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Everyone always talks about the Drift. Always, always, always. How cool the technology is. How amazing. What a feat it is, to be Drift-compatible. How great that this is what saved humanity.
It's what they don't tell you, though.
The Drift with the Kaiju was full of wrongness – shakeable, ultimately, but wrongness like the time he found Mega Bloks mixed in with Legos at the doctors office and had to spend 20 minutes sorting them all out.
It was an event. Horrifying, rattling, scarring, fuck, but it was an event. Turn the page and it's in the past. It happened and then it was gone and he had to move on to other, more pressing shit.
The Drift with Hermann was—
Well.
He's seen the way that Mako and Raleigh act around each other. Mako he's known for a while, and she's always been quiet and thoughtful and observant (never gonna forget the time he'd fallen asleep in a weird corner with a lab notebook and woken up with one of her blankets around his shoulders) but she reads Raleigh like a fucking book. They're not, like, magical braid-your-hair BFFs or anything – they really don't spend too much time together, honestly, they're just quiet friends – but the air is different when they're around each other. You can feel the intensity of their connection.
What they don’t tell you about the Drift is that it leaves a fucking hole.
It takes him a while to notice it.
In the whirl of the Breach closing and Pentecost— fuck, Stacker Pentecost, what a fucking incredible human being— -
—but it's not until the exhilaration dies down and the alcohol stops flowing (as much) and words like decommissioned and reassignment start getting whispered and Real Life sets in – that's when he notices it.
It's kinda like allergies, sinus pressure building up, at first. He's tugged this way for such-and-such duties and Hermann gets sent that way for so-and-so work and the anxious pressure starts filling him up, making him nervous and fidgety, and it doesn't click for him what it is, but when he finally gets back to the lab to keep slowly packing, a slow warmth fills him, head to toe, the second he gets through the doorway.
And then he notices that Hermann does it, too. Around everyone he's got a posture like someone rammed that cane up his ass, unrepentantly stiff and too formal, but he gets all easy around the edges when they're within ten feet of each other and, if they're lucky, if they finally get fucking left alone for more than thirty seconds, all of Hermann's sharp lines go soft and all of the tension melts out of his frame.
No lie, it makes Newt feel kinda great to know it’s because of him.
Okay, really great.
And it's all because of the goddamn Drift.
( Postwar cleanup is a total mess. The PPDC is having a hard time deciding what to do with whom and a week after the Breach is sealed, the Shatterdome is still half in party mode, and the higher-ups are still squabbling. )
( He misses his samples. Work isn't as frantic now, obviously, but there's still science to do. Experiments to run, research to be done, all that jazz. And during the sciencing is when he and Hermann go back to bickering about literally fucking everything. )
( don’t touch my chalk newton don’t call me hermann newton don’t get your kaiju entrrrrrails on my side newton god he loves the shit out of—— - – )
Because the thing is, he's always known how to read Hermann. The Drift only showed him that he can. He's always had all of the little parts and pieces, and the Drift showed him how to put it all together and how to see the why behind what makes Hermann tick.
Contrary to what the entire fucking Shatterdome seems to think, arguing with someone 24/7 means you’ve got to know them really goddamn well. He knows exactly when Hermann’s going to jab and when he’s going to feint and when he’s bringing out the big guns and when it’s just harmless teasing and when it’s a legit picking-your-brain discussion-cum-argument.
There are no secrets after the Drift. Some questions, maybe, and fuckloads (a scientific unit of measurement) of confusion, but the neural bridge is less a bridge and more a battering ram. The Drift reaches its hands into every single last little dusty corner of your brain, scoops it all up, and dumps it into the same bowl as your co-pilot’s neural mush. Co-researcher. Whatever.
When you’ve been laid bare like that in front of someone with all false pretenses and iron-willed defenses stripped away, there’s literally just no more room for embarrassment or awkwardness. It’s an intimacy that soars straight past romantic or sexual or anything else that’s describable by any language. Existential intimacy, or something. He’s no philosopher. Sharing the same headspace just changes things.
No one in this world knows Newton Geiszler or Hermann Gottlieb the way they know each other.
blue cyan blue everywhere—
—- -cyan blue kaiju blue filling his lungs his eyes and then
another world kaiju crawling everywhere half disgusted half curious need to research need samples bowled over by death death destruction carefully calculated planned methodical terraforming cleaning up
- - -only the beginning only the beginning only the beginning jaws wide open bioluminescent blue saliva dripping ready to swallow ev—
A wave of nausea wakes him up and he barely makes it to the teensy adjoining bathroom in time to puke up everything in his stomach, dry-heave for what feels like an hour, and then some.
Yeah, they don’t tell you about the nightmares, either.
Then again, no one had ever drifted with a fucking Kaiju.
“You’re a genius, Newt,” he mumbles sarcastically to himself, then hauls himself up just enough to splash some water on his face. Christ. A nosebleed, too, on top of everything.
College hangover remedies are still buried somewhere in that gorgeous genius brain of his and given it’s 3:47 in the fucking morning he really doesn’t care that he’s stumbling towards the mess hall still wearing boxers and a faded Universität Tübingen t-shirt.
His hands are shaking so hard that he slops water all over the countertop and he nearly throws up again waiting for the toast to finish but he makes it, sort of, and burns his fingers on the toaster trying to get out because the walls of the self-serve kitchen are starting to compress like the garbage compactor in A New Hope.
His first instinct is to trust his eyes, and his eyes tell him that the long, dim mess hall is empty. Approximately 2 milliseconds later he realizes that the mess hall is not, in fact, empty, and that the miserable, slumped figure at the far, far end is actually Hermann. Holy shit.
He makes an incoherent noise of relief and power-walks (definitely doesn’t run) the hell over there. The look of relief on Hermann’s face is– well, it’s something. He parks it on the bench next to him, keeping his back to the table. One of his knees is leaning against Hermann’s thigh and, well, if Hermann’s not scuttling away from it, then he isn’t gonna move, either.
“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?” he asks, aiming to joke, but his voice cracks and the concern in Hermann’s face shoots up by, like, 215%.
“I–” Hermann makes a face, a stiff face, one that belies the relieved slope of his shoulders and the easy set of his jaw. “I’m sure this is all inconsequential, but my subconscious treated me with a dream—”
“—about the Kaiju,” Newt blurts. “You too.” He chuckles weakly. “Bucket of goddamn laughs.”
But something is wrong because usually being around Hermann eases that built-up anxiousness inside him but it keeps building up and building up and he feels like there’s a wall straining to keep everything in and he can’t breathe and everything just—
—spills the fuck over.
kaiju fucking kaiju oh god the noise the smell like rotting fish and death and oh god oh holy god hannibal chau being eaten alive and then he drifted with that thing and—
—everything is fading to
white
noise
he can’t breathe he can’ t b rea th e
“Newton,” hisses a voice, and he’s half-jerked back into semi-reality. “Newton.”
kaiji kaiju kaiju kaiju seeing them hearing them drifting with them kaiju kaiju he’s going to be sick again kaiju
Something is pressing against his chest and he looks down, startled, to see that Hermann has taken his shaking hands oh god kaiju on his arms kaiju no no no no not kaiju pressed them against his chest holy shit holy fuck are those his lungs is his breathing really that erratic——
“Newton,” Hermann says again, “Also, Newt, sprich zu mir in Deutsch.”
get a grip newt get a fucking grip—
“Ich hab’–” he gasps out, then three panicked breaths, then, “–vergessen wie man Deutsch sp—”
“Du hast nichts vergessen,” Hermann says, one hand still pressing both of Newt’s to his chest. “Ich weiß, das du nicht vergessen hast. Erzähl mir von Tübingen.” Hermann tugs on the ratty old tee and Newt looks down again through crooked glasses at the faded letters and his chest stuttering underneath the cotton and oh shit his eyes are really wet—
“Tübingen war–” He can barely get a few syllables out without gasping for breath. No. He’s got this. He can control a biological response. Hermann is challenging him – his German is rusty and Hermann knows it, is using it to make him think. “Es war die beste Zeit in mein Leben.”
“In meinem Leben,” Hermann corrects softly. “Warum? Magst du Unterrichten?”
“Yeah,” he manages breathlessly, with a nervous chuckle. “Yeah, ich hab’ es sehr gern. Meine Studenten war so– schlau, so klug, so inspi– inspier– inspiring.”
“Inspirierende,” Hermann supplies again. “Fühlst du dich besser? Dein Atmung ist langsamer.” Still in that slow, patient voice, still holding Newt’s hands against his chest so he can feel what’s going on in there. Fuck. What a godsend.
“Yeah,” he says again, and because Hermann’s shoulder is right there, he drops his forehead down to get a nose full of itchy wool and a deep, rich smell he’d been associating with the Drift. Turns out that’s just Hermann. “Yeah.”
He can feel Hermann sort of just— at a total loss for a couple of seconds, and then something must kick into gear because there’s a hand on his back, warm and large and comforting, and another at the back of his head.
“You know, Newton, I– I–” Hermann’s cheek is pressed against his temple and Newt can literally feel every word. “A side effect of the Drift, I’m sure, but seeing you like this has– adversely affected me. I would not wish more panic attacks upon you, but do know that I am– available. At any time.”
Newt can feel himself still trembling but he smiles in spite of it because as far as Hermann is concerned, that’s basically a candlelight dinner complete with a capella rendition of O sole mio.
“Thanks, buddy,” he whispers.
And he splits the toast and makes sure Hermann is doing okay after that apparently shared nightmare (and he’s not, hilariously enough, but that’s what Newt is there for) and they take it slow heading back to the sleeping quarters because Hermann left his cane behind and Newt is exhausted on every single level. It’s 4:28 in the morning, and he needs some nightmare-fucking-free sleep.
Four hours later, he wakes up groggy and disoriented in a bed that is decidedly not his own. His glasses are on the nightstand, okay, and he’s about to reach for them when he realizes that the weight is distributed unevenly on the creaky mattress and that his back is warm and the anxious not-around-Drift-partner hum isn’t there and—
Well, okay, maybe he can sleep for a few more hours.