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It starts off entirely reasonable and innocent.
There’s an alarm in the middle of the night, during one of the incredibly rare instances when Tendo managed to get himself a few decent hours of sleep before being jerked awake by the blaring alarms. The problem with being a LOCCENT technician, especially a senior officer, is that you never really clock out of work, and two minutes later finds Tendo bounding the stairs to LOCCENT three at a time in naught but boxers and a ratty old Modest Mouse t-shirt, a far cry from his usual impeccable style.
The shirt had been a present from an ex, back when he’d been nineteen and in love with all those old-school nineties bands and he’d just never gotten rid of it, especially when two years later he’d been packing what little he still had left while the Trespasser’s corpse burned thirty miles away. It had an odd sense of comfort to it, the same feeling of the hot chocolate your mother used to make or the blanket you slept with as a child, and while he hasn’t listened to the band in years, the sentimentality remained.
And that shirt why he’s nearly jumped by Geiszler when he’s still trying to make his way back to his room--having only just realized he’s barefoot too, and mourning the cold concrete of the shatterdome’s floors. Geiszler’s not looking too much better, his hair even more crazed than usual, but when he catches a look at Tendo’s state of dress (both subject matter and in general, the disheveled look that looks wrong on him) his face breaks out into a wide grin.
“Oh, man, you listen to Modest Mouse?” he asks excitedly, trying to balance the large stack of papers in his arms. Given that this is the first time either of them have really spoken beyond purely professional circumstances, Tendo raises an eyebrow.
“Um, yeah. Sort of.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Not so much anymore, but I was real into them in high school.”
“Dude,” Geiszler says, and shifts the papers again. “Dude. You had to have been into the Smiths, then.”
At that Tendo perks instantly, previous uncertainty washed away. “Are you kidding,” he responds, breaking out into a grin, tired though he is. “Morrissey is a god, man, my entire life was changed when You Are The Quarry came out.” The noise Geiszler makes in response is nothing short of an excited groan, knees bending with the weight of his excitement.
“Thank you,” he tells the ceiling, eyes closing and papers threatening to spill over. “Someone with a musical taste that isn’t two centuries old, I’ll never have to listen to Hermann’s concertos again. God bless whatever deity made this a real possibility.”
“Sounds redundant,” Tendo replies, amused as he reaches over and pulls some of the papers into his own arms. Newt makes an affectionate, thankful noise and shifts the weight again. “Should’ve known you’d be a rocker. All those tattoos should’ve been a giveaway.”
“I’m not the only one rocking ink, here,” Newt points out, and at the silent request Tendo turns his head to show Newt the lettering dancing across his neck. “Pretty sweet. Got any more?”
“Oh, yeah.” He shrugs with the stack of papers. “Bunch of ‘em. Not as many as you, though.”
“I’ve just got a mild obsession,” Newt waves off casually, and nods his head towards the corridor they’d both been walking down. “C’mon, we can talk on the way to our rooms. If you didn’t like Queen we’re going to have to have a long and difficult talk, dude.”
Tendo scoffs. “Who doesn’t like Queen?”
And, weirdly enough, they become friends.
-
They begin hanging out a little more, first only during the quick moments when Tendo can duck out of LOCCENT long enough to grab a quick lunch or even an hour of downtime, and after a while he starts spending that hour with a cup of ramen noodles overcooked in the mess hall microwave and his feet propped up on Newt’s desk in his tiny room. He’s loosened his bow tie and pulled his suspenders down, because the room is stuffy and it’s been a goddamn long day.
They’re discussing the finer points of Metallica’s third album (“Newsted wasn’t as good as Burton because no one will be better than Burton but you know I still think it was a goddamn good replacement on their part”) and in the middle of Newt’s tirade he jumps up to grab a drink around the same moment someone knocks on the door.
“Can you get that?” Newt shouts, and Tendo, rolling his eyes, walks over to open the door to Mako, her clipboard hugged to her chest and her expression confused at the sight.
“Oh,” she says, and looks a little surprised. “I thought this was Dr. Geiszler’s room.”
“It is!” Newt shouts from somewhere in the bitty kitchen, voice carrying.
Oddly, Mako turns a bright red and bows low. “I’m sorry,” she says quickly, “I did not mean to intrude.”
Tendo just laughs it off and offers Mako the door with a sweep of his hand. “You weren’t intruding, Miss Mori, don’t worry about that,” he says kindly as Newt emerges, wiping his wet hands on his trousers, and she looks between the two of them before narrowing her eyes the tiniest bit. Something looks like it clicks, and then she’s smiling a little as she nods and bows again.
“Thank you,” she replies, and to Newt, says, “The Marshall would like to see you to go over your reports with Dr. Gottlieb,” she explains. “He also asks that the two of you take turns in speaking rather than bickering as usual.”
“I will if he does,” Newt grumbles, and to Tendo says, “hey but seriously, come over later so we can continue our conversation, I was getting into it. Can you lock the door?”
Tendo nods to both statement and question and as Newt bounces away behind Mako, she looks over his shoulder and there’s something almost like a sly little smile on her face.
Weird.
-
“Hey! Got those pictures of the Kaiju from the last attack!” is how Tendo greets Newt in the mess hall the following morning after a particularly long and gruesome night. There are bags under his eyes and it’s at least his fourth cup of coffee, but the sight of his friend bounding through the aisles made by the tables perks his mood significantly. Newt yelps at the news and practically dives at him, leaving an irritable looking Dr. Gottlieb in his wake. Tendo takes note of the way he shakes his head at Newt’s retreating back and that’s about when Newt collides solidly with his shoulders.
“Dude, seriously?” Newt sounds like he’s a moment away from spontaneously combusting out of pure glee. “Show me, show me!”
“You could ask politely,” Tendo says, without meaning it.
“Lemme see,” Newt whines instead, stretching himself over Tendo’s back and resting his chin on the tip of his shoulder. Their cheeks are smooshed together, scratchy and clean-shaven, and it’s going to leave scratches at this rate. Tendo just raises the tablet, relenting, and flicks through the pictures one by one, and Newt keeps leaning forward until Tendo’s practically bent double against the table, pointing at different parts of the Kaiju and babbling incessantly.
“Dude do you even see that right there? That hide’s gotta be like, over three feet thick, no wonder Cherno was having such an issue with it, oh man that’s beautiful, just. Look at it, wow.” He sounds reverent, high off knowledge and delight and Tendo laughs because it’s so nice, so contagious to find someone who genuinely finds the beauty in horror, and it’s right then that Herc Hansen clears his throat and says above them, “keep it to yourselves, mate. The Marshall’s coming ‘round.”
They both look up, startled, but Herc’s already walking away and they exchange glances, Newt still hanging all over Tendo like personal space has never been an issue for him in his life. They look around, and people’s heads duck back down. But it had been clear that they were staring, and there’s a moment of confused silence.
“What?” Newt finally asks, and Tendo shrugs.
-
Tendo reckons his finest shared moment with Newt is when Dr. Gottlieb files a complaint about the incessant racket that can only be referred to as “Tubthumping” and refers to them as “the cackling, incomprehensible lovebirds of old school rock music.”
-
It’s not all light-hearted games and grins across the mess hall, though.
“It’s okay, man.” Newt’s voice is the quietest Tendo’s ever heard it, soft in the silence of the room. Tendo just stares at the ceiling, feeling a dark pit settling in his stomach. They’re both lying on Tendo’s bed shoulder to shoulder with their feet dangling off the edge, scuffing the concrete. Tendo’s room isn’t very big, and it feels stifling, like all the air is too heavy to breathe. He manages to keep his cool for so long in LOCCENT that sometimes it all sort of builds, and after a while it spills out in the form of shaking panic, running through his veins like poison until he needs to close his eyes and block everything out. “It’s alright, it sucks but you’re gonna be okay.”
Most people aren’t around for this part of the job, the times when the anxiety that curls around his spine finally explodes, but Newt had followed him when he’d quietly excused himself from the main deck and carefully made his way back to his room. He feels itchy all over, stress boiling to its breaking point. And Newt, of all people, manic extraordinaire, is quietly talking him through it.
“Dude, trust me, I get it, this shit is stressful.” His hand is rubbing Tendo’s shoulder in warm circles, and he takes a second to take a deep breath while Newt keeps talking. His words are fast, but the tone is still soft and kind. “I’ve had a few of these myself, it’s like, man, it’s like you’re drowning sometimes but we have a bunch of people to hold us up, okay, and it’s. Yeah. It’s gonna be fine.”
It’s odd, almost awkward, but it feels nice, and Tendo appreciates it. Having acquaintances as a result of working in the same place day in and day out is one thing, but having an actual friend is something else entirely. They end up falling asleep, both too tired to stay up for very long, and when Tendo wakes up, Newt’s arm is thrown over his chest and they’re sharing the same pillow.
He yawns and carefully disengages himself, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes when he catches out of the corner of his eye a change to the room.
Raleigh’s had free access without really asking to come in for a while now, before Hong Kong, all the way back to Anchorage when they’d hang out in each other’s rooms until the wee hours of the morning, and Tendo’s not surprised when he finds a note tacked to the tiny fridge in Raleigh’s untidy scrawl.
Hey, you two were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you up. You looked upset before and I know you get antsy sometimes, stress and stuff. Glad Newt’s taking care of you though, you deserve it. Talk later?
-Raleigh
Tendo runs a hand through his hair and then scrubs it down his face. From somewhere on his bed, Newt snorts in his sleep.
Raleigh’s a good kid.
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hansen jrs got a copy of the stones 2nd album wont share it gotta steal it u in
Tendo can’t help but laugh out loud.
ok but if he catches us im not taking the heat
excuse u are we not bros here choi we both go down together man
fine but ur going in first
deal
It goes about as well as they’d imagine, and Chuck glares at them for two weeks straight afterwards, telling them that if they try something like that again “I’ll hit you round the head so hard even your goddamn children’ll feel it.”
-
“Mr. Choi, this is entirely unprofessional behavior.” Pentecost sounds less than pleased with the fact that his senior technician currently has his head pressed against the LOCCENT console with very little indication that he’ll be getting up, but Tendo feels like he weighs five hundred pounds, shoulders sagging. When the Marshall clears his throat again, however, sounding even less amused, Tendo finally manages to tug himself into a sitting position. He knows he looks like death warmed over, but the goddamn coffee machine in the mess hall has been broken for a day and a half.
“It’ll be working again in short order, Mr. Choi,” Pentecost offers, not sounding very convincing. “In the meantime maybe you can direct your attention to the task at hand like everyone else who has to suffer through the day without injecting caffeine into their veins.”
“Please don’t taunt me,” Tendo says into his arms, miserable as he runs his hands through his hair. “If only I could.”
“No need!” A sing-song voice echoes across the room and everyone turns to find Newt, looking dirty and unkempt, walking towards the console and rubbing his dirty hands together. He looks like he just spent an entire day in a car workshop, a smudge of something on his cheek. But as soon as he reaches the small collection of people he throws his arms out, looking supremely pleased with himself. “All fixed, back to working order, courtesy of yours truly.”
He grins widely at the stunned look on Tendo’s face and elaborates.
“I fixed it for you.” Newt does pause, for a moment. “Well, I guess and everyone else who drinks coffee here, but my motivation was your misery. Which, contextually, sounds cruel but in fact was the complete opposite. I fixed it to get rid of your misery, which sounds a lot better.”
Tendo just blinks at him. “Wasn’t that. Difficult, or something?”
“Nah,” Newt replies easily. “I took a lot of engineering classes in college, and like, a lot of tinkering through the years gives you a pretty good arsenal of knowledge when it comes to this shit. Ancient broken coffee machine? No problem.”
He can’t help it; he stands and grabs Newt by the face, kissing him right on the mouth hard enough to stagger him a little, and then smacks both cheeks and shakes his head with the force of his gratitude and excitement.
“I fucking love you, man.”
Pentecost makes a sound like a cross between an unimpressed huff and a disgruntled sigh.
-
It’s only when Sasha pulls Tendo aside one afternoon and asks him, with a serious expression on her face, whether or not Newt has been a proper, verbatim, “English say ‘boyfriend’, is that correct?” that Tendo feels maybe something may have been misinterpreted along the way.
True, Newt is a boy, and he is a friend, but up until this moment Tendo had never really bothered to consider that their touchy-feely attitudes could be misconstrued as anything else. Tendo just stares at her for a moment, eyebrows raised so high they’re nearly disappearing into his hairline. Tendo’s known the Kaidonovskys for a while now and he’d call what they have a pleasant acquaintanceship, going so far as to say casual friends perhaps, especially after Tendo single-handedly kept the crew together when the Kaiju was heading towards the shatterdome, but he hadn’t expected Sasha to actually care about him enough to double-check his social life.
“Um,” he says as a response, because he honestly does not know what to say to that. Her eyes narrow, and he flounders for a better response. A thought runs through his mind, and he rolls with it, thinking of what Newt will have to say about it later. “He’s. Great, ma’am. It’s been, uh, it’s been great. He’s a great. Boyfriend. Yes.”
Sasha raises her head to stare at him down her nose and, well, if Tendo hadn’t felt small around her before he certainly does now.
“Has, um. Has everyone been, ah, concerned about this?” he asks carefully, turning his head with the question, and Sasha crosses her arms.
“A few,” she allows, and Tendo clears his throat uncertainly.
“What constitutes a few?”
“Several,” is all she says in reply. “You are sure things are going well with doctor?”
“Yes,” he says slowly. “They are.”
“Good.” She claps him on the shoulder and it’s startlingly heavy. “Then I will not send Aleksis to him.”
-
“So. People think we’re dating,” Tendo finally says conversationally around a mouthful of cup ramen, later on when they’re hanging around in the lab by themselves, and Newt stares at him for a moment over his glasses. Finally he breaks out into a grin, one that Tendo shares wholeheartedly.
“We’ve gotta fuck with them.”
“We sure do, brother.” Tendo kicks his feet onto the desk. “We sure do.”
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