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Leodum is minum swylce him mon lac gife;
willað hy hine aþecgan, gif he on þreat cymeð.
Ungelic is us.
To my people he gives war like a gift.
They will destroy him if he comes in force.
We are not the same.
He’s a human being. A human being, in spite of what may be in control. Hermann sees it in the way he gasps for breath, frightened and in pain. The aliens are not afraid, but Newton is, and his body displays his reaction even as they rant and rave in anger. His need to conceal his anxiety behind a torrent of words, to soothe himself with the sound of his own voice, but they control what he says.
“You think this is over, huh? You think you saved your crappy little world?”
Hermann takes note of the word choice. He’s quite sure the aliens would have chosen something more dignified. “Crappy” is a word Newton applies to watered-down beer, or the kind of music he refers to as corporate pop.
Maybe he’s just desperate to find a sign of Newton’s influence in there. But he’ll take any evidence he can get.
“We’re going to keep coming! We are never going to stop, and sooner or later, your luck is going to run out!”
Hermann flinches back from the monitor, unnerved by the distortion of that so-familiar voice. He’s still human, he’s still Newton, but he’s them now, too.
How will anyone ever see him in there? How will Hermann convince them to let him go in after him?
He hasn’t been allowed into the cell thus far. For his own good, they say, as if it could possibly be better for him to be locked out. So he sits and watches the feed. Sits and watches Jake Pentecost roll in with all his righteous fire, because he’s trusted enough to face the captive of the hivemind.
“The things in your head,” Jake says, to Newton, when he should know damn well he can speak to them directly. “The precursors.”
Newton’s head tilts back, and Hermann leans forward, as if by getting closer to the screen he could make out the details of his expression in the grainy feed. Is it Newton reacting, looking to the first human being other than Hermann himself who has acknowledged those things inside his head? Is he hoping for rescue, or fearful of retribution? Is it Newton at all, or the precursors themselves, aware that they can no longer go unobserved, simply waiting to see how this will go?
“Tell them we’re not afraid,” Jake says, and Hermann’s hope sinks.
Tell them. He doesn’t know who he’s speaking to. He’s convinced that Newton is the villain in this story, that he’s helped the precursors willingly.
They are never going to let Hermann save him.
“Tell them next time, they won’t need to worry about coming for us, because we’re gonna come for them.”
And they will, of course. They’ll bring war to the enemy’s doorstep. But Hermann doesn’t bother thinking of that. He’s too busy focusing on the tiny breath Newton lets out, a sound that could almost be a laugh, or simply a sigh of relief, before the precursors snap his mouth shut and his eyes go cold again.
He’s still in there, and he’s still on humanity’s side. He’s still one of them. He’s still Newt.
Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre.
Fæst is þæt eglond, fenne biworpen.
Sindon wælreowe weras þær on ige;
willað hy hine aþecgan, gif he on þreat cymeð.
Ungelice is us.
Wulf is on one island, I on another.
The island is a fortress surrounded by marsh.
The warriors there are fierce in battle.
They will consume him if he comes in threat.
It is different with us.
“You’ll only get one shot at this,” Jake says, as if Hermann doesn’t know the risks ahead.
“Your concern is appreciated. Now open the door.”
Jake Pentecost has a contrary nature. He stands blocking the door, arms folded across his chest and quite the forbidding look in his eyes.
“Let me through,” Hermann insists.
“Not until you show me you’re ready to take this seriously.”
“I have never been more serious about anything in my life!” For God’s sake, it’s Newton. “I’m going to reach him.” No matter what it takes, he is going to reach Newton, and he’s going to save him.
“You’re assuming he can be reached. You think they can’t keep you out.”
“They can’t!” Nothing and no one is going to keep him from doing what he’s come here to do. No aliens will keep him from touching Newton’s mind, and no mere human will keep him from his side. Not even this man, the closest thing he has to an ally in this.
Jake doesn’t believe Newton can be saved. He doesn’t even truly believe he wants to be. But he’s gone along with it all. He hasn’t stood in Hermann’s way. Not until this very moment.
“What do you want?” Hermann asks.
“I want you to understand you might not win this one. Yeah.” He slices a hand through the air, cutting off Hermann’s retort before it can begin. “You think you’ll pull through with the power of friendship.”
“No! Nothing so trite,” Hermann scoffs.
Jake studies him through narrowed eyes.
Hermann scowls back at him.
“Oh my god,” Jake says.
Hermann stiffens his shoulders.
“It’s the power of love?”
“Let me in, Ranger Pentecost!” He prods at Jake’s boot with his cane. The young man remains unmoved.
“You’re crazy, old man,” Jake says. “I like that. And I’ve backed you in this for my sister’s sake. Mako loved you.” He glances at the locked door behind him, face softening for the barest fraction of a second. “Both of you.”
“One of the few who did,” Hermann agrees. Neither he nor Newton has ever been well liked, but Mako was their friend once. She knew who Newton really was, and if she were still alive, Hermann has to believe, she would go after him. Not with Hermann’s singleminded purpose, but with her own determination, and the faith that her old friend is still there to be saved.
It’s good that Jake still trusts his sister, even if he’ll never trust in the two of them.
“But you know that loving him isn’t enough,” Jake says. “If those things have him prisoner in his own head, they’ll do everything they can to lock you out.”
“You’re the one keeping me locked out!” Hermann retorts. “Why, Jake? Why stand against me now that it’s all decided?”
He hasn’t called young Pentecost by his first name in years, not since Jake was a little boy tagging along at Mako’s heels. Now, it’s as if all those years have fallen away, and Jake is that earnest little boy once again.
“I’m scared, Doc,” he says.
“I won’t give them anything, we have safeguards—”
“Yeah,” Jake interrupts. “That’s not what I’m afraid of. Much as they’d like to take our secrets out of your head, if you go to them, I think it’s more likely they’ll just kill you.”
“Then I’ll trust you to pull me out, if it comes to that,” Hermann says. “But you’ll not stop me from going in.”
Jake nods, and steps aside at last. And Hermann moves past him, into Newton’s cell.
Let the precursors do as they will. He’s coming to save his Newt, and nothing will keep him out.
Wulfes ic mines widlastum wenum dogode;
þonne hit wæs renig weder ond ic reotugu sæt,
þonne mec se beaducafa bogum bilegde,
wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað.
I followed my Wulf’s tracks in faraway dreams.
When it was rainy weather and I sat weeping,
My hero wrapped his arms around me.
I had joy in that, but there was also loathing.
“H-Hermann?”
There’s a light in Newton’s eyes that hasn’t been there in some time, even as the precursors yank at the leash, locking up every muscle in his body and twisting his face into a rigid sneer.
“Newton.”
There’s a chair provided, but Hermann doesn’t take it yet. Instead, he walks straight to his old friend and touches his fingertips to an unshaven cheek. Newton trembles at his touch.
“I’m here,” Hermann says.
Newton looks up at him, panting hard through his clenched teeth. His eyes brim over with tears.
“Are they hurting you?” Hermann asks gently.
“Keep trying!” the monsters snarl back. “You’ll do more to break him than we ever did, when he sees how hard you fail!”
“I’ll get you out of this,” Hermann promises, and steps back to let the technicians do their jobs.
Newton, and the precursors, can’t fail to understand the significance of the equipment Hermann’s team is rolling in, but the screaming doesn’t start until they clamp a squid cap to his head. He howls in rage, throwing his body against his restraints, again and again, to no avail.
Hermann sits across from him, and prepares himself, with a minimum of fuss.
And abruptly, Newton throws his head back and laughs.
“C’mon then, Hermann. Let’s do this thing. You come to us, and let him watch what we’ll do to you.”
“Don’t listen to them. I’m coming for you,” Hermann says, and initiates the drift—
It’s all impressions at first, his own thoughts, Newton’s memories, the hivemind’s hatred storming around them both. Nothing he can hold onto, nothing that sticks long enough for him to make any sense of it. He can’t see into the heart of the storm, but there must be a way in.
“Make a path for me, Newton,” Hermann urges. It will be there, some well-trodden track to the place where Newton dwells, if only he can find it.
“I can’t,” Newton’s voice says from somewhere, and everywhere, and nowhere.
Tiny pinpricks sting at Hermann’s face like frozen rain. He throws an arm up to shield himself from the worst of it.
“Hermann…” Newton’s voice says. “Find…Hermann…”
“I’m here!” He raises his head to shout into the storm. Some invisible object slices across his cheek, and he cries out, but Newton—
Newton screams, somewhere far distant, long and drawn out, a wail of pain and terror, animal-like in its intensity.
“I’ll save him,” Hermann’s own voice says, echoing back in various intonations, some of them real, others a twisted alien mockery of his hopes.
“I will,” Hermann insists.
“I can save him,” says a lantern-jawed hero, and, “I have to save him,” sobs a broken man, and, “No one can save you,” whisper a thousand voices from the dark. “You’ll be here forever. No one will ever come for you.”
“Hermann, why can’t you hear me?” says Newton’s voice.
“I hear you!” He tries to follow that voice. Unseen things in the wind slash at his sleeves, his trousers, into the flesh beneath, but still he strides forward. That pain isn’t real. Only Newton matters. “I am coming for you, Newton! Let me in!”
The ground opens up at his feet, and Hermann tumbles down into sudden quiet.
Newton has built him a holloway. A path, sunk deep into the earth by the passage of countless footsteps since a time long before the coming of foreign invaders.
He gets to his feet. The banks on either side stretch up six feet or more, sheltering him from the storm above. This path was cut by Newton alone.
He steps forward, and when his foot touches ground, Newton’s voice says, “Hermann…”
Another step, and the voice says, “I’ll escape.”
He steps again. “Get to Hermann.”
Step. “He’ll figure this out.”
Step. “Hermann will save me.”
Step. “He can save us all.”
“I hear you now, Newton. I’m on my way.”
He moves faster, and the words echo, overlapping.
“I’ll escape.”
“I have to get to Hermann.”
“He’ll see the truth.”
“I have to get out of here.”
“Hermann.”
“If I can just get to Hermann.”
“Hermann!”
For ten years, Hermann has had nightmares of the precursors. Endless nightmares, enough to drive a man mad. And after a time, in pure desperation, he turned to meditation and lucid dreaming to deal with them. Not the sort of thing he generally believes in, but it did help.
And what is a deep drift anyway, if not a sort of shared dream?
In reality, Hermann is a tired, middle-aged man with a gammy leg, who would be daunted at the prospect of walking the distance he sees laid out before him.
But here, he can be anything he needs to be.
Here, he can run.
A wolf courses down the ancient track, as swift as the winds above, and with each footfall, in time with the drumming of shaggy paws, his own name echoes again.
“I have to find Hermann. Hermann can fix this. Hermann can stop it. Hermann, I’m sorry. Help me, Hermann! I have to get to Hermann…”
“Just wait for me,” Hermann says, as the ancient path comes out suddenly into a familiar underground corridor, all rusted steel and bulletproof glass.
A Shatterdome cell. A prison, but because it takes this form, Hermann has the key. He presses his ID badge to the lock, and with a clunk and a grinding of gears, the door rolls open to let him inside.
And there he is. Newton. Shackled to a chair, just as he is in reality, but this is him, Newton alone, in his leather jacket and his combat boots and his black-framed glasses with the crack across one lens. They have him gagged, internal echo of the control they have over his body. The silencing of his voice.
Newton looks up at him and laughs in disbelief.
“Hello, Newton. I’m here to rescue you.”
He rushes to his old friend’s side, works the gag out of his mouth, then bends down to release the straps that bind him to the chair. Newton leans forward to bury his face in the folds of Hermann’s shirt.
“Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?” he asks, and promptly bursts into tears.
Their time here is limited, they have to get out, but Hermann pauses in his efforts to free him. Just for a moment. He wraps his arms around the man he loves and holds him while he sobs, helpless as a child.
“My poor, brave Newton, you’re all right now. I’ve got you,” Hermann soothes. “I’m here.”
Wulf, min Wulf, wena me þine
seoce gedydon, þine seldcymas,
murnende mod, nales meteliste.
Wulf, my Wulf, I’m sick with yearning.
My soul mourns when you so seldom come to me.
I’m starving, but it isn’t food I need.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” Newton cries, arms locked tight around Hermann’s waist. “I can’t believe you really came for me.”
“If they told you I wouldn’t, they were lying.”
“But you hate me,” Newton says, and it’s the same thing he said ten years ago, moments before Hermann kissed him for the first time, when their first drift had just blown things wide open for the both of them.
“You are a good man, and I love you. I always have. Now, stop that foolishness and come with me. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“I can’t get out,” Newton says, eyes wide with a fear that should be foreign to him, this man who once was all bravado. “I’ve tried, Hermann, I’ve tried so many times, but I’m not strong enough, I couldn’t stop them, everything they did, I couldn’t stop them—”
“Newton,” Hermann interrupts, “We have Alice.”
Newton looks away, overcome by a shame as foreign as his fear. And Hermann will tell him, as many times as he needs to hear, that he is not to blame for what that thing has done to him, but for now, there’s no time.
“The rangers are going to destroy it in less than a minute. That’s why I’m drifting with you now. I’ll be your remaining anchor point on this side of the breach. Understand? They’ll lose their hold on you the moment that thing is gone.”
“They won’t let me go,” Newton argues, his voice pathetically small.
“They don’t have a choice. We’re severing the connection.” He grips Newton’s shoulder, willing courage into his heart. This is the drift, after all. Newton can feel his determination, just as he can feel Newton’s despair.
The man has had ten years to learn how helpless he is. Ten years alone, but for his captors, seeing his hopes crushed again and again. It’s a miracle he has any fight left in him at all.
“You’ve done everything you could,” Hermann says, still holding tight to his drift partner; he will never allow Newton to be torn away from him again. “I’ll take you the rest of the way. All you have to do is hold onto me, and trust that I will not abandon you.”
“I trust you, Hermann,” Newton says.
The next moment, the rangers carry out their orders. Newton screams in pain, reflected back on him by the kaiju brain in its final moments, while the world goes to pieces all around them.
Alice is dead.
And they will be, too, if they don’t run now.
Gehyrest þu, Eadwacer? Uncerne earne hwelp
bireð Wulf to wuda.
Do you hear me, Warden? There goes our wretched whelp,
Carried off to the woods by a wolf.
Sirens blare, twisted distortion of the old kaiju alarms warping and reforming into inhuman screams of fury. Hermann doesn’t stop to think what might be at their heels.
He runs, first down the holloway with its echoes of Newton’s own thoughts, then out into the merciless storm when even that destabilizes and falls away. The hivemind is losing cohesion in Newton’s psyche, with nothing to ground them on this side of the breach.
They’re going to win.
Newton whoops with unbridled joy, raising one hand to gesture rudely at the things trying to claw him back.
“Screw you, Alice! I’m going home!”
Then he hunkers down into Hermann’s fur, to protect himself from the slashing wind. They’re not safe yet. Those things will kill him if they can, rather than let him go free, but Hermann keeps him one step ahead of the worst of it. Just a little longer now.
“Why are you the wolfman now, anyway?” Newton asks. “I didn’t think you were a furry.”
Hermann is not a furry, as a matter of fact, and if he were, he wouldn’t be anything so common as a wolf. But he can’t think of himself as he is, or else he won’t believe he can succeed. And in the drift state, belief matters.
He runs, with Newton clinging to his back, dodging blows that would knock him off his feet if he lost focus, even for a moment, and allowed them to connect. And when the illusion of solid ground disintegrates beneath his feet, he leaps up and away, and continues running on nothing at all, dodging left and right, streaking away at inhuman speed while unseen things strike at his heels, trying to tear his Newton away from him.
If they succeed, there will be no second chance.
He won’t allow it. A wolf can run farther and faster than any human, and it has claws and teeth, to tear out its enemies’ throats if running fails. It takes a monster to escape a monster.
“Holy shit, you’re kind of scary,” Newton whispers.
Right. They’re drifting. He heard all that.
No matter. They’re almost clear now, running through a formless void with only intermittent flickers of alien influence in the shared mindscape. In moments, Newton will be free.
And then what? comes Newton’s unspoken thought.
But the answer should be obvious. Hermann has no intention of saving Newton from the hivemind only to turn him away to face the world alone. There’s a reason why Hermann chose a wolf over any other predator. It’s not just about being able to run and to fight. Wolves are social animals. And they mate for life.
“Oh,” Newton gasps.
This is the moment it should all go wrong. One final strike to take Newton out with them. And all of this will have been for nothing.
But still Newton holds to him, and that blow never comes. The thousand screaming voices fade into silence.
Everything is still.
Hermann lets go of the predator within. He needs only, now, to be human.
The nothingness around them changes all at once, suffused with light, and warmth, and music, and love. Overwhelming love, buoyant, unmistakable love.
They’re drifting now with no one but each other.
þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs,
uncer giedd geador.
It’s easily torn apart, that which was never joined,
Never composed - the song of you and me.
They wake to the reality of a cell, restraints,a procedure performed without consent on a man who has had far too little say over anything that’s happened to him for far too long. But before Hermann can feel a moment’s guilt, Newton laughs.
He laughs. Newton is free, he’s himself, and by Jove, he’s laughing.
“You got him?” Jake asks, and Hermann is shocked to think that he doesn’t see the difference between Newton and his alien puppeteers.
“Of course I got him. There was never any doubt.”
“Those fuckin’ guys were no match for him!” Newton cheers. “Wolves mate for life, baby!”
“Oh, shut up about that,” Hermann mutters. It sounds positively absurd to say that now, in the real world and not in the heat of the moment.
“I will not shut up, I’m in love with a cringey millennial weirdo and I want the whole damn world to know it!” Newton's grin has a manic edge Hermann has seen in him often enough before. He’s clinging to his happiness by a hair’s breadth, desperately afraid of what else there is to feel. But his face softens when he looks into Hermann’s eyes. “I really am, you know,” he says. “In love, I mean. With you.”
And that’s why they’ve succeeded. Why Hermann was able to bring him back. The precursors forced a bond on him, but it was never real. Not like the drift, not a partnership, not a joining of equals.
“You are my partner,” Hermann says, “and I will never allow anything like this to happen to you again. I promise.”
Newton goes quiet at that. He knows what a promise means to Hermann. How seriously he takes it. Hermann never makes a promise he doesn’t intend to keep.
“You…you really saved me,” Newton says, a tremor in his voice.
“And I would do it again. Don’t ever doubt it.”
“Wolves mate for life,” Newton says again, very softly.
“For life,” Hermann agrees.
And God help anyone who tries to take his partner from him again.