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Sometimes when Hermann dreams, he can still see the red sky and the terrifying gray ranks of the invaders who came so close to entering their world. He’ll hear the cry of the kaiju factories and see the birth of something so inhuman that his screams become stuck in his throat because the beast swallows all sound and all fear in its path.
Then Hermann will twitch, and the dream will change. He’s seven and too small for his age and Newt’s glasses slide down Hermann’s sweaty nose in the heat by the lake. His mouth tastes like dirt and juice and there is the low strum of a guitar in the background. He pretends that there are monsters at the bottom of the lake, and Newt’s Uncle laughs and puts him on his shoulders and Hermann can see the whole world from up there.
When Hermann wakes up, he’s still in his bunk at the Shatterdome. The Kaiju are defeated, and he has never been to that lake in Germany, and he has never sat on someone’s shoulders.
Hermann isn’t sure which dream he hates more.
///
“I have half a mind to demand to know when we get to leave this place.” Hermann grumbles one afternoon, when he and Newt are sitting down to lunch in the commissary of the Shatterdome.
It’s mostly empty now, with half the personal either leaving for greener pastures or just taking a well-deserved rest. All that’s really left are a few engineers, the higher-ups, and the pilots. Which… well there are only two active pilots left, aren’t there.
They made Newt and Hermann stay for medical, at first, to make sure they hadn’t given themselves permanent brain damage after hooking their heads up to a dead embryo. Although even thinking of such a plan should’ve landed them both in the loony bin.
They were cleared after a week, but Hermann thinks that’s only because he never said anything about the dreams. About waking up in the morning with a growl on his lips and his hands gripped like claws into his mattress and needing to count prime numbers until he feels human again.
“Leave??” Newt is incredulous, “Why, Hermann, would you ever want to leave?? I can do anything I want here! No more stupid ‘safety limitations’ on this lab, baby!”
“You know, not all of us are content to live pent up like rats in a cage.”
“Dude,” Newt laughs, “we’re not the rats here! We’re the… we’re the cheese! They’re the rats! The PPDC and the Universities and… even Marshal Hansen, I think. They all want us! There’s just formalities and stuff first. Give it like another week and we’ll be on a world tour, I promise!” Herman pauses a moment to consider the other man’s words while Newt shovels sauce-soaked bread into his mouth. “Besides,” he adds, “we totally saved the world. I’m sure we could go anywhere we wanted to right now if we asked. So you know, any time you want to leave, we’ll leave.”
Hermann wants to say that he wants to go home, but it’s been so long that he’s not even sure where home is anymore. Is it Germany? Is it England? Is it just a shatterdome – any shatterdome?
He thinks that maybe the lab has become his home, and that terrifies him because a pieced together DYI lab in Hong Kong was never supposed to be his home.
Then Hermann looks across the table at Newt and realizes he has had only two constants in his life for the past ten years, and one of them was sealed up with a nuclear bomb.
///
Newt’s burned into Hermann’s brain now, like an itch he can’t scratch. Whenever they’re in the same room together – which Newt likes to make sure is almost always – there’s the low hum at the back of his mind telling him Newt is there and Newt is feeling and breathing and sometimes they feel and breathe in unison and it makes Hermann drop his chalk.
Sometimes the hum sounds like a synthesizer, sometimes it’s the low plucking of a base guitar, and on two occasions Hermann could’ve sworn that it was the wine of an electric violin.
Interestingly enough, music was never one of the things they really fought about. Sure, sometimes he’d complain to Newt about screeching guitars and drum kits set to blow, but it was mostly because he’d tired out his usual complaints about chunks of rotting monster flesh left strewn across his desk when Hermann had specifically said that he wanted that cleaned up three days ago.
To be honest, Hermann never had much of an opinion on music one way or the other – though he sometimes liked deconstructing it down into its mathematical formulas when he was bored. ‘That’s why this is popular,’ he’d think while turning his mind back to more important things, ‘just because the numbers make it so.’
Now Hermann will catch himself singing lyrics to songs he never knew, and when he stops and thinks too hard about it, the words will vanish. He panics, because things aren’t supposed to vanish from Hermann’s mind, ever.
So he starts writing down the frequencies of the chords and the beat of the lyrics while he sings and slowly the panics fade.
///
Hermann wakes up one night to find Newt standing in his door way. He’s naked from the waist up, and his tattoos almost seem to glow in the dark.
“I never knew,” he says, and he’s crying and it’s the first time either one of them have talked about the memories that they never asked for, tearing at their frontal lobes and dripping blood over the collar of Hermann’s sweaters.
“Well obviously you didn’t know,” Hermann says, irritated because it’s 2:36 in the morning and he has never wanted to have this conversation with anyone. “I never told you, so how could you know?”
He knows what Newt’s going to do before he does it, so he moves over on the bed and allows for Newt’s skinny arms to wrap around his shoulders. They’re both too bony by far, and any physical interaction between the two of them shouldn’t feel as comfortable as it does. Like a well-worn sweater.
“God, Hermann, your dad was such a- he was such a dick!” Newt whispers, and Hermann laughs because “a dick” is certainly an understatement when talking about his father. “Hey don’t- don’t laugh! I’m trying to communicate here! I had a dream where he was…” Newt shivers and Hermann sighs, because he’s had that dream before.
It’s the dream where he crouches down on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees while his father screams at him that he’ll never be good enough. He’ll never be good enough for anything, or anyone.
This dream is old hat to Hermann by now.
“I’m sorry, Newton, that we didn’t all grow up with loving parents and a kindly uncle to teach us science. Some of us just had to make do.”
Which makes Hermann so angry sometimes that his blood boils and he can feel the monster from the drift begging to be released. And he’s not even sure what he’s more angry about, that Newt got to have that beautiful summer down by the lake as his childhood or that Hermann is just so pathetically grateful that somebody had the childhood he always dreamed of.
And then he feels despicable because here is Newt hugging him and getting snot and tears all over Hermann’s shoulder and normally Hermann would complain but he’s feeling too tired and too vulnerable and Newt’s sadness and love sounds like a blues guitar in Hermann’s brain. Hermann never even knew that he liked the blues until now.
“But you shouldn’t have had to make do… that’s what I’m trying to tell you man! You’re better than that! I’m telling you that you’re better than-” Newt is really yelling now and Hermann claps a hand over his mouth before he wakes up the whole bloody floor.
“Just. Just go to sleep Newt. Please.”
“Okay dude, fine. Whatever you say.” With those words Newt totally deflates, and it’s only another 30 seconds before he’s snoring contentedly in Hermann’s bed.
Hermann supposes that it’s easy, when you share neural pathways, to forget that going to sleep might actually include going back to your own bunk. He supposes that it’s easy to be tired, and caught up in the warmth of someone else’s body, so that you just stay where you are. That’s an explanation that might be scientifically credible. Maybe.
But Hermann likes cold hard facts.
///
They saved the world together, so they can’t be enemies anymore. Which, Hermann has to admit, they never really were. Rivals. Antagonists. Bitter little boys. But never really enemies. That was a term reserved exclusively for the kaiju.
They could be called friends now. They fist pounded and hooked up their brains to a dead infant kaiju, and ran together (Hermann ran!) from a helicopter to save the world, so friends applies to them.
But they have the same patterns cut into their brains, they dream the same dreams and wake up with the same craving for bitter black coffee – which is something neither of them drank before the drift – so they have to be something more than friends.
It’s a state without any clear cute definition. The only people who have drifted together before are Jaeger co-pilots, but Hermann has never been inside any machine other than an airplane. Taking the term for himself and Newt feels almost disrespectful; for all that they were just as instrumental in winning the war.
So the lack of precision continues to needle at Hermann’s brain, so he turns his mind back to numbers.
///
When Hermann walks in on Newt piercing his own ear, he doesn’t know what to say. For a brief moment it takes him back to birthing chambers and the scraping of nails against embryonic sacs, but then the thought is gone as quickly as it came and then it’s just Hermann feeling vaguely, but fondly, exasperated and making sure that Newt at least disinfected the needle first because that would be just the sort of thing he would forget.
“Do you really think this is my first gig?” Newt whines, “I’ve had piercings before, back in college.”
“I know. I was rather hoping you at least got it done professionally, like those tattoos.”
“Oh, no man,” Newt laughs and then the needle is through and Hermann feels the sharp prick of it through his own ear. “I haven’t got an artistic bone in my body… visual art, I mean. Those had to be done by a professional. Anyone can do a piercing,” Newt offers Hermann the needle, “you want one?”
“No.”
“I mean obviously I’d get you a clean needle. I’m not an idiot.”
Hermann is painfully aware of the fact that Newt is anything but an idiot. He has the wrong memories to prove it.
He still doesn’t get the piercing, but he stays to watch Newt do another, already bracing himself for the sting.
///
Sometimes Hermann reaches out for Newt when he’s not there and Hermann finds his mind gaping with the lack of contact. Except for that one night, there hasn’t been any physical contact between them, so Hermann can’t understand why he feels as though Newt’s arms were just around him a moment ago. He doesn’t know how he misses the huff of Newt’s breath at his neck.
Sometimes Hermann pulls at his shirtsleeve and expects to see red and blue and yellow ink on his wrist, and when it’s not there he wonders if he could scratch his skin clean and find different skin underneath. He wonders if it would Newt’s or the kaiju’s.
He runs the equations again and again, tries to find out when this will end, when their brains will repair, when he can just be Hermann again, instead of HermanNewtKaijuAll, but he keeps getting numbers that don’t add up until he nearly cracks the chalkboard in half.
“You okay?” Newt asks, but they both know the answer to that, so there’s no point in talking.
///
They do go on tour, just like Newt predicted. It’s Ranger Becket and Ranger Mori, with Marshal Hansen, Tendo Choi, and of course Dr. Geiszler and Dr. Gottlieb.
They do the coastal countries first, since they’re the ones that need the moral boost the most. They’re the cities with fires that burn for the dead, with harbors covered in kaiju blue and deceased Rangers’ faces flashing on their televisions every twenty minutes. It’s about time they saw some alive ones.
Newt signs autographs while Hermann scowls, until Newt grabs his arm and forces him to sign autographs too.
“These kids are gonna be little scientists one day! Look, that’s a mini Hermann right over there if I’ve ever seen one. Same terrible haircut. Are you really going to deny him your awesome signature?”
So Hermann sits between Newt and Becket and signs the autographs and looks over childrens’ equations and even gets presented with a handmade stuffed kaiju which he immediately throws into the trash once he gets back to his hotel room.
They all eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. Mako and Raleigh have adjoining rooms and no one talks about how Marshal Hansen keeps Max close at all times. Hermann thinks he might even bathe with the dog. They’re sad when they’re not happy and happy when they’re not sad and mostly they’re just relieved. If this is the price to pay for a safe world, then they will empty their pockets of it.
“You know,” Mako says one night, and Hermann has to admit that he really likes her, “the new neural pathways formed when you drift with someone never disappear. The changes are permanent.”
“What?”
“I saw your equations, I know what you were working on. The ‘drift hangover’ as pilots call it, it never goes away.”
“Then a hangover is quite a misnomer, isn’t it.”
“When you drift with someone,” Mako continues, ignoring Hermann’s bitter laugh, “it’s special. It’s forever.”
“…I knew that already,” Hermann mumbles, and he looks off to the side where Newt is currently jamming out with a toddler’s battery powered guitar. Of course he knew that. He’s been working around drift technology and Jaeger pilots for years.
“It would not have worked if you weren’t drift compatible.” Mako says, and she sends a fond smile to Raleigh who automatically returns it from across the room.
“I know that too. I just… needed to run the numbers to be sure, I suppose.”
///
It’s been made clear to them that once they get through the press junkets and the propaganda and the smiles for the camera, they’re all free to go. Or at least, he and Newt are free to go.
Hermann has a dozen offers from Universities. He’s been asked to head up special divisions doing this and that. He’s been asked to organization organizations. He’s been asked by Virgin Atlantic what the probability of Trans-Dimensional Vacation Travel being a viable technology in the near future is. He told them 0% and then asked if they were out of their minds.
Newt was right; they’re not the rats anymore. Hermann isn’t even sure that they’re the cheese, since the cheese has no choice in its fate once the rat finds it.
After years of being shuttled around from one Kaiju Science Team to another, of high stark metal walls and the clangs of Jaeger engineering and the smell of oil and salt water, Hermann can go anywhere he wants. He could go be a shepherd in New Zealand, if he so felt like it.
Hermann doesn’t feel like being a shepherd in New Zealand, or anywhere else for that matter.
Instead of finding the offer that fits, instead of painstakingly going over benefits and laws and immigration, Hermann shows up at Newt’s hotel room one night and talks to him about the instruments his uncle made.
“Of course I could make them again,” Newt says, “I mean, who do you think you’re talking to here? Don’t you know what I’m capable of?”
“Yes, Newt, I remember that you built a drift machine out of garbage. I’m the one who found your almost lifeless body, aren’t I?”
So they tinker together for an hour and put together something that could pass for a soundboard if the only sounds you wanted came from instruments that belong in a Dr. Seuss book. Which, Newt says, is exactly what he was going for and Hermann knows that he’s not lying about that in the same way that he knows the exact temperature of Newt’s skin and that Newt’s breath will taste like cherry coke if he kisses him.
There’s a lot of debate, for Hermann, about when he should kiss Newt and if he should kiss Newt and are these feelings real or manufactured from sharing a drift but that of course brings in a whole bunch of questions about sibling and parent/child drift pairs which is a conversation that Hermann excuses himself from so in the end he just focuses on the numbers and the drift compatibility and he leans forward and catches the right half of Newt’s mouth in an awkward kiss.
It takes a second and a half for him to kiss all of Newt’s mouth, and Hermann has to say that that’s a lot better. Even if Newt’s hispter glasses are digging into his cheek.
Newt grins into the kiss and Hermann realizes that the bastard was expecting it this whole time and just thought putting together an electronic instrument was a fun type of foreplay and that just makes Hermann kiss him harder and when he stops to unbutton Newt’s shirt, Newt actually starts laughing.
“If this is so funny to you, I can leave.”
“No it’s just that dude, dude! It’s taken us so long to get here but I’ve wanted this the whole time and then it happens while we’re in Panama which is hilarious because I’ve never even been to Panama before! And you taste like vanilla coke!” and Newt keeps laughing until Hermann kisses him again, but even then Hermann can still feel the laughter vibrating in Newt’s skull and it sounds like the guitar Newt used to play in college.
He dreams that night of his own father, who died alone in a nursing home without anyone around to love him.
He dreams of the lake, and the squelch of mud between his toes and the way Newt’s mother used to brush back his hair and how Newt would stare at the tattoo on her wrist that his father used to kiss.
He does not dream of the kaiju, or the drift, for the first time in a very long time. There is no roar in his chest, just the sounds of water lapping at a shore and a single acoustic guitar. He wakes up with a clear mind and even breathing and it feels like the first time Hermann has slept in months.
Hermann does not wake up this time to find himself entangled in the yarn of Newton Geiszler, because Newt is already awake and scribbling madly on a piece of paper.
“What are you doing?”
“I figured we would go to the lake, you know, the one I went to as a kid?” Newt grins and pushes his glasses up his nose, “We’d be able to get a house there for the summer, no problem. The water should be nice right now.”
“Newt, I-“
“Then there’s the question of after the summer like, where we’re going to work? And I saw that we both have offers at MIT but you also have an offer at Harvard and I don’t want to presume anything obviously but you know what I’m totally gonna presume a little bit so I’m not saying you have to take either of those jobs but you know Boston is a pretty cool place and it’s not on the Pacific Ocean which really just seals the deal for me and-“
“Newton,” Hermann barks, and Newt stops, just freezes mid sentence. They stare at each other for a second before Newt tentatively reaches his hand across the table and grips lightly onto Hermann’s fingers.
“What? What did I say? Do you not want to go to the lake?”
“I do, just…” Hermann fumbles and frowns for a second before leaning over and kissing Newt once on the lips. “Good morning, first. Let’s start there.”
“Good morning!” Newt choruses, and then laughs and switches on his iPod and ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ by the Beatles comes on, which is a song Hermann has never heard before and yet knows all the lyrics to.
“You think you’re hilarious, don’t you.”
“I think I’m a little hilarious, yeah. But you think the same don’t you? I know you do.”
“Maybe.”
It’s not quite an ‘I love you,’ or a ‘since we drifted together with a kaiju I have been terrified of screaming monsters that never leave me alone and your brain has become part of my brain and I want to know you inside out and sleep inside of your breath and hear your music in my skull and when your knee locks around mine at night I want to pull you close and never let go.’
But it is something.
The rest of the equation will follow eventually, Hermann is sure.