Work Text:
His lungs hurt.
They ran from the Boneslums to the helicopter to LOCCENT on a crippled leg; of course his lungs hurt.
this is what you get for smoking in a former life Newt tells him, and Hermann snarls in his head, because at least he has some practice at not being able to breathe. Newt keeps overcompensating, trying to take a breath through Hermann when he can’t do it himself.
I feel like I’m choking all the time Newt explains, drifting through the floor and everyone they pass at the celebration as they make their way to the back of the room. can’t get enough air can’t get enough oxygen we need that you know humans
“You’re babbling,” Hermann whispers to him, and he’s so, so tired.
He takes a seat at the back of the festivities, sitting on a bench where they used to dock Cherno Alpha. He closes his eyes and there’s a weight he can almost feel on his shoulder, familiar like the shape of a head, but he’s feeling it from the wrong angle, as if coming up through the skin.
I’m sorry
“No you’re not. You never apologize for anything.”
Drifting once with a kaiju is monumentally stupid. Twice was just asking to die.
Hermann knew this, the same as he knew that kaiju could not stand in the gravity of the earth, yet did. The numbers were wrong, the numbers are consistently wrong where it comes to Newton and his brand of stupidity, to his entire improbable field of study.
Newton – Newt, always Newt after what they were to each other, Newt to his friends, not that he had any, but Hermann has seen the inside of his head –
you’re brooding Newt tells him, manic around the edges and fading in the center. stop that cut that shit out we’ve got a planet to save I swear to god if you fuck this up
“Shut up,” Hermann hisses, because he’s too loud, he’s always too loud, too vivid, too bright, and the techs at LOCCENT still won’t listen—
“Doctor Gottlieb?” Tendo asks and when he snarls back there’s too many voices in it, harmonics sliding one over the other in a way that human vocal chords were never built to do—
“If you don’t listen to me,” Hermann snarls when the bodies are still cooling in Hong Kong, “if you don’t listen to me, we’re going to die, this plan isn’t going to work—”
No one listens; Hermann screams. Frustrated, angry German, and it’s not just his, either, tinged with unnatural, translated phrasings, Cantonese, English, German, Mandarin, back again; it’s an impressive litany. Tendo, who listens, who has always listened, patches them through, the ringing silence that still isn’t quiet.
“Didn’t know you could swear like that,” he’ll say to Hermann later, who will only shrug, and twitch-smile around his facebleed:
“I can’t.”
Newton looks up from the floor and he’s shaking, shaking; Hermann has him by the shoulders, around the entirety of his body, wrapped tight around his brainstem.
“Don’t let go of me,” someone is saying, and they’re neither of them sure which one it is, just that Hermann is sick and worried and Newton is elated and scared and bleeding from his eyes; someone stretches out a hand, the sensation of skin against fabric and bone against muscle as Newton is lifted from the floor—
That comes later, but also first.
Pentecost reaches for him; Hermann follows, but lets go. Lets Newt go. Lets him retreat back behind the relative safety of his PhD and his manic smile.
Hermann will wish, later, that he hadn’t. Let him go, that is. Newton, Newt, Doctor Geizler, will call him stupid for that wish, then laugh, even without his own lungs to do it.
“I have a plan,” Newton says, “it’s brilliant, it’s stupid, you’ll hate it—”
He’s still chattering, and Hermann can see the bloom around his left eye, the red ring he compared to gaming equipment, once, back in the Mark I days when everything was guesswork and none of the numbers came back correct, the breakdown just before the junking.
“Let me share the load,” Hermann demands from him, and his voice is shaking, his stutter horrendous, but he doesn’t let go.
Newton smiles at him, but blanches first, has been blanched this whole time. His glasses are cracked, his face is cut. His nose is bleeding, or else never stopped.
Hermann doesn’t run the numbers. They run themselves, anyway, a warning in the back of his mind, but he refuses to listen, the chalk on his hands rubbed out with concrete and rubble.
A kaiju may run, may bound, may be stupidly extant while on land or at sea. Newton Geizler has survived a drift with the hindbrain of a kaiju, touched the dark and felt it reach back towards him.
Hermann takes the helmet, and Newton presses the button.
His eyeball explodes right out of the socket. They feel it go, and the brain matter sliding, warm and wet before the sensation fades, buried, lost; there are too many and too scattered— the fight above the city, the breach below and past that, too—
keep it together someone snarls as the hive rushes in in in in in keep it together don’t give up no no we are better than this
‘What is it like,’ he wants to ask Raleigh Beckett, ‘to lose half of yourself and still move on?’
But he knows that answer, already.
In the same manner, he would like to ask Hu, the surviving Wei brother, who before K-Day had never been alone, what it means to never be multiplied by more than you are.
What he cannot, will not, won’t ever ask them is this: ‘do you still hear your brothers speak to you when you need them? When you don’t need them? Are you carrying their ghosts around in the back of your mind and in the corner of your eye and in every word you say because you can’t extricate yourself from what’s left of them—’
He is terrified of the answer. What if they said no? Worse, what if they said yes?
The technical explanation is this:
The brain is nothing but electrochemical impulses, fired through roughly three pounds of fluid and cerebral tissue. Those impulses, those signals, are transmitted from one portion of the brain to the other, directing the body it jockeys to do things like eat and sleep and fuck. These signals can be transmitted elsewhere, too, with the right technology; this is what makes a neural handshake work, this is what tricks a pile of gray matter into thinking that its body is a gigantic fighting robot and that it is only one half of a whole. Reminds the heart of what it has always known; that no man may be an island, that each sentience is only one part of a whole.
It is known, and has been known, that the sum of a human being, the soul, if you will, is nothing more than the series of electrochemical codes, transferred from neuron to neuron.
It stands to reason, then, that these codes could be saved, could be re-written, hardwired. The memories that pilots share through their partner’s eyes can attest to this.
In the same manner that Hermann Gottlieb spends the remainder of his life feeling off-balance without a tail and wishing for a home that he helped destroy and would gladly call hell, he also spends the rest of his life with the processes of his brain bound irrevocably with those of one Newton Geizler, the only remnants of a mad, dead man being the ones trapped inside his skull.
His math was right. Three kaiju at the breach, and one fatality from the drift.
His math was right.
and so was I Newton insists, because he cannot whisper, because he never could, really, but now he lacks the lungs to do, because Hermann is bleeding from the nose and he feels the pressure on his left eye where a scarred ring is most certainly blooming—
There’s a body cooling on the ground, but Hong Kong is a city for the dead, and the dying. There are lot of bodies here; there are several, in fact, lying just at their feet. One of them has lost an eye, popped outwards like a grape, fast-acting tumor, maybe, or else latent radiation. Kaiju are dangerous things, you know. From the gaping wound weeps all manner of fluid, from the clear leavings of the eye to blood, to gray matter spilled unceremoniously with the kaiju’s sulfuric hellscape blue.
the plan won’t work it won’t
“Shut up,” he tells his partner when he’s done throwing up into a toilet, “shut up, I know, I’m smarter than you, I’ve figured that out already you titanic fuck—”
“We are rockstars,” he tells Hermann, and does not turn the music down, tattoos jumping on his never-stilling arms, following his hands as they dive into the belly of the beast. “We are going to beat them at their own goddamn game and all we have to do is just—”
He drives the spike into the kaiju’s secondary hindbrain, and grins like a tapered magnesium flare, the coil burning itself at both ends.
He’s telling the story in the wrong order, he knows. The medical wing he’s sitting in is too bright and too clean to exist in Hong Kong, much less the dilapidated wreck that is her Shatterdome, and the celebration outside is too loud, still filtering through the walls—
“You’ve suffered some sort of break,” the medic is telling him in careful, regulated Mandarin when they can both hear the Cantonese trying to slip through.
no shit Newt says from where he’s sliding into the wall behind the bed, the blue of his tattoos electric and live.
“That,” Hermann tells the medic, in the pidgin Cantonese that the engineers traded like the clap before they ultimately gave it to Newt, “is startlingly apparent, given I didn’t speak Cantonese yesterday, wouldn’t you think?”
In the back of his mind Newt is laughing, laughing, laughing and the medic is staring at them, but all Hermann can see is blue, blue, blue, violent and wet where Newt coughs it in clouds from his lungs and tattoos.
The less technical explanation is this:
Newton Geizler’s left eye pops, and his brain cooks itself, the fluid spilling out of his ruined eyesocket and from his nose, the gray matter mixed liberally with blood.
At that same moment, he had been drifting with Hermann, who was, is, will always be, his partner. They were tangled in each other beyond repair even before the drift took them; when Newton’s body died, most of his mind was already scattered across Hermann’s. When his physical brain imploded, several moments before his heart actually stopped beating, the body carrying on before it knew it was rightly fucked, the entirety of what was left of Newt fell the rest of the way into Hermann.
Hermann managed to disconnect himself from the kaiju and their hivemind, pulling himself out of the eternal nightmare of the Anteverse. He couldn’t disconnect himself from his partner.
ha Newt laughs, pointedly. Hermann would throw a spanner at him if there was any space left in the lab, but there’s nothing now but the tape line he pulled up six days ago, four hours, thirty-nine minutes—
anal-retentive scheiße
“No one asked for your opinion,” Hermann barks, and only realizes it was German later, later, when he’s in the mess hall because his body still needs to eat even if he can’t keep it down for very long and the server on staff looks at him stupid when he orders his rations.
They have to clean out the lab.
The entirety of the Hong Kong Shatterdome is disassembling, slowly. Not quickly, though, not quickly. No one wants to go, not really, not at all. The whole base drags its collective heels, digs into the shifting ground and growls, angry, while the bureaucrats scramble to take the credit for their heroism. But they’ve seen Hercules Hansen with a look on his face, the surviving Wei Tang brother. There’s something in their spines that makes it so, so clear; they’re not going out without a fight.
Which is good, they can fight this, there’s going to be someone left to hold the fort, so to speak, when the fort won’t hold itself, when the world starts falling in even though it’s standing up—
stop trying to be poetic you fucking suck at it you’re a mathematician not a lyricist
“I thought we were rockstars,” he snaps back, sardonic because he still has his defenses, even when they don’t matter.
I’m a rockstar you’re just sharing headspace with me
The reminder isn’t exactly a welcome one.
They rip the tape off the floor and rip the tape off the floor and break all the specimen tanks and knock over all the chalkboards, letting the green-black slate and wood go crashing into the green-yellow-blue of preservatives and acid.
The acid eats through their shoes, and what’s left of the tape, and when Hermann coughs he does it into a handkerchief that turns blue and melts, just a little, on his hand. His skin stings when the drops meet flesh, but it takes the pain a moment to register before Hermann has it under the lab’s emergency clean station, washing the corrosive acid from his skin.
well fuck Newt supplies, and all Herman can think is ‘quite.’
To which Newt replies could you get anymore british holy shit dude
Kaiju blue is a very nasty way to die. As their last, and possibly most insidious final “fuck you” to the planet Earth and all its inhabitants, the blood of a kaiju is not only highly acidic, it’s almost virally infectious. Spreading through the air and tainted earth, the bright blue acid has a tendency to seep into the groundwater of any area that it touches down, becoming part of the water table and the city’s acid rain cycle. In the cities of the Pacific Rim, the water was always very blue, and the rain a bluish-gray, making reinforced umbrellas not just a smart fashion statement but a lifesaving necessity.
In the same manner, so were heavy water filtration units and breathing masks. On high humidity days after a rainstorm close to a kaiju attack, there was not telling what could happen to the unprotected.
Or, well, no, that’s not quite accurate. Everyone knew exactly what would happen.
Once the blue got into your lungs, it acted quickly, like an accelerated version of the consumption of yore. Only where the white death filled the lungs with fluid, its modern cousin the blue death filled the lungs with corrosive acid. For some reason, the human body’s mucus membranes were as resistant to the disease as they were susceptible to carrying it; the blue replicates in the lungs and is expelled from there, seeking to infect any other human being standing too close to the sick and likely to be breathing their air. Along the way, the blue rots the teeth and eats away holes in the trachea and lungs, powering slowly through the body’s defenses over the period of several days. By the end, sufferers are in tremendous pain, unable to speak or eat, breathing too rendered an almost insurmountable challenge
Not that Hermann thought he was going to live. The numbers in the back of his head impart a certain certainty on that front; everyone dies, eventually. Statistically, he knew that he was bound to be out of life’s running sooner rather than later. Against him were his crippled leg, his youthful smoking habit, and all the times he’d ever cheated death. He knew that his number was going to come up, but there’d always been a part of him that expected more time, that figured he could keep beating the odds, even when as a mathematician he knew the unlikeliness of such a thing.
According to mathematics, there are no impossibilities. Only possibilities with infinitesimally small margins. Meaning: you’re still fucked, but you might as well try. He just wished that it wasn’t going to be so hellishly painful.
“I know you didn’t like him,” the newly-minted Marshall Hansen begins with him, fitting ill in his old partner’s trappings, “but we’re going to have to talk about funeral arrangements, at some point.”
As it is with many things, these days, Hermann is having problems understanding the basic concepts presented to him; English, the native tongue he learned to rarely speak is coming less and less easily to him.
When the words finally register for the mathematician, their meaning filtering in past the Marshall’s accent, Hermann laughs, nastily, and has trouble stopping.
He coughs corrosive acid all over the front of the Mashall’s desk and begins bleeding out of his face, and if both his eyes were weeping more than blood, well. His medical stay is extended once more, but only for a day. The PPDC made a legacy out of fighting the losing battle, but this is one that Hermann knows how to fight better, and he always was able to make his superiors cry in shame and ignorance if he needed to.
Here are the facts:
They didn’t love each other. Whatever it was they had, it wasn’t love. It wasn’t even sex. It could have been, maybe. One of those. Eventually. But Newt was always a happy inhabitant of the gray shades approaching aromantic, and there is and always will be a part of Hermann that mourns Vanessa, that loves her completely.
Mostly, they hated each other, and they pushed each other, and screamed constantly in German in shouting matches that the rest of the Shatterdome would have been able to hear were it not for Newt’s hideous noise that he called music. They had a line down the center of their lab serving as the literal representation of the figurative line in the sand. They threw things at each other’s goddamn heads.
But they were never better than when they were working together. Put them in the same room and they were a nightmare, a hurricane of revelations and science that was, quite frankly, mad. Forced into close company, Newton Geizler drifted with a kaiju using a connection built out of scraps and Hermann Gottlieb successfully predicted the exact date of the apocalypse using only a blackboard or five, and all of this with the impetus of proving each other wrong.
Whatever it was that they had, it wasn’t love. It wasn’t even sex. But it could have been. One of those. Eventually.
It’s ironic, in a way, that Hermann’s got the blue. It only makes sense; the kaiju infected him with Newt and their extra senses, their impossible tessellated memories. He killed them and they killed Newt and now they’re coming for him, a last parting shot for the men that ultimately stopped them. The deconstruction site at the Boneslums had been a nightmare of acidic blood and hellscape phosphorescent blue; nearly everyone there had been wearing a facemask but the two of them and Hannibal Chau, who had died in other ways.
The rest of the base takes the news in separate ways. The staff, for the most part avoid him like the incurable alien bloodborne plague he’s carrying. The medical workers want to keep him under constant observation, not that they didn’t want to do that before.
Tendo Choi offers him a few platitudes, a beer, some shrugged condolences at the futility of it all.
Marhsall Hansen wants to keep him under quarantine.
Mako Mori looks at him and sees the uncle she always did treat him as, and hugs him, not caring that by nearing his airspace she risks infection. “You are stronger than this,” she tells him angrily, rolling her letters together because they have always had the same problems with clear English. “Don’t give up now,” she insists, and shakes him, just a little.
Hermann grins back at her and shows off all his blue-stained decaying teeth; “of course not Ms. Mori,” he promises her, “there’s no such thing as giving up in science.”
Which is, at this point, something a lie. Science knows damn well when to give up. Unfeasible routes are often discarded, money, time and prudence making sure of that. Some things are just empirically unlikely (not impossible, never that) and for all that they make sure to never deal in absolutes, it doesn’t help what Hermann and Newt are quickly becoming; obsolete.
The bureaucrats are moving in faster than Hermann would have assumed. They’re being quick to try and seize the victory out from under the PPDC’s feet, congratulating the survivors for their bravery, claiming that if the rift could be closed with so few jaeger, than certainly there’s no point to the program left.
there isn’t Newt insists you killed them all we murdered them in their womb-cradle they wouldn’t come back
“You can’t possibly believe that,” Hermann hisses, not caring what language he speaks, not caring about the stares that he gets from the nurses.
what’s there left to believe in your sorry ass?
“Better me than giving up!” Hermann roars, and now he knows he’s being stared at, that his medical observation will further include speaking to nothing soon enough. He’s not sure what language he’s using; they’re all starting to fall together.
Newt says nothing and Hermann seethes, some part of his hindbrain lashing the tails he doesn’t have, his teeth grinding together and uncomfortably flat.
Hermann’s eye won’t stop bleeding. Neither will his nose. The technical term for it is a facebleed; most of the Mark I pilots became susceptible to them, the radiation and the solo drifts cooking their brains.
Unlike a Mark I pilot, Hermann’s eye is degrading faster than any of theirs ever did. If the blue wasn’t going to kill him first, he’d lose it by the end of the month, the completely useless orb falling from his head, not entirely dissimilar to the way that Newt’s corresponding eye had popped in the last drift.
what about a glass eye Newt prods him, glass eyes are cool
“The day I take sartorial advice from you is the day I commit suicide,” Hermann responds acidly, scowling at his own reflection.
Newt is silent at that, and Hermann would count it as a victory. He can still feel his second set of arms, though, and his partner’s lingering hurt; his scowl turns itself into a snarl and he stalks from the bathroom, looking for something, anything to do.
In the new world order they’ve become somewhat obsolete. There’s not much left for the men of science when the realm to pioneer was welded shut by their efforts.
“How long?” Hu asks him, cornering Hermann in the medical wing. Not that he’s hard to corner, at this point; by doctor’s orders, he’s been confined to bed rest.
“What?” Hermann replies, “not going to pussyfoot around it, not going to wish me to get better?”
Hu frowns. “We both know that you’re going to die, there’s no point in dragging this conversation out with mindless pleasantries.”
Despite himself, Hermann laughs. It’s not pretty, or clean, and though his laughter dredges up burning acid to be deposited in a glass basin, Hu doesn’t flinch away, or reach for a face mask.
“Do you have any special funeral arrangements?” Hu asks him.
“Scatter our ashes in the Pacific,” Hermann answers tiredly, closing his eyes to the onslaught of light that rains down from the medical wing’s fluorescent strips. “We never were at home anywhere else; say a psalm and put us back where we belonged—”
“Doctor Geilzer, I presume?” Hu cuts in.
Hermann nods. “I doubt there’s much left of him, at this point; we had to leave his body in the boneslums, the world was ending and we had a helicopter to catch-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hu assures him. “Hannibal Chau has been looking for you and for your friend; he found the remains and has been subtly seeking someone to do something proper with them.”
hannibal chau?
“But he’s dead,” Hermann blurts, opening his eyes.
Hu shakes his head. “Only the good stay dead, these days,” Hu Wei Tang tells him. “I’ll take care of everything. You’ll get to the sea, doctor. Both of you,” he assures Hermann, and walks off before the mathematician can demand any sort of clarification.
Here are the facts:
The whole base thought they were fucking.
There had always been an underlying fondness in the way that they dealt with each other. Their conversations smacked of old married couple. They fought in a way that only the related and the deeply entwined could. They could tolerate no one else, and often they could be found collapsed and overworked almost too near each other, as if they had (and in fairness, they had) passed out on top of one another.
There was a sort of sweetness in their interactions, if viewed through the right sort of misanthropic lens. Who else would they treat like that? Who else would they rely on?
Of course, let there never be any doubt that they hated each other. With all the rage left to men who society would have gladly discarded without their skills, they hated each other. They threw shit at one another constantly; books, wrenches and other tools that they apparently only kept around for the sole purposes of winging at each other. Newt once took a piss over Hermann’s side of the line, just to prove a point that neither of them can remember. Hermann, more than once, jeopardized his partner’s experiments, and wrote countless complaints to what consisted of the PPDC’s human resources department. Worse still, he wrote referrals for him, letters of recommendation that could have gotten the illustrious-if-eccentric Doctor Newton Geizler a career at any academic institution of his choosing.
But there was love, too, probably (definitely, he knows, they’ve seen, the answer is definitely, yes, of course). It’s hard to call it anything else, and not because they’d chase off anyone else they were supposed to work with if they were installed at close contact, no. Love, for them, meant Newt on the roof at four in the morning and manic to his eyeballs, nearly vibrating out of his skin while Hermann sat with him and spat equations at him, puzzles, impossible questions, anything to keep him occupied. It meant Newt keeping him forever supplied with more chalk, always refusing to stoop to the point of erasing his equations even when it would have been so easy for him to have done so.
Love, for them, meant Newt failing to smother his amusement when Hermann reduced military officials to tears over the viability of their programs. It meant Hermann dragging Newt to bed if he had to do it by his fucking ears. It meant Newt always, always matching his pace for him even though Hermann never once asked him to do it.
Hu’s words set him to thinking. When the medics release him as a lost cause, Hermann already has a plan. It’s brilliant, it’s stupid, Newt would have absolutely hated it; all the hallmarks of being truly great.
In the back of his mind, the numbers are running. Not that they ever stopped. Not that Hermann thinks that they’ll ever stop, that he’ll be dead and they’ll still be there, written on the inside of his skull, printed there with the worst of Newt’s manic rambles and the exact figures of how to instinctually balance a wings and a tail.
But yes, in the back of his mind an equation has been running; how long until the kaiju return? Because hell if they’re gone for good. Hell if that’s really what’s going on here. They waited out the dinosaurs, they waited out the entirety of human evolution and their destruction of the planet’s ecosystem to suit their own needs. If one atom bomb were enough to keep them down, to keep them out, well. Well.
Only the good get to stay dead, lately.
Walking past his office, Hermann can hear the newly-minted Marshall Hansen fighting the first battle of his career: “You’ll be shutting this program down over my dead body,” he promises quietly, all full of menace. “Too many good people died here for you to shit all over their corpses.”
Hermann remembers, suddenly, that Pentecost didn’t call them the resistance for nothing. Maybe it’s time to stand up and actually resist.
Hermann goes back to the lab. Throws open one of his boxes. Cleans off all the blackboards. Sets the ladder up against the first one, the farthest to the left. Begins, slowly, steadily, to climb.
the hell are you doing
Hermann grins, vicious. “Proving you wrong,” he says to the pregnant air. “My last symphony.”
He puts the chalk to the blackboard and he begins to write.
Hermann’s mathematical fugue lasts the rest of the night. Hu is the one to drag him from the lab, not requiring explanations, not needing words. Instead, he lets Hermann babble at him in too many different languages, only half of which the mathematician actually speaks, doing his best to show Hu what he sees when he closes his eyes, the certainty he’s found again.
“We’re fighting back,” he tells the pilot, animated more in this last week since Newt’s death than he’s been for most of his life. “The war’s not over, not really and I’m intending to fight back—”
“Good,” Hu says angrily. “If they’re coming back, we need to know when. Can you do that?”
“What language am I speaking?” Hermann asks him in return.
“Mandarin,” Hu replies, pausing only for a moment, his sadness deep and full of knives. “With an American accent, of all things.”
Hermann laughs, bitter, not bitter, angry and in some ways too full of life. He knows what it feels like to release an organic electromagnetic pulse, to feel his body strain with the effort of holding in that titanic energy, the rush of its release.
“I didn’t know it last week,” Hermann tells him, grinning, stuttering, sharp. “If I can do that, I can get away with anything.”
Marshall Hansen is keeping his distance, not that Hermann blames him, or really even wants his company. The man is grieving for his son, his comrades, his partner. Hermann understands the sort of thing that does to a person, to lose everything he ever cared about. He’s not sure that he’d even want to see the Marshall like this.
Does he still fit ill in his uniform? Does he still hear his son’s infant laughter when he tries to fall asleep? These aren’t questions Hermann really wants answers to. In a way, having the non-interference that the Marshall’s absence provides him in the lab is fantastic; Hermann unpacks, and unpacks some more, and runs through two blackboards and a pack of chalk. His clothes are covered in white powder, his usual fastidiousness crawling away to die beneath a table as the clutter in the room grows back to something approaching its previous norms.
Hermann doesn’t put the tape back on the floor; he knows sentimentality when he sees it, and can distinguish it from encroaching madness.
Hu comes through with the body; Hermann doesn’t think to ask how. There’s a significant part of him that just doesn’t care, and doesn’t want to know, scientific curiosity failing him at last.
“You don’t have to come to the morgue, if you want. It’s not pretty,” Hu warns him, and Hermann doesn’t even think to back out.
Newt’s vacated body is nothing like the man it used to house. It’s too still, too quiet. The wounds are, of course, disfiguring. Enough days have passed that the body, what’s left of it, really is in terrible condition. There’s a part of Hermann that wants to vomit again; part of it, he thinks, is Newt, still rattling around if shocked into silence by the sight of his own corpse.
“Are you okay?” Hu asks him when Hermann only continues to stare.
“What do you think?” Hermann asks him hoarsely, letting the rising bile leak out through his words.
Hermann searches the back of his head, looking for his partner, finding the kaiju but looking for someone else. There were no accounts of chasing rabbits in ghost drifts, but this is more than that, and deeper too; someone being viciously teased, a Midwestern childhood, the streets of London, a random meeting in Berlin, the howling depths of the Pacific.
“You don’t have to do this,” Hu says after a minute or so of quiet.
Hermann laughs, almost in spite of himself. “Of course I do,” he replies, not looking at Hu, not looking at anything. He can’t understand why the lights in the room have gotten so dark. “Wouldn’t you have wanted to see your brothers?”
“I see them every morning in my mirror,” Hu shrugs, bitterly, “why would I want to stare at their bodies unmoving when I could see them in each reflective surface, alive out of the corner of my eye?”
In the morning when Hermann looks in the mirror, Newt’s staring back at him through the reflection of his ruined eye, translated right where it belongs on them both to the left.
He bares their teeth in a death rattle grin, revealing pitted skin, quick-rotting teeth stained blue, blue, blue and all the flesh bleeding red and turning gray. He can’t stop coughing and the sallow hollows of his lips and cheeks are starting to fill with holes. Hermann used to smoke before the war, but even at his pack-a-day worst he never looked this bad, felt this bad. His lungs were choked before but now he feels like he’s drowning, a thicker malady than Newt’s childhood pneumonia had ever been.
you look like you have meth mouth Newt informs him gleefully. your whole face is falling apart man it’s disgusting
“My whole everything is falling apart, you discorporate twit,” Hermann snarls back. “If you hadn’t noticed,” he adds sardonically, because he has to maintain the barrier, has to keep his guard up even when it’s become not so much as obsolete but irrelevant.
“The Marshall went missing,” Hu informs him at one point, reappearing in Hermann’s lab with what looks like military grade powdered eggs and something that could possibly be considered sausages on a tray.
“He’s grieving,” Hermann says. “Give the man time, he lost his son.”
“We need him,” Hu protests. “Mako’s surviving, we need him now, they’re trying to shut the program down unless we can make ourselves valuable—”
Hermann clenches his fist around his chalk so tightly that he snaps the rod in half. “He lost his son,” he reiterates, stuttering hard on the stressed words, the sounds feeling thick and heavy in his mouth.
“I lost my brothers!” Hu shouts. “But you don’t see me trying to hide from the world, we don’t see you hiding—”
“What do you think this is, then?!” Hermann roars back, and does not stutter once. A stunned silence lingers, and Hu says nothing, staring sullenly at the mathematician. “I am here,” Hermann says slowly, “trying again to predict the end of the world, because there is nothing left for me here now, and I might as well spend my last days trying to pinpoint yours. What else is that but hiding?” He finishes tiredly, and he’d climb off the ladder but leg hurts, and he’d rest his forehead on the chalkboard if he wasn’t so afraid of smudging the theorem.
“What language is this?” He asks Hu, eventually. “It feels wrong, when I speak it.”
“English,” Hu tells him. “You’ve been speaking English the whole time.”
Herc Hansen reappears, in all places, in Hermann’s lab.
Hermann isn’t sleeping in his bunk anymore; he’s barely sleeping at all and when he does his dreams are plagued by frequencies of light that the human eye was never meant to see. It’s the middle of the night when the Australian walks in, clearly battered, and just as sleepless as Hermann himself. The man startles when Hermann moves towards him, stepping heavily with his cane, deliberately telegraphing his motions.
“Oh,” Herc says lamely, and the tension in his shoulders almost melts, and takes all the bearing in his spine with it. His voice is rough with what Hermann recognizes as to be damage from tears, perhaps a fair deal of raging at the heavens. He assumes it’s been the sort of weeping that doesn’t stop no matter how one wants it to, the kind of pain that goes deeper than anyone could reasonably expect.
To outlive a child isn’t just a bereavement, it’s hell.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Hermann says, and is gentle as he knows how to be. “With an explosion like that, he would have been dead before he could have registered pain.”
Hansen grimaces. “You’ve never been married, have you,” he remarks, mouth twisted in rueful pain.
“Twice,” Hermann corrects him, adding; “I had a son, once.”
Hansen pauses, his hand hovering over a stack of displaced papers, the rumpled diagrams. “What happened to them?” He asks quietly.
Hermann’s mouth twists, smiling, almost, bitterly. “The kaiju,” he says. “What else?”
Here are the facts:
In a sense, they were married.
What else can you call that, drifting like that, falling like that? It strikes Hermann as incestuous, now, that brothers, parents and children, were the ones most often to share that bond. He knows that his own drift was atypical to the extreme, and fatally so, but by god. In one handful of moments, he saw and understood everything that there ever was about Newton Geizler, all of it laid bare in the seconds before he died.
It had been easier to understand that barrage of loneliness-pain-anger-anger-rage-joy-challenge-determination-stubbornness than it had been to contemplate the howling alien that was the kaiju hivemind. After all, it was so close to the sum of Hermann himself, and they were both moreso than their component parts; they didn’t, as the pilots would have put it, need to chase the rabbit.
In four seconds they got everything, and after that, they got whatever else was left.
He was Hermann and then he was suddenly not, not alone, at least, and he’s stayed that way since.
Death, like the closed rift, is a permeable barrier, incapable of keeping anything out for long.
Hermann starts losing time.
Little pieces of it slip away from him when he’s not watching closely; it’s hard to keep his remaining eye on the clock when he’s so focused on the blackboards and his broken eye won’t stop weeping, mostly tears, but sometimes blood. He’s ruined more handkerchiefs than he’d care to think about between the red and blue of his lungs and his eye. He’s been keeping the soiled rags in a glass container that used to be one of Newt’s specimen tanks, letting them pile up all blood and acid, safe trapped inside the glass where they won’t try to eat through the table, leaving strange pitted patterns on the wood and steel.
He tracks the passage of time in this manner, monitoring his symptoms and using his own deterioration like the shrinking of a wick. His life is made of wax; for the price of illumination it burns away, leaving smoke and liquid, and a pure shining light.
you have to stop it’s almost, almost a plea.
“You of all people should know better than to ask me that.”
no you need to stop you’re dying you should be taking better care of yourself not wasting away in this lab trying to run towards it
“We’re all dying. Some of us just go out quickly than others. It’d be a sin to live forever. Lonely, too. Besides, what do I have left here, anyway?” He says serenely, thinking of his wife, thinking of all the people he has ever loved
what about that Hu kid
Hermann frowns, and adds another cosine to the equation. “He’ll survive. It’s in his nature.”
what are you trying to do? Newt demands, the barest outline of colors seen from the corner of Hermann’s liquidated eye. are you working yourself to death? is this some insane penance? just to prove what you could do? to prove me wrong?
“Yes,” Hermann answers viciously, striking his equal sign with pleased vengeance.
there’s no afterlife Newt tries this is all we have you’re racing towards the howling abyss of infinite nothingness that exists beyond the confines of your body how could you possibly be so eager to throw yourself through that—
“That’s what you believe,” Hermann counters, “and in any case, you’re a biologist, not a poet. Leave the mysticism to someone else.”
It’s been a month, and the wolves are closing in. The bureaucracy draws tighter around them, circling with lines of red tape ready to snap shut the minute anyone slips up. They need to prove their worth, and quickly, otherwise the whole operation will come crashing down. Hermann follows the fight with an interest that is more than the mere moot instinct of self-survival, viciously entwined in the future of the PPDC, what will become of his last works.
But today, the danger that is the world’s government is ignored, unhappily; Chuck Hansen is put to rest, at last, a small ceremony that Hermann is, surprisingly, invited to. He attends in the company of Tendo, Hu, Mako, Raleigh. Some of Striker Eureka’s mechanical team.
The graveyard is large, something public outside of New Sydney, a mass grave for the dead that could not be recovered after the first, and then second attacks on the city, the atom bomb and what came after. The rows are white, and neat, and between the small stones there is grass, parched from the summer heat and the wind off the sea.
The Marshall does not appear, but Herc Hansen does, and the man, the father, is broken as he places another empty grave marker next to that of his late wife. His back is bowed and he’s weeping; Hermann watches as he finishes breaking down, saying his last goodbyes in public to a son he’ll be mourning for the rest of his life.
After a moment, Herc surprises them, and speaks, his voice hoarse, still, a hand trailing over the stones that he has bent down to reach, one older, one new. At his side is Max, who, it seems, has taken to sleeping Chuck’s bunk, waiting for his master to come home.
“I lost Angela in the first explosion,” Herc tells them slowly, his free hand resting in Max’s hair. “I lost Chuck, then, too, picking him over her when there was only time to save one,” he swallows, throat clicking around the weight of that admission. “I drove and I ran and there was a flash of light, and my wife was gone, taking my son with her. I lost Chuck in the second explosion. I fought, so hard to make sure that he would live, that he’d have a world worth living in. And then—” a father’s voice breaks.
“I’ve lost everything to this,” Hansen curses. “My son is a hero; he always did say that he was going to surpass me.”
Here are the facts:
Hermann Gottlieb has been in love before.
Her name was Vanessa and she was the most wonderful thing he’d ever laid eyes on. She was a model and she’d always wanted a man that would listen when she talked, look at her face when she spoke. She thought his sarcasm was charming, and had her own wit to match, sharpened in the world’s fashion houses behind the backs of every director that ever demanded she work under him. The world was ending and Hermann was home in London, having left Berlin, where Newt was still Dr. Geizler, having only met him once.
“Let’s get married,” she said, a hand on his good knee. It took Hermann a minute and thirty-seven seconds to stammer out the fullness of his yes, and he has regretted since the time it left wasted between them.
Eighteen months later, he was in San Francisco when Sailfin attacked Taiwan. The first pilots were dying, the mental strain was killing them and everyone was scrambling for an answer. The call came after Hermann had spent two days awake: New Taipei was mostly underwater, and his wife and child were listed among the missing. Vanessa had been there for a fashion show, forcing her way back into the circuit even as a mother.
“Please don’t go,” Hermann had asked her, forcing the words from his mouth. It was the last time he begged anyone for anything.
“Hermann,” she’d smiled at him. She was always smiling at him, even when she was mad at him she smiled at him— “Hermann I’ve stood up to industry titans and I’m about to reenter the field in my late twenties. It’s going to take more than some sort of interdimensional dinosaur to frighten me now.”
He wondered, in his darker days, whether she had time to swim, or crawl, before her determined body gave out beneath the strain of that which by virtue of its existence all at once resisted God.
Hermann knows what it’s like to love someone completely. He knows what it’s like to lose them. When Vanessa died, when their son died; there was a sort of madness in it, then. It was an equation with a proof ripped out, it was a building without walls or foundations.
Hermann felt his family missing in his chest, a hideous, evil cavernous ache. It lessened with time but it’s always been there, and will be until he dies, however much longer that takes.
Losing Newt? It’s not like that. In a way, it’s almost but not quite worse. Because whatever they were, it wasn’t finished, not yet begun. It wasn’t even a half-formed thought. And like a poorly set bone, after the break, it lingers, and doesn’t heal, just reshapes wrong, jutting out just below the skin.
“What are you doing?” Hu asks him, peeling Hermann off the table where he has scrawled a series of notes that have blurred before his eyes. “Are you trying to work yourself to death? Glare the numbers into submission?”
“It worked before,” Hermann grumbles and allows himself to be dragged, “why the hell else would I own this many blackboards—”
“Your Mandarin is getting better,” Hu informs him, and pulls him out of the lab, over the wads of tape that had been prized from the floor, “but you still speak like an American, which is something we’ll have to work on, I think.”
“The doctors are telling me not to focus on the aphasia,” Hermann says, irritated at having been disturbed, at the regulations placed on what remains of his life.
The expression Hu gives him is perfectly bland, with an undertone that Hermann is starting to understand as signifying a small but deep disdain. “The doctors also told you to take nausea medication to get rid of the sensation of having a tail,” Hu tells him, “so it’s probable that they just don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, now isn’t it?”
The expletive surprises him, but Hermann isn’t sure why; Hu did tell him that he and his brothers were street fighters before they were pilots. Maybe it’s just that he can understand the swears, now; when the back of his mind brightens with startled laughter, Hermann lets it out through is mouth, and enjoys the way Hu rolls his eyes at him as he breaks into slightly hysterical giggles that he just can’t help.
Despite his certainty in his numeric righteousness, Hermann’s fading fast. He’s not certain what day it is anymore and that’s a first, in a sense. The ground can shift under his feet as many times as it wants to but Hermann Gottlieb has always known just where he stands, held up by cane and sheer bloody-minded determination.
Hermann doesn’t remember, later, falling from the ladder. Hu is the one to find him, but he only knows this because the he’s there when Hermann wakes up, sitting vigil by his bedside with an angry glare and the shadow of his family waiting behind him, Marshall Hansen asleep in the corner of the room on one of the medical wing’s uncomfortable chairs.
“You idiot,” Hu hisses at Hermann slowly. “You’re not— If you work yourself to death then there will be no one left to finish the job, don’t you understand?” It’s a plea, but it’s not, but it is; Hermann can sympathize with that need, to keep close what one has left, by whatever means necessary.
“There will always be someone,” Hermann explains to him gently, and moves the mask the doctors had put on him away from his mouth so that Hu can see his smile through the blue and the blood. “That’s the thing about science, about knowledge; someone will always come after us to improve on our works—”
Hermann breaks into a coughing fit so bad he has to stop speaking, and lean back, his body giving out beneath the strain he’s placed on it. Marshall Hansen wakes at the noise and is the one to call the doctors in, but Hu refuses to leave until they stern-faced make him, pushing and prodding oh-so unsubtly until he’s gone, and Hermann is alone, or almost, adrift in a sea of strangers in labcoats, the back of his mind filled with alien noise, and highly intrusive rock music.
Hermann asks what day it is four times in the same hour. He only realizes that he’s been repeating himself after the third time, when he forgets again, and asks once more.
He changes languages each time. Eventually, he finds that he’s beginning to intersperse nonsense into his speech patterns. Aphasia, for real this time.
He can’t remember the last time he heard Newt.
Here are the facts:
In the end, what is love? Break it down to its basest component elements, and what you’re left with is a series of electrochemical impulses telling you don’t let this one go.
“I’ve decided on a date,” Hu tells him, hands splayed carefully in his lap so that they don’t fist or rumple the bedding. On Hermann’s bed, he’s placed two white envelopes, each marked with a name in characters that he can no longer understand.
“Oh?” He asks neutrally.
Hu nods, just once, and sharp. “Two days from now, after the wake is over,” he says. “Will you come?”
“Even if you have to wheel me there on a stretcher,” Hermann promises him.
At this, Hu nods, and tells him about the therapist that the Marshall has mandated that he see. Hu speaks while Hermann listens, absorbing what he can from these last moments of contact before the cold.
Hermann makes it through the funeral, if barely. He doesn’t need a stretcher, though, he’s proud enough for that, even if he is unable to stand under his own power, more than his bad leg having given out on him lately. Tendo and Raleigh have Hermann propped up throughout, sandwiched near the front by Crimson Typhoon’s mechanical team, all the multitudes of them that worked and laughed and joked with the brothers Wei Tang here to pledge their support, and grieve their losses.
Hu stands at the front and gives the eulogy.
In the fine black suit he has no doubt only worn to press conferences, Hu stands, head bowed over the closed coffins of his brothers, recovered in two few pieces for a proper open casket funeral, acid and the Pacific having eaten away at most of their bodies.
“I don’t know what to do without my brothers,” Hu admits by way of beginning. “Our whole lives we were never alone; we were street urchins, then street fighters. There was always safety in numbers,” Hu smiles grimly. “That didn’t stop being true when we became pilots. If anything, it was more true.”
“I’m not sure what to say here,” he says, grieving candidly. “What do I say about people I’ve never had to describe? People always treated us as a unit, and it was safer that way. Cheung was the protective one. Jin was the young scholar. Me? When they mentioned me, well. I never bothered to get smart. Cheung always said that we should learn and improve ourselves, but I always was waiting for the fight, looking for the problems I could solve my way. They were the ones who had everything to offer the world, but I’ve got nothing but their memories and my fists.”
Hu laughs humorlessly, then lifts his eyes from the ground, looking his way around the gathered mourners, the crowd that hangs like a cloud of grief around the hill outside of Hong Kong.
Hu smiles, and turning to the Marshall and the head of Crimson Typhoon’s mechanical team, he begins to lower the coffins, throwing the first handfuls of dirt on his brothers.
“But enough of my weeping. None of us were traditionalists; we were never any sort of believers. There’ll be gambling by the gates,” he says, nodding in the direction behind the crowd, “food and drinks, too. And as always at these sorts of things, a donation box,” he chuckles, and a few others do too, the offered joke taken wetly. “So, go. Drink, laugh. They would have hated to see us all crying and carrying on when the world just got saved. I for one plan to give them a party they’d have been sad to have missed.”
People file out, and eventually Hermann is left with Tendo, the Marshall, and Hu.
“How did I do?” He asks Hermann when he is done accepting the handshake from Raleigh, the full-bodied hug from Tendo.
“Well enough for someone who doesn’t like public speaking,” Hermann grinds out, trying to force his tongue to make the shapes of Mandarin.
“High praise from someone who still talks like an American,” Hu ribs him as they proceed towards the gate, where the party is already beginning.
Hermann laughs, and whacks the pilot’s shins lightly with his cane. “You owe me a round of poker,” he tells Hu.
“You probably count cards.”
“I can barely see,” Hermann corrects him. “We’ll count whatever I lose as my donation.”
Hu laughs at him. “Old man, you’re going to take me for all of my money.”
“I’m not old,” Hermann squawks, and it’s only when Tendo begins to shake from suppressed laughter that Hermann realizes that they are still accompanied by his medical minders.
The doctors know that Hermann’s going down; for all of Hu’s original optimism, everyone knows, now, that Hermann’s not going to be alive for much longer. He can’t see at all out of his right eye anymore, and his aphasia has progressed to resemble something like the actual disorder everyone has been pretending that he has. He speaks and the words come out garbled, worse than his usual stutter. He’s forgetting, more and more, how his human vocal chords work, and how to push air through them when every breath or action hurts.
Hardly able to communicate, Hermann drifts through his last days in the medical ward like a ghost, watching people move in and out but never stay, and never touch him, Hermann locked away behind the eyepatch and the facemask the doctors had finally forced on him.
At one point, Marshall Hansen visits, and speaks to him, thanking Hermann awkwardly for his service.
“Your son would have died too quickly to feel the pain,” Hermann explains falteringly to the man, tripping over the words and the heavy medication he has been given to keep away his agony. “A flash explosion like that? He would have been dead long before his brain could have registered any sensory discomfort.”
He’s not sure if he expected that to help, or not, but Hansen nods at the information nonetheless, his face closing off as he stands from his uncomfortable chair. Has Hermann said this before? He’s been repeating himself, lately, and repeating himself lately; he’s not sure of anything, but his numbers are right, he’s sure that the numbers are right, they have 117 years, 117 years until the world ends again and none of them will live to see it or fight it or even well prepare unless the whole world starts now—
“I’m sorry about the desk,” Hermann blurts, or at least he thinks he does; the back of his mind tastes like too many teeth, and he’s not sure what language he is party to today. “You have to check the boards, in the lab, I’ve written on them, the answers at the bottom, with all the proofs, even, all labeled and good—”
“It’s okay,” the Marshall tells him, “it’s okay, Doctor. Hermann,” says Herc Hansen, “Hu’s taken pictures and had everything backed up, it’s okay, we’re not going to let this go—”
“Good,” says Hermann, vicious and relieved. “That’s very good. Who’s Hu?” He manages to ask eventually, and something in the Marshall’s face goes shuttered.
From what Hermann can see of him, the young man in the back of the room with the military haircut is very upset. Hermann doesn’t know what to do with that. He’s never been good at comforting anyone.
Hu scatters his ashes into the Pacific, throwing the dust into the wind.
The funeral is a small affair; at the docks of Hong Kong, surrounded by the industrial hum that is overtaking the city once more in the wake of its most recent destruction, what remains of the pilots and the command team gathers to mourn one of their own, the last of the K-scientists.
There is no eulogy; Hermann was never overly sentimental, and no one present feels qualified to tell any sort of story of his life, or deliver any platitudes on his contributions. The knowledge of what he has given them is a tangible weight, the omen of the future splayed out in a dead room with the detritus of two brilliant lives.
Instead, as was requested of him, Hu reads a psalm, translating the words as best he can into Mandarin, not knowing the German in which the target spirit would have preferred.
“Lord,” he begins quietly, “you have been our generation from one generation to another. You turn us back to dust and say: ‘Turn back O children of the Earth,’ for a thousand years in your sight are as but yesterday, which passes like a watch in the night.”
Behind his voice is the roar of the sea beneath the breakers and the distant clash of heavy machinery. His suit, worn to more and more press conferences as the PPDC levers its grief against the end of the world once more, is pressed finely still, and uncomfortably fit upon his weathered, battle-scarred skin.
“The days of our lives are three score years and ten, or if our strength endures, even four score; yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they soon pass away and we are gone. Who regards the power of your wrath and your indignation as those who fear you? So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”
If it is that Hu’s voice cannot be heard over the din that surrounds them, no one comments, or interrupts what passes for this service. Most attentive is Herc Hansen, the Marshall having taken the day, folded up once more into an old soldier. The stance of his body is old, and stiff, but there is something military in his bearing still, a pose that suggests respect for the fallen, a parade rest.
“Show your servants your works, and let your glory be over their children,” Hu does not plead. “May the gracious favour of the Lord our God be upon us; prosper our handiwork; O prosper the work of our hands.”
When Hu finishes, it is not to silence. There is a sense of weight on him, one with which he is not sure how to cope. There will be no festival after this funeral; there will be no grand remembrance. There is only them, the people who had known the dead, mourning until their own deaths, waiting for time to sweep them away with the pain and the ash left behind.
Hermann has six limbs and seven eyes and none of them are his; Hermann is running through the streets of Hong Kong; Hermann is kissing his wife. She tastes of sunlight and the bottom of the Pacific. Hermann is arguing with his partner, and he is watching his son learn to crawl.
He is telling this story out of order, he knows. But it’s the only one he has to tell, and he was never meant to be any sort of poet.
In the Hong Kong Shatterdome, there is a new count on the clock. There is no one here who will see it complete alive. But they have set it all the same; it would not do, to get complacent. But for the first time since the thing’s creation, the number is going down. Someday, it will even be finished.