Here?” Hermann asks, pressing the tip of his thumb against Newton’s bottom lip, just hard enough to part those lips and give him a tantalizing glimpse of what lies beyond.
“Uh-huh.” Newton lets his mouth fall open wider, giving Hermann plenty of space to do as he will.
“Hmm…I can’t see anything wrong with you,” Hermann teases. As a matter of fact, he’d say he’s looking at a perfect mouth. He might just deign to kiss it even without the first aid.
Newton dips his head and takes Hermann’s thumb into his mouth, lips closing around it at the knuckle, tongue swirling over the tip, and, oh, of course he isn’t going to leave Hermann in complete control. Heat pools in Hermann’s belly. He does not withdraw.
Newton releases him a moment later, with an audible pop and a gleam of mischief in his eyes.
“How ‘bout you?” he asks. “You hurting anywhere?”
“Oh, yes, dreadfully,” Hermann says.
“Yeah? You want to show me where it hurts?”
They end up giving each other quite the thorough examination, and don’t emerge from the lab until each is satisfied that the other is completely unharmed. And after gaining so much more experience in the matter, Hermann is forced to agree that kissing is a vital part of the healing process.
How lucky for both of them, that they’ll have the rest of their lives to keep each other in perfect health.