Work Text:
“You know I used to live a life of dignity and respect? Can you even believe that now?” Hermann snorts, tugging at his collar, taking his glasses off, putting them back on. “This situation, it’s utterly intolerable. It’s like he has no regard for my own personal space—my personal anything, for that matter! Oh, and I thought things would be better after we saved the world together. Fie, fie!”
Raleigh blinks at him from across the table, a forkful of meatloaf halfway to his mouth. “Did you just say fie?”
Hermann has the sense to look embarrassed. “What? No. Why would I say that?”
“I think you just said fie. Look, have you considered—”
“I have considered every single possibility!” Hermann cries, slapping his palms down on the table. “It is my duty as a mathematician to observe all the variables and follow them to the proper solution, and as a result I have come to the scientific conclusion that Newton has gone absolutely insane! He brought it into our house, Raleigh!” A few tables over, someone glances at them strangely. Hermann doesn’t seem to notice.
Raleigh pauses, staring off into the distance with a dubious expression. He raises a pointed finger. “…You two live together?”
Hermann harrumphs, a sound generally reserved for crotchety grandfathers that he had quickly adopted for himself. “Yes, well, housing is sparse after the catastrophe, and it really only made sense, localizing the variables and whatnot, and after all, henceforth for the good of science—”
“Okay, right, moving past that,” Raleigh says quickly. “Have you actually asked him to get rid of it?”
“When would I have possibly had time to do that? I was too busy fleeing for my life!”
Raleigh ponderously chews a bite of mashed potatoes while Hermann fidgets. “Follow up question: why are you talking to me about this?”
Hermann shoots him a look. It’s not a nice look.
With a sigh, Raleigh pinches the bridge of his nose in a long-suffering gesture Hermann is quite familiar with; except normally he is the one doing the suffering. “Don’t you guys have a landlord or something?”
“Yes, but he’s no use. I think Newton has him bought off somehow. He has enough blasted Kaiju organs lying around to start up his own illicit pharmacy.”
“What are you two talking about?” Mako asks, sliding into the bench across from Raleigh and bumping his shoulder affectionately as she sets down her lunch tray. All the familiar faces around the PPDC’s new Post-War division are one of the few things that have kept Hermann sane this past year after they sealed the Breach. One familiar face in particular is working tirelessly to the opposite ends.
“Newton brought home a new pet and Hermann doesn’t like it,” Raleigh explains through a mouthful of food.
Mako tilts her head to the side. “You two are living together?”
“Why does everyone find that so interesting?!” Hermann cries. “I am being terrorized within my own living space! He’s trying to destroy me!”
Mako giggles.
“This is no laughing matter,” Hermann says, standing up with a glint of purpose in his eye. “This is life or death. Drastic measures must be taken. Let no one say I was not driven to it.” He limps off down the hall, words like “intolerable” and “no choice” peppering the air behind him.
Raleigh turns to Mako with raised eyebrows. “Should we be concerned about this?”
Mako shrugs and jams a straw into her chocolate milk. “I’m sure they’ll work it all out. Or they’ll both kill each other and we won’t have to worry about it anyways.”
Raleigh toasts her carton with his own, sharing her mischievous grin. “Cheers.”
“Murderer!”
“Newton, just listen to reason—”
“You’re a goddamn psychopath!”
“Now that is completely unfair, you—”
“How could you do try to do this to me? To her? And you’ll be happy to know that the only surefire way we’ve figured out to kill these things is by depriving them of ammonia, so your knife-wielding antics were also completely pointless!”
“Her? Her? You have absolutely no way of determining its gender, it is a louse, you are literally cuddling with an overgrown skin parasite!”
Newton pulls the infernal creature closer to his chest, petting its hard outer shell as the little clawed legs squirm and writhe. “You’re hurting her feelings,” he says defensively. The louse screeches and tries to bite him. He smacks it on what could conceivably be the nose. Hermann watches them with a look of horrified disbelief.
“This is the last straw, Newton!” He says at last. “I could handle the entrails, the odd hours, the blasted terrible music—but this is too far.” He places both hands over his cane and tilts his head back dramatically. “Either it goes, or I do.”
Newton shrugs. “Yeah, okay. Just don’t mess up any of my things when you pack up.”
“I am not moving out, Newton! Get rid of it immediately!”
“You can’t make me do anything!” Newton screams, clutching the agitated mite tighter. “The apartment is under my name!”
“You tricked me into that! We are roommates, and we must respect each others’ wishes!”
“Well then maybe you should start respecting my wish to make Betty a well-loved member of this little family.”
Hermann stares at him. “Betty? You’re calling it Betty?”
“Yeah, I’m still working on the name,” Newton admits.
“Well that’s a terrible name, honestly Newton you should at least—We are not having this conversation.” He raises a finger threateningly. “I’ll report this, Newton. Don’t think I won’t.”
Newt snorts. “Report this to who? I’m the head of the bio-science branch, if I want to take home a Kaiju skinmite from the lab, then I will take a skinmite and no one can stop me.”
“This is ridiculous,” Hermann snarls. “Hand it over now!”
“No!” Newton screams, standing up and holding so-called Betty in front of him like a shield. Its razor-sharp legs thrashing the air madly. “Get away from us or I’ll sic her on you!”
“Newton—”
“Back! Back!” Newt lunges forward shoving the louse in Hermann’s face, as the creature screeches in impotent fury. Hermann is forced to back up or risk having his head removed, shouting and being shouted at as he’s driven out the door.
“This isn’t over, Newton!” He screams at the door as it slams in his face. “And Betty is a terrible name!”
Hermann takes a deep breath. Then he takes another. For good measure he takes a third, and he probably would have just kept on like that for the rest of the afternoon without lowering his blood pressure a single decimal point. And then Newton starts talking.
“I don’t understand what the big deal is,” he begins.
“Do not even start with me, Newton!” Hermann bursts out. “You brought that, that—monster into our home! I could have died!”
“Oh sure you could have died, because you’re a stupid sissy who can’t even defend himself against a harmless little skin louse—”
“Your definition of harmless continues to baffle and alarm me—”
“God, you are just so—”
“Quiet!” Herc Hansen yells. Newton and Hermann fall silent immediately, slinking lower in their seats. Herc looks out at them from across his desk like they’ve just slapped one of Newton’s specimens on the desk and demanded that he eat it. “Will one of you genius-level morons please explain to me what you’re doing in my office?”
“We needed a mediator,” Newt says. “Apparently the one thing our building tenants won’t tolerate is a 3-hour shouting match through our front door. So we decided to go to the authorities.”
“You do realize that I am not the police,” Herc says. “I feel obligated to point that out to you.”
“Newton has managed to acquire a living skin louse and is currently harboring it in our apartment,
Hermann jumps in before Newt can respond to that. “Surely that’s illegal? There’s some sort of law against that, yes? You can take it away?”
Herc shifts his baleful stare from one to the other. “You are seriously overestimating how much I care about your domestic disputes.”
Newt leans back and folds his colorful arms across his chest. “Well Hermann has decided that the best course of action is to be an unreasonable jackass, so we figured—”
“I object to that sort of language, my actions were perfectly reasonable for anyone operating in a sane frame of mind—”
“Shut up!” Herc bellows. “For crying out loud, if you’re going to invade my workspace and disrupt my afternoon, you’re going to do it like goddamn civilized people. No raised voices, and no statements that begin with ‘you’,” he warns, jabbing an accusing finger at Newton before he can get a word in. “Trust me, I’ve sat in on a lot of school counseling sessions, so I know how this works. You keep an even tone or you go fight in the hall.”
“Is that really what they tell highschoolers these days?” Newton wonders aloud.
“I believe our good friend was making a joke, the nuances of which undoubtedly escape you,” Hermann grumbles.
“No insults,” Herc warns, picking up his pen and scribbling away at one of the forms on his desk as he returns to his previous state of ignoring them entirely.
Newton grinds his teeth. “It hurt my feelings when you tried to stab Betty with a knife,” he says, his vicious glare betraying the reasonable tone.
A muscle in Herman’s cheek twitches. “I feel disrespected when you make decisions which affect my physical and mental wellbeing without my input.”
“I feel upset when you decide to be a control freak about everything,” Newton says, his voice rising.
“I feel like I want to hit you in the eye with my cane!” Hermann snarls.
“I feel like you should bring it on, baby!” Newton shrieks, rising halfway out of his chair.
“Christ Almighty,” Herc groans. “You two both saved the world together once, a fact which I am now in the process of disbelieving; can’t you come up with a single compromise?”
A light comes on behind Newton’s eyes. “Okay, fine,” He says. “If Hermann can survive in the house for one week without flipping out or staying in a hotel, I’ll do whatever he wants.”
“You do realize that ‘whatever I want’ will be having that thing disposed of immediately,” Hermann says.
“Oh, I think she’ll win you over in the end,” Newton replies. “She’s a real charmer, that one. Such a sweetheart. You know that when you tickle the gap between her second and third armor plates, she squirms around and squeaks extra loud? I like to think she’s laughing.”
Herc buries his face into his hands. “Get out. Both of you.”
The return trip to the apartment is nearly unbearable.
“…And she makes this really cute noise when she’s eating, like a sort of, mmrammghrmammmrmghhh.”
“Newton, I do not care.”
“And she’s really not that heavy, you can pick her up with one hand, of course that means she might try to bite you, because she hates being picked up or touched. So you should watch out for that.”
“Newton.”
“And I think she’s starting to recognize me,” Newton says happily, fiddling the keys into the door of their flat and stepping inside. “This morning when I woke her up in the lab, she stopped thrashing around and screaming only two minutes later, instead of the usual five—” Suddenly he stops in his tracks, his eyes widening. “Oh boy.”
Hermann glances around, his stomach sinking past his toes. “Oh dear god, what’s happened?”
Newton raises a finger and points towards a dark corner of the room. “She was supposed to stay in her playpen while we were gone.” He whirls around. “Shut the door, shut the door!”
Hermann fumbles it shut, plunging the room into darkness except for the light coming in front the window outside. “What the devil’s going on,” he hisses.
“Tessa escaped. I’m calling her Tessa now. We have to make sure she doesn’t get out, or else she might hurt herself. Don’t turn the light on!” He warns. “You’ll scare her.”
“Oh yes, I’d hate if we scared dear Tessa,” Hermann says, shuffling over to the couch and flopping down on it in exasperation. A dark shape moves out of the hallway and resolves itself into Newton’s face.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I am sitting on this couch and pretending that none of this is happening,” Hermann replies.
“Well that’s not very scientific of you, ignoring all the evidence to better fit a solution you agree with. Plus, catching a rogue skin louse is a two-man job.”
“I will not be roped into this insanity,” Hermann sniffs. “You can go deal with your pet by yourself.”
“Okay, but if something bad happens I’m going to blame you immediately,” Newton says, trudging off through the dark apartment with the occasional yelp or bump. Hermann is left by himself to the sound of his roommate sifting through pots and pans in the kitchen.
“Intolerable,” he mutters to himself, because it seems like the thing to say. The couch gives a slight twitch in agreement.
Hermann swallows. “Oh, bloody wonderful. Newton!” There’s a loud thump from the other room, followed by an inventive curse. Meanwhile the cushions beside him seem to be coming to life. “Newton, get in here this instant!”
“I’m a little busy to be babysitting you right now, Hermann!” comes his strangled reply.
“Newton!” He hisses, trying to keep his voice as loud and quiet as possible, “It’s inside the couch!”
There’s a beat of silence, followed by the rapid thud of running footsteps. A second later Newton tears out of the kitchen and stumbles to a halt in front of him. Hermann starts to get up.
“No no, don’t move!” Newton cries.
Hermann freezes, his heart pounding. “Why can’t I move?”
“You’ll antagonize her.”
“I don’t care—”
“Trust me, you will care! You will care very much! Now stay completely still and silent while I try and get her out.” He drops down to the floor and squints underneath the couch.
“I hate you so much,” Hermann mutters out of the edge of his mouth.
“I know,” is Newton’s muffled reply.
One week, Hermann reminds himself. One week of pure hell. He’d lived through years of it when he and Newt shared a lab. What’s seven days more?
When he wakes up the next morning there’s no food in the kitchen. Which is not all that odd, really; living with Newton meant a very liberal approach to buying groceries, but there had been leftovers from Olive Garden that Hermann had been looking forward to forcing down, and apparently in the night someone had gone through and removed every conceivably edible item of food in the entire apartment. Even the spices and condiments were gone.
He walks out into the main room to find Newton, hair and eyes wild, surrounded by the contents of their kitchen.
“She stopped eating,” he explains. “I’m not sure whether she didn’t like her food, so I thought I’d just try a few different things. I think she likes your biscuit things.”
Hermann turns around and goes back to bed. He is not yet equipped to deal with this.
It quickly turns out that the skinmite cannot be held by any cage, tank, or barrier that Newt tries to construct. Hermann discovers this firsthand when he wakes up the next morning to the feeling of something moving under the covers by his feet. He nearly checks into a hotel that very night, but the thought of Newton’s smug face is enough to keep him on the couch.
“She’s really quite friendly,” Newt says. “Except when she starts making that weird cooing sound. Then you might want to watch yourself.”
“Yes, of course,” Is Hermann’s miserable reply, as he sinks a little lower into the couch and cups a hand over his eyes.
Strange bite-marks start appearing out of everyday items: shoes, books, furniture, the walls. Listening for the scuttle of little clawed feet quickly becomes a habit for Hermann, after the first time the wretched beast nearly takes a chunk out of his foot. He sits with his legs propped up on the table now, and complains about his leg as often as Newton is around to hear it.
“You’re not going to want to go into the spare room,” Newton says one day.
Hermann leans on his cane and presses his lips together. “Should I ask why not?”
Newt just shakes his head and widens his eyes meaningfully. Hermann doesn’t ask.
It turns out that a skinmite is one of the most high-maintenance pets imaginable; it requires daily ammonia baths, massive amounts of exotic and constantly changing food, and enough attention to keep it even-tempered and, most importantly, nonviolent. To his credit, Newt does it all. Not to his credit, it’s still the worst possible animal companion Newt could have chosen.
The next day when Hermann gets home he finds Newton standing just a few feet from the door, his hands behind his back and his leg jiggling anxiously.
“Hermann, buddy, you’re home!” he exclaims, his voice shrill. “How was your day?”
Hermann stands in the door for a moment and sighs. “What happened,” He says tiredly, closing the door behind him and resigning himself to an evening of whatever wretched damage control Newton might require of him.
“Okay, look…don’t be mad,” Newton says.
When Hermann turns away from the door, Newt has stepped aside to reveal an empty space on the floor. Specifically, the empty space where their couch used to be.
For a minute he just stands there staring. Then Hermann takes off, his cane thwacking the floorboards with each step as he growls wordlessly in the back of his throat. Newt trails after him, gesturing frantically.
“Hermann, let’s just talk about this!”
“I’m going to throw it out the window,” he snarls.
“Okay, that wouldn’t really do anything, they’re really pretty tough, but please let’s try and work this out in some sort of nonviolent way,” Newt says, orbiting around the furious mathematician as he stomps around the apartment, peering under furniture and throwing open doors. The louse is nowhere to be found.
Eventually Hermann just stops, standing in the middle of the living room and staring at the space where at one point he could sit himself down and comfortably fume. Newt hovers a few feet away, his fist pressed to his mouth, staring at Hermann like he’s about to explode.
Hermann slowly shakes his head. Without his eyes leaving Newt’s, he slowly walks over to his armchair and pointedly lowers himself into it. Newt chews his lips in that guilty way of his. Then Hermann shifts his gaze out the window and slowly leans back, tapping his fingers on the head of his cane.
“Three more days,” he mutters to himself. “
The next time that Hermann comes home he finds the skinmite, and by extension Newton, in crisis.
“Stop biting yourself!” Newton cries, wrestling with the beast as it tries to claw its way under the table. There’s a sour smell in the air, and a trail of some unidentifiable fluid running around the living room. The carefully cultivated appearance of dishevelment that Newt seems to favor has been replaced by a state of actual mess; his glasses are askew, his shirt un-tucked, his hair seeming to puff up in agitation. As soon as Newt looks up to see Hermann standing over him, his eyes widen.
“Hermann, get over here and help me hold her!”
For a moment Hermann stalls a few feet away, feeling obligated to help yet also wanting very much to not. The louse attempts to scurry up the wall. “Newt, you said you would take care of all this by yourself.”
“She could be dying, just hold her!” Newton cries, shoving the squirming creature into Hermann’s arms and running off into his room. Hermann is left clutching the beast just a foot away from his chest as its legs splay out and wiggle furiously. The only thing stopping him from dropping it is the knowledge of what will happen if it is actually free to move. A few seconds later Newton returns with a massive syringe in his hand, his teeth bared savagely.
“I’m sorry Sheryl!” he yells as he stabs it into her underbelly. It stops squirming so immediately that Hermann nearly drops it. Its legs hang limp and lifeless, and a tendril of drool dribbles off one of its mandibles.
After a beat of silence, Hermann lets himself breathe. “Is it dead?” he asks. He can scarcely bring himself to hope.
Newt wipes a sheen of sweat off his forehead. “No no, just sedated.”
Hermann’s arms are getting tired from holding it so far away from himself, but he refuses to compromise on that front. “What did you give it?”
“This?” Newton waves the syringe around aimlessly before tossing it onto the table. “Sugar water. It makes them sleepy for some reason. Still trying to figure out why. Can you set her on the table?”
Hermann does as he’s told, laying the creature out on its back while Newton hovers anxiously in the background. It’s the first time he’s ever seen it so motionless. Its legs splay out at odd angles, occasionally twitching as if it’s dreaming. He’s reminded of the pet hermit crab he had as a child, if it bred with a spider and grew fifty times bigger.
“There you go,” Newton says, stepping in to wiggle its legs in a way that Hermann supposes is comforting. “Now, let’s fix that boo boo, okay? We can’t have you trying to eat your own organs again, silly!” Apparently the universal language of condescending pet-talk does not exclude Kaiju parasites.
Hermann watches as Newton tends to its wounds, fighting down nausea as he gets out the needle and thread.
“Good thing these guys don’t have any pain receptors,” Newton says as he cheerfully stitches up the gash in one of its soft tissue walls.
“Certainly,” Hermann says, resisting the urge to gag. He focuses instead on what is probably the creature’s face: over a set of vicious mandibles, its six black eyes are still. Now that Hermann is seeing it up close for the first time, it’s not as hideous as he thought; its skin is a pearly white, the translucent membranes on the inside as fine as tissue paper. Its flesh is speckled with blue splotches. Hermann isn’t one for flowery descriptions, but in its strange, alien way, it’s almost beautiful.
“Here, rub her belly,” Newton says, grabbing Hermann’s hand before he can spill out the infinite number of protests crowding up in his throat, and slapping it down in the middle of the creature’s stomach. Herman’s first reaction is to recoil, but Newt keeps his hand in place and after a moment he just feels.
Its skin is so smooth it’s practically slimy, but to Hermann’s surprise it’s completely dry. The flesh yields slightly under his touch, and even though Newt lets his hand go he resists the urge to pull away, fighting down the quiet gurgle of disgust in the back of his throat and keeping his hand still for just a moment more.
“Yes. Well. That’s. Yes.” He takes his hand back quickly, flexing it self-consciously. Newton grins at him like a kid on Christmas staring down the biggest box.
“She’s soft, right? She likes it when you rub this spot right here,” he says, poking at an indiscernible location on the louse’s underbelly to no apparent response. “Man, I remember the first time I ever saw her. She was in the lab looking all pathetic in one of the holding tanks, and I just had to take her home.” His smile turns wistful. “You know how it is.”
It’s a skin parasite, Hermann wants to say. It’s the size of a golden retriever. It would probably eat a golden retriever if it ever came across one. Instead he just nods his head aimlessly and gives her stomach another pat. She spasms in response.
“Wellp, time for her nightly ammonia bath!” Newton says, hoisting her under his arm and trotting off in the direction of the bathroom. Hermann watches him go, a baffling mixture of emotions churning in his stomach. Vague disgust eventually wins out, and he resolves to go scrub his palms with a potato brush for the next fifteen minutes.
The last day. If you had asked Hermann a week ago he would have said it would never come, or possibly started crying. Now all that was standing between him and a return to the closest brand of sanity Newton would allow was a span of twelve hours. Yet against all odds, recently he hasn’t been humming with pent-up excitement like he might have expected. He had stopped standing over the mite’s makeshift pen and whispering promises of revenge, or glaring at Newton whenever he walked into the room. Right now all he wants to do is sit in his remaining armchair, read a book, and wait for the day to end.
He’s just starting to get wrapped up in the biography of Emma Noether when he feels a sudden tug on his pants leg. Instinctually he jerks away, hauling his legs up onto the chair out of habit before peering over the side. There’s nothing there. Very suspicious. Undoing one of his shoes, he dangles it down a few inches above the ground and gives it a wave. After a few seconds, an armored claw extends from under the chair and gives it a tentative push, spinning it around in a circle. Hermann sighs.
“Get out from under there,” he orders. To his utter shock the creature complies, scrabbling out through a gap much smaller than it should have fit through and nearly tipping Hermann out of his chair. It scuttles around to face him. Hermann shoots it a dirty look out of habit, immediately distrusting whatever agenda might cause it to cooperate, and goes back to his book.
There’s another tug on his sock.
“I said, leave off,” he starts to say, but by then the beast has tugged his sock off entirely and is scuttling across the floor, trailing a shouting Hermann behind it. He corners it a few short minutes later, only to watch as his sock is completely shredded in a pair of strong mandibles.
“No!” Hermann says sternly before he stop to examine the fact that he’s treating an interdimensional parasite like a household dog. “Bad!” The louse seems almost pleased with itself, giving a little dance before turning in a circle and rearing up on its back legs to wave at him like the cheeky little bastard it is. Hermann sighs through his teeth and turns on his heel, troops back to his armchair and sinks into it with his feet pulled off the floor. He raises his book. It’s the last day. He can cope.
A minute later, a pair of feelers start creeping over the top of the page. He lifts it up to see the skinmite with her head resting on the cushion. Hermann hesitates to apply such an irrational observation to an animal whose emotional range is likely limited to hunger and rage, but her eyes look almost sad. A thrumming noise emanates from somewhere in her body.
“Newton fed you earlier,” Hermann finds himself saying. “You had your bath, now go away.”
As soon as he starts speaking the creature perks up, wiggling its hindquarters before launching itself into Hermann’s lap.
A series of exclamations all compete to come out of his mouth at the same time as he squeezes his eyes shut. After a moment he realizes that nothing is currently burrowing into his stomach cavity, and risks cracking an eye open. A few inches away six more eyestalks stare back at him. If she had a tongue, she might try to lick his face. Instead she just sits on his chest and does her best to purr.
“Oh for god’s sakes,” he mutters, reaching down to gently scratch the joint between her second and third armor plates. She gives what Hermann assumes is an appreciative screech. Yet when he raises his book again she begins pawing at it with her front claws.
He can’t help it. He gives in. “What are we calling you now…Carol, is it?” he murmurs, scratching under her chin. “Are you hungry?” Gingerly, he picks her up under one arm and grabs his cane with his free hand, carrying her into the kitchen. She wiggles her legs as he goes like she’s still trying to walk, like a dog paddling when you hold it above the water. It’s not cute, he tells himself. Don’t find it cute.
When he opens the refrigerator it is predictably empty: except for a single jar of olives shoved into the furthest corner. Hermann shrugs and pulls them out, unscrewing the cap with some difficulty and giving them a whiff. They smell fresh enough, although he doubts it makes a difference. He’s not sure how they escaped Newton’s utter decimation of their food supply, but at this point Hermann won’t question his blessings.
“Treat?” he suggests. The creature keens shrilly.
Hermann tosses her an olive, which she catches in her mouth and swallows whole. He gives her three more. His parents had never got him a dog, and he’d never particularly wanted one—but now he can start to appreciate what all the fuss was about. He sighs long and hard through his nose with the realization. He’s gone and done it. He’s gotten fond.
“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” he grumbles, reaching down to pat her head. Perhaps he’d be better off using the favor Newton would owe him on banning all non-living Kaiju paraphernalia from the household.
Suddenly Carol stops in her tracks, one leg frozen off the ground in mid-scuttle. She slowly opens her mandibles wide, a strange sloshing sound coming from her insides. Hermann peers down at her nervously.
“Did you not like your olives?” he asks.
Carol’s head explodes.
Raleigh and Mako are in the middle of a two-man combat drill when Hermann bursts through the door, breathing hard, a metal chain trailing from his hand. Attached to that chain is a skin parasite in some sort of harness, its legs clicking on the tile floor. A quiet, menacing growl undulates from the back of its throat.
“Have you seen Newton?” Hermann says, stopping to lean on his cane and catch his breath.
Raleigh and Mako stare at him. Their speechlessness is not helpful. “What are you doing with that thing?” she asks at last.
“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly docile until it starts making the noise,” Hermann says. “Newton, I need to see Newton. He’s not in his lab.”
“But why did you bring it here?” Raleigh interjects. The skinmites’s eyes readjust to his face. He takes a hurried step back.
“I accidentally killed his pet louse,” Hermann explains. The creature on the leash gives an accusing trill.
Mako points at it. “So—”
“I’ve arranged a copy,” Hermann says, that manic gleam returning to his eyes. “I went down to the specimen department and looked through dozens of the beasts until I found one that resembled her perfectly. Not even Newton could tell them apart, I’m absolutely sure of it.”
Raleigh scrunches his brow. “You’ve spent this entire week trying to get rid of that thing, and once you actually managed it you went and got another one?”
“There is a complex series of variables which you could not hope to understand!” Hermann cries. He suddenly seemed to deflate. “She ate my sock,” he says in a small voice.
Mako and Raleigh exchange a look. After a moment, she steps forward and gently pats his shoulder because it seems like the thing to do.
The door swings open again, and Newton strides in with his arms full of papers. “Hey guys, I had a look at those combat specs from Yamarashi you were talking about, and—” Newton glances up to see Hermann and company, standing with a pained grin stretched across his face. “Well look who’s here! Hello Sandy!”
He bends down to scoop her up, holding her in the air above his head and spinning her around with a laugh. She screeches. When he sets her down on the floor she scurries around excitedly, or perhaps furiously—Hermann still can’t quite tell. At that point Newton reaches into his lab coat and pulls out something slimy.
“I was going to look at this under the microscope later, but I think you’ll enjoy it more,” he says fondly, tossing it to the louse. It devours the Kaiju viscera instantly.
Raleigh stares at him in abject horror. “Why were you carrying that around in your pocket?”
“Gotta stay ahead of the game,” Newton says cryptically. “So Hermann, what brings you and Cassandra up to J level?”
“Oh, just thought we’d say hello,” Hermann replies with what must have been an attempt at an easygoing laugh. It sounds more like the turn of a rusty screw. “Just get her out and give her some exercise, no?”
“What a great idea,” Newton says appreciatively. “Although I guess it doesn’t really matter, seeing as today is her last day with us before going back to the tanks.”
“ Ah. About that. I’ve been giving it some thought,” Hermann begins. “And well, maybe it would be more humane—as long as you promised to keep cleaning up after her, of course. Having a pet, it’s a good…you know.”
Newton blinks at him in disbelief. “Do you mean we can keep her?”
Herman’s eyes are wild, but he keeps on smiling. “Yes, I suppose I am.”
Realization dawns on Newton’s face. “So what you’re saying is… I won?”
Hermann’s manic smile withers. “Must you turn everything into a competition?”
“Uh, I don’t have to, no, but I like to point out the fact that I’m always winning.”
“You are impossible! I swear, after everything I’ve done—” Hermann is interrupted by the skinmite wrenching towards the door, nearly yanking him off his feet. “You owe me for this,” he cries over his shoulder as he’s half-dragged out the door. “I better not find a spot of louse vomit anywhere! I’m putting my foot down on this!” The skinmite barrels into the hall, beyond which lies a magnitude of new people to meet and then terrorize. “And her name is Hilda!” Hermann yells just before the doors slam shut again.
As soon as he’s gone, Newton turns to his audience of two with a rueful shake of his head. “Wow. That guy is a terrible liar.”
Mako raises her eyebrows. “You knew he switched them?”
“Of course I knew. That skinmite is male. And his eyes are all different.” He chews his cheek thoughtfully. “Must have given her the olives. I made that mistake earlier this week. Was cleaning all the vomit out of the spare room for the next three days.”
“So the other skin louse…”
“Is totally fine, yes. And as of now, is about to have a new playmate.” Newt winks and fires off a pair of finger guns as he backs towards the door. The sounds of turmoil echo down the hall in Hilda’s wake. “I’ll catch you guys later,” Newt calls out cheerfully. “I want to see Hermann’s face when he realizes we now have twins.”