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The creature that finds the surface does not have a name. It does not have a face or self or anything more because its Masters have decided it does not need one. The creature that comes to the surface has nothing but a mind full of the noise of the hive, orders carved into every inch of its existence, deep into the bones of its DNA. And a whisper, somewhere in its mind. Drowned out by the orders and the noise.
It is infiltrator. It is scout. It has been bred and beaten to hunt out prey and report back to the Masters. That is its purpose. That is what it has been created to do.
It is very good. It has the scars to prove it.
But here, far from the Breach, it surfaces into clean air. The sun burns its eyes, the sky is the sweetest blue it has ever seen. Sweet, yes, murmurs the whisper in its head. It can almost taste the colour. The sun strikes sparks on the waves around it.
Beautiful. The whisper says.
There has been so little in its life that could be said to be beautiful.
The orders overcome it, and it dives again. Streamlined and swift, it swims like a snake, following the rise of the shore and the slow swell of land.
The beach it lands on is empty and bare, only sea birds to watch it creep ashore. The sand crunches under its hands, and it pauses and looks down at the marks it has made coming ashore. It runs a claw along the sand, marveling at the sharp, clear contrast of the line. Beside it, a bird takes flight, and for a moment it is mesmerized by the sight. The creature's claws move in arcs across the sand, trying to map out the motions of the bird, the parameters of its flight.
The call of orders comes again, and the creature pauses, shakes its head. The bird is gone, and it moves on up the beach.
The creature finds what it is looking for as the sun rises higher. A cluster of dwellings - pens, the whisper says, the only dwelling it has ever known - and the creatures that live within. Its target found, the creature crouches still in the shadows of an outcropping of stone and waits.
It watches.
The inhabitants come out during the day. They stand upright and the creature feels its legs and hips shift in emulation. Their long, thick arms are two to the creature's four, so it presses them together. The creature reads their movements, their features down to skin tone and hair colour as it sits there, observing, body shifting ever so slightly as it begins to grow a new skin.
The inhabitants do not come near the creature. They do not see it, for it can stay very still for a long time, and it has turned the colour of the stones. They talk to each other in guttural voices, and young ones come out. The older youths go to another building, and the creature can hear shouts and high-pitched shrieks from it. It shudders like a horse shedding flies, the screams it remembers are not so happy.
It watches the younger ones run and play, their language is debased, simplified, and the creature was created to learn. It listens, and soon it begins to understand the rudiments of their language.
Then the adults come, and take them inside and the creature tenses without realising it is doing so, because it knows what comes when you are taken from your pen, and it braces itself from the cries, the sounds of the pit.
But nothing comes, and soon the little ones are outside again, and this time joined by the older ones. The young ones smell of rich alien meat and sweet scents that mean nothing to the creature. It counts the older ones and yes, they are all still there, still the same number as before.
They roll around and play at fighting and hunting and the creature feels a bitter taste rise in its throat. It remembers only the pit. The pit as a child, the pit as an adult, the Masters' eyes watching always, ready to cull the weak, the helpless, the merciful.
It was none of those. It had lived.
But then the adults come home. They smell of this land's earth and grasses. They make noises of joy and pick up their children. They hold them close and listen to them talk, and carry them home with a look in their eyes that hurts something deep inside the creature. It is as though, the whisper in its mind decides, the entire world could be found within their little ones.
The creature has never been looked at like that, but it has seen it before. Sometimes, when the Masters are not looking, the creature's large cousins breed their own young, and try and raise them. It never works, the Masters always find out because true born young are weaker than those they make themselves. The creature would have told them that much, but the cousins are very stupid and never understand. Their cries ring in the pens for days.
No one comes to take the young away here. The lone, warm star grows red as it approaches the horizon, and the smell of food preparation comes from the building. Then the inhabitants sit outside and talk. They hold their children, who look up at them with wide solemn eyes, or let them play and sit with arms around each other. They talk about the weather patterns, the food they are growing in the fields nearby. They speak of each other, of their children and loved ones. The creature, its skin finished, does not move and stays to listen. It could listen forever.
The sky goes dark, the stars blaze out and a moon rises. The inhabitants go back inside. The creature moves, stretching alien limbs and skin that moves oddly against the body compacted inside. The orders are to investigate. To enter a home and analyse level of technology, learning, defenses. To kill and examine biology, to reveal kills and examine psychology, then return home to share with the Masters.
The whisper speaks of the inhabitants. They were so kind, they had a whole world around them and they looked for worlds in each other. Would it harm to wait a day? Two days? It could learn more by not following orders too quickly.
It has been the first day in its life that the creature has not seen blood. The thought of seeing some now exhausts it. It settles down, folding its ungainly body in the grass, and decides to watch for another day.
The next day, the young ones do not go to the noisy building. All the inhabitants go out in neat clothes that fit their bodies better than those yesterday. They go to a white building together, and the creature follows low to the ground. Such a gathering must be important, and the orders compel it to move.
The creature has enough of a grasp of the language to understand what is being said, and its eyes blink in a gesture of local surprise. The inhabitants are receiving a message from their Master. One Master, or three, it is not clear. The Master speaks of peace, of forgiveness, of love that's finding one's world in someone else.
The creature would like to meet this Master. Its Masters do not speak. Their orders are of blood and death and are written into its very bones, and it is growing sick of them.
It seems as though their Master is not to be found anywhere, but can be reached by opening oneself to a hive mind and allowing Him in. The creature tries, and listens as hard as it can, but cannot hear anything.
It does notice, however, that when it listens, the orders do not seem to be as strong, and its whispers fill its head with its own thoughts. It tries to listen whenever it can, the buzz of the hive fading to a dull noise in the back of its mind, the orders slowly eroding from its bones.
The creature marvels at the new space in its mind, all the thoughts that can fit inside it.
It wonders what it would be like to be one of the inhabitants. Not as an infiltrator, but in truth. It wonders what it would be like to hold a child and laugh with them, to take a loved one and share a life, to work in the fields and grow living things rather than killing them.
The creature, in the silence of its own head, thinks that it would like that very much.
The inhabitants speak of a larger settlement to the north, one where an unknown man could go and meet others, and not be noticed. The creature decides that it will travel there, as a man. Its skin is worn and comfortable, and it feels steady on two legs now. It finds old clothes left out in front of the white building and dresses itself carefully, as it saw the inhabitants do for their visits.
But it - he now, it is a he - needs a name. All the inhabitants have at least two, and the creature does not even have a designation. Names are important here, and even the lowliest inhabitant is required to own one.
The creature traces out names in the dirt, picking one that he has heard a great many times here, one that would not attract attention. And a second, warming him like a fire, the name of this new Master, and the word for finding a world within another.
Sometimes, during the day when the sun is warm and the sky so blue it aches to see, Hermann can forget. He looks at his face and sees only that, his face, and does not think of the edges hidden beneath. He feels at home within the limits of his body, as though there had never been anything but.
But not at night. Not since he became human enough to dream.
Because those nights are when the memories claw up from where he keeps them locked away, and the night dissolves into the blur of blood and teeth. His hands dislodge their claws and his teeth bare bloody and the memories of fight after fight after fight ring through his head.
And Hermann gets up, and puts on human tea, and makes human toast, and sits at his human chair and reads his human books and remembers where he is. Which world. This world. His world. Home.
It is a kind place, his world. It is confused and contradictory and lop-sided as Hermann's own human body, but it is warm, and welcoming to the tired, broken thing he had been, cast up on an alien shore starving for a place where it could be free of blood..
No one had known what he was, human as he seemed, ordinary as he looked. He hollowed out just enough of their world to make a space for himself, and when he slipped into it, it was as though he had always been there, and no one looked askance. He studied the rules and laws that built this universe, the orders of the Master they called Gott, which was no Master at all but a love so deep it had formed this world. He studies, and learns, and now humans study from him, and Hermann writes books for them, and lectures, and gets so lost in this sweet, welcoming world that he sometimes forgets he isn't part of it, not really.
And if his bones still ache from the scars of his Masters' orders and the sound of the hive hisses in the shadows of his mind, he can ignore them now.
If he withdraws every few months to shed his skin and grow another, he can make his excuses.
If his muscles waste away from lack of food that cannot grow in this world, and he comes in one day with a cane, no one ask too many questions.
He has no lovers to watch him shed, and pick out the subtle differences between each skin- a mole, a wrinkle, a faint birthmark-, to listen to him cry out at the memory of another pit fight (and their alien eyes as he proves himself worthy once again in a spray of blood) or trace out the scars that run under his skin marking every one a victory, emerging bloody and alive until there were none of his siblings left and he was the one taken to be sent outside the world.
Hermann tries not to dream. Perhaps, one day this world will fill him up until he dreams of nothing outside it. He spends his nights at the kitchen table, reading human books, drinking human coffee. It doesn't help his weakening body, but it gives the illusion of satiation. Perhaps one day he could synthesize the ammonia compounds his body needs. But he's got another good five years here before starvation really catches up with him, so he does not need to rush.
He lives, if not thrives. He is happy, in as much as such like he can be said to be happy anywhere. He writes his books, and lectures and hears his name spoken and it feels like his now.
And then the shadow of the hive bursts into his mind one August morning, and Hermann cannot pretend any more.
Hermann Gottlieb hates Newton Geiszler.
He meets him on his first day in the Jaeger program science division, still sick and shaking months later. He'd handed in his resignation as soon as he could, and the program had taken him as soon as he was free. It had been an overnight marvel, famous mathematician gives up tenure to go hunt monsters. Anything to unclench the claw of guilt at his throat. For those five years he had spent playing human when he knew this was to happen.
He hates Newton, only slightly less than he hates himself.
He hates him for his irrelevant attitude, his ease and arrogance. He hates him for blundering around Hermann as if he belongs there, each outflung hand close- too close - to touching him. He hates him for being able to relax, to strip down, if the labs get too hot, to shirtsleeves and shorts, when Hermann always, always has to hide under layers upon layers.
He hates that of all Newton could show off on his perfectly human body, this is what he's chosen.
Hermann doesn't recognise all of Newton's tattoos. Most of the older Kaiju are hidden under his shirt, but there are already enough of them that they creep down Newton's arms when he rolls up his sleeves. Onibaba, Spinetail, Machaga. Human names, because they never bothered naming their creations.
And he glorifies them. He admires and loves them and immortalizes them on his body in a thousand brilliant colors, and it makes Hermann want to scream because they weren't like that. They weren't bright and fantastic and awe-inspiring. He knows them. He'd seen them grown from curious youngsters to starving adults to the maddened, broken things that had been cast ashore in this world like so much wreckage.
He'd seen them fight to the death for their satisfaction and the battles had made the ground shake. He'd picked his way into their pens to scavenge for scraps, watched unwary siblings snapped up in their jaws when they were less than silent.
He remembers their slit eyes watching him, those three from Newton's arms, as he crept past them. They'd been too young to have been trained to rage, only watching this tiny being curiously as he made off with scraps too small for them to bother with.
He'd watched them die four, three, two years ago. He'd seen so many of them die in the pens. What would Newton say if he knew that for every tattoo on his body there were ten more who had died for the crime of not being strong enough, fast enough, cruel enough?
Newton scratches absently at his newest addition, a snarling Knifehead, and suddenly Hermann can hear its screams. It never stopped. He didn't know what they did to it but it just wouldn't stop. It had been an infant, barely large enough to swallow him -as he had been - whole, but the pens had rung with the screams moment by endless moment until it was the kindest thing the Masters had ever done to send Hermann through the Breach.
He can still hear it.
"Hey-" There's a hand on his shoulder.
Hermann jerks away, he knocks his cane over and it falls with a clatter; "Do not-!"
Newton freezes, hand still outstretched.
Hermann takes a breath. "Do not touch me."
"Dude, are you okay?" Newton doesn't come closer, but doesn't withdraw his hand. "You looked-"
The screaming. Hermann can feel its vibration in the teeth beneath his teeth. The sharp ones, the ones which have tasted blood. He swallows down the taste of ammonia chloride. "I am fine."
There's something in Newton's eyes when he looks at him, a softness to him that makes a place inside him ache.
He loves that about them, the kindness. For this gentler world than the one he came from. Humans are a uniquely caring species. Cruelty outside mindless carelessness is an aberration to them, and Newton is kinder than most.
But few people have ever looked at Hermann like that. And Newton, however misplaced his admiration, sees something in the Kaiju that makes him want to immortalize them on his own body. Is caring enough to extend it to the broken, mad things that are clawing their way across his - their- world.
Hermann wants to hate Newton, and can never quite bring himself to do so.
"What is that?"
Newton grins. "You know that Kaiju that made land in Lima last week right? Well, guess who manage to get some specimens?" he whips off the tarp. "Ta-daa!"
The smell.
It has been years since Hermann has seen fresh Kaiju liver, but he will never, ever forget the raw wet smell of it. He had crept out of his pen after a fight, after the loser had been left eviscerated in the pit. Somehow, he had been the first upon the corpse, and had not had to be content with picking scraps from the bones.
It had been so long since his last meal and he had eaten until he couldn't move, and had crawled into the first hole he had found and slept for time unchecked.
That smell.
He no longer thinks about food. He had passed beyond the point of feeling hunger long ago. Now just tired and wasted, and limping more than before. Attempts at synthesizing the compounds has come to nothing, and it has been ten years since Hermann has seen real food.
And he has never felt so hungry. Even before, when there was no sense of time and human decades could have passed between meals, no one ever let him starve and then put food in front of him, forbidding him to eat.
Hermann feels his teeth, his teeth beneath, start to itch, his hands ache from the claws trying to tear through their human sheathes.
He swallows a few times, and attempts to look unperturbed. It fails, but Newton just grins. "Don't worry man, I'll keep it to my side. You don't have to worry about Kaiju gunk on your blackboards."
"You cannot expect me to work like this." His voice sub-vocalises, a barely-there growl of warning. My food. Back off.
Newton, human idiot, doesn't notice. "Come on, you have no idea about the potential of this, if I can catalogue the DNA we can finally start classifying them according to species-"
Hermann cannot hear him. The world drowns in blood-blue blindness. In a last flash of lucidity he lurches to the wall and punches the fire alarm.
The sprinklers drench everything in seconds.
"What the hell, man!" Newton stares at him in disbelief from behind rain-fogged glasses. "Are you completely nuts? You just trashed your own research!"
The water dampens the smell a little, and Hermann can think around the screaming need for food. He's shaking, his hands have left trails of blood across the alarm, where his claws have cut through the skin. A few more seconds and it would have been Newton.
He takes a breath and struggles to control himself. He is not that creature. He hasn't been that creature for ten years. He will not become it again. "If you want to cut up dead Kaiju, you can do it in your own space, not mine."
Newton stares at him, speechless. Inside his suddenly crowded mind, Hermann begs him to go, while Hermann is still able to hold himself back. Finally, unable to come up with a response, Newton turns on his heel and storms off.
Hermann takes a deep breath, another. He can taste human blood where his teeth beneath are starting to push through his gums. He spits out a human molar and tucks it away in his handkerchief. The pain is dull from being so close to shedding, but it centers him.
He carves up the liver into manageable chunks and wraps them in tarp to keep from leaking, and locks them inside two briefcases. He leaves his laptop behind - it's ruined anyway - and fills that case too.
He gets home and leaves the cases on the kitchen table, climbing into the shower to get the shed over with now so he can eat with teeth suited to raw silicon. His skin splits and peels under his claws, flaking off and falling to dust as it hits the enamel of the bath.
He stumbles out shaking and soaked. Hermann loves human manners and etiquette. He dresses smartly, if eccentrically, in clothes that fit his awkward body and always changes for dinner even while on base, something which Newton finds endlessly hilarious. He always makes sure he eats properly in company, and doesn't make a mess (unlike Newton, who eats at his desk if he does at all).
But when he opens the case, and stares at the first meal he's had in ten years, he forgets it all. He forgets his world, his life here and everything goes blank as it reverts back to savagery and violence and the feeling of flesh and muscle bursting between his teeth. The flesh tears off in chunks and the creature swallows it whole, head tilted back as its throat contracts to force it down its gullet.
The creature rips the next case apart with its claws to get at the flesh. It drops its head inside and feeds. Blindly, mindlessly. Tearing off another mouthful before it's even managed to swallow the first. The creature has no name, no gender, no mind, nothing but raging hunger unleashed and howling-
The creature had collapsed after the second case, and slept a full day lying under the kitchen table. Hermann wakes up some time past midday, groggy and confused with his weak leg screaming. He finishes the liver after growing his new skin, licking the table and the inside of the cases clean.
He returns to base two days later, each muscle in his jaw feels wrung out and sore from unprecedented activity and his stomach is distended and swollen. Every epidermis layer of newly-grown skin aches when it stretches.
He's not hungry. He had forgotten what it was like to be not hungry.
The lab has been renovated, with the addition of Newton laying a line of warning tape down the middle of the room. He looks up when Hermann comes in.
"That side," he points at Hermann's worktop "is your side. You can do anything you want over there. You can cover everything in chalk if that makes you feel better, but that side," he points to his own workbench, where a few bedraggled looking Kaiju parts are sitting, "is mine, and I can do anything I want there as well. I can cover anything in Kaiju bits if I want. You do not get to throw my stuff away. Do you know how much Kaiju liver costs?"
Hermann doesn't answer, but licks the lingering taste of Kaiju blue off his lips and starts trying to rebuild eight hours worth of lost work.
"You'd do this for me - with me?"
Hermann looks up. Newton is smiling, a bright, trembling thing that frightens more than it reassures. "Yes." He says the words before he dares think about what they mean. He has been far from the hive for nearly two human decades. Time does not mean anything in the Anteverse, but they have felt his loss, and hunger to find him again.
But Newton is determined to go into the hive. They have his taste now, after that first time, and they will hunt him down when he goes alone. And Hermann knows the hive, he can map them a path through the maze of minds, finally pick out the secrets of the Breach that had been hidden from him, they could win. After seven years of loss, of hopeless fighting for the sake of fighting because it would be better to die here, side by side with humanity, than to wait for the Masters to take the world and hunt him down as that creature-
If he can stay himself now, if they do not crush him back into that creature, the hive in his mind, the orders in his bones, his thoughts banished to the edges of self. As broken and maddened as any of the Kaiju.
He's no longer the weak and ailing starveling that hunger had brought him to. Eight years of feeding from Newton's samples and he is a lean, hunting thing, sharp of tooth and claw. And Newton is a soft human, peacelike, and kinder than most.
And if it succeeds, and they live, Hermann hopes he has been correct in his assessment of Newton, and that he will be kind enough not to tell them all, when he sees what Hermann is.
Newton grins at him, filthy and exhausted, glasses cracked. Hermann suddenly remembers the brightness of a young sun flecked against the waves, and feels warmth burst deep inside him.
He takes his hand, and smiles. Their hands clasp, warm and awkward and Hermann hopes. Please, Gott, his mind whispers, please. Let the Masters not take them both. Let them win this last fight. Let him not wake up with Newton's blood in his teeth, under his nails.
He closes his eyes under the PONS, digs his nails into his palm until his fingertips split and his claws paint bloody arcs across his skin.
Then, the teeth are at his throat. The cold. He'd forgotten the cold of that other world - curling up among the newly dead to leech some small amount of warmth still clinging to their bodies - The roar of the hive, unimaginably loud after so much silence, and Hermann is lost. He cannot think, it cannot-
He hears Newton cry out and for a moment the terrible noise ebbs, lost in a wash of memories that are not his, not the hive. Newton, a small child in his mother's arms, hiding from some imagined terror. Newton playing with toy monsters, eight years old. The memory of Trespasser's attack. The burn of his first tattoo four weeks later. It's a moment of calm, a heartbeat that gives him- Hermann- a moment to catch his thoughts.
Then the hive returns, hungry and howling, and Hermann turns to face them, snarling in echo. The skin peels from his face and his teeth slide free. The memories of a thousand battles ring around his mind, a wall of claws and teeth, hunger and rage. The hive hesitates, and Hermann strikes, with the weapon that won him every pit fight. He was not the fastest, the strongest or the one with the sharpest teeth and the longest claws; but he was the cleverest, even under the screaming hive and the scoured orders.
And Newton - Hermann feels him reel back and snarls at him to fight they need to fight-
Newton doesn't move, he doesn't know the first thing about fighting. A body covered in ink, not scars. But he is there. He- Hermann doesn't know, there are no words for this. He nests himself a place inside Hermann, a warm place like his own personal sun. Pushing away the claws of the hive when they come for them both. Together, they struggle against the howling, step by step won with Hermann's teeth, every push back checked with Newton's solid, stubborn fire.
Until they find it, the mechanics of the Breach, lost and buried and hidden under layers of traps and hunger and hate. Hermann sinks his teeth into in, tears and pulls and howls as it comes free, and swallows it down whole-
And his mind goes blank then, and he comes back to himself on his knees, head down in a convenient toilet and the taste of Kaiju blue in the back of his throat.
But not human blood, his fingers grope his face and the skin is unbroken, intact. His fingers are split to the claws beneath, but they have not unsheathed. Gott. Danke Gott.
Newton hands him a handkerchief to wipe the blood and half digested mess from his face. Hermann does not look at him. He cannot look up and see that he knows, that he came so close to being-
"Hey."
The word, such a purely human word, Hermann chokes down a laugh, swallows stomach acid and ammonia. And salt. Hermann touches his face, the blood from his nose. The tears from his eyes. He has never cried before. He wasn't sure his body was capable of it.
"Holy shit, you've been eating my specimens?"
Hermann snaps around, to angry to speak. They are doing this? Here? Now?
Newton is staring at him, and his expression is the warmest, kindest thing Hermann has ever seen, let alone seen turned at him. His anger leaks out, leaving him tired and worn through.
"Hey, it's okay." Newton sinks down next to him and puts a hand on his shoulder, Hermann twitches, and he knows Newton can feel the scars and twists of his body, hidden under his clothes. "I thought you just threw them away. If I knew you were this hungry, I'd have given you some."
Hermann tries to glare, but he does not feel up to it, there's nothing but warmth in the close place where Newton touches his mind. Warmth, and slowly exploding excitement. He feels so tired, washed out with relief.
He catches Newton- Newt's - arm and pulls himself upright. "We have to go."
"You told them it would work." Newt yells at him, over the roar of the helicopter rotors. "You said the Breach would let them through-"
"And as you were so quick to point out, I was wrong." Hermann snaps back, turning his cane over and over, trying to will the helicopter to fly faster.
"But, you're a-" a Kaiju. Newt stops himself and glances at the pilot. The man is two meters away. Hermann and Newt are a few feet apart and are having to shout to make themselves heard. There will probably never be a better place to discuss this.
"I was an infiltrator, not a scientist. They- " the shadow of the claws at his throat - "They do not share their secrets willingly."
They don't speak. The sounds outside are of rain and sea. No long now, please, Gott, please, long enough.
"Shit'" And Newton is smiling, grinning at him as though Hermann's just given him the world, "Shit, this is insane. You' ve been- You've been doing this for how long?"
His back hunches, protective against the old shame. "Eighteen years." He hates those words. The admission of those five years he spent hiding when he could have been doing something-
The Drift, the hive, is still too close. Newton catches his arm, fingers pressing in the gap where the bones of two limbs fuse to a whole. "Don't. It wasn't your fault."
"Even you cannot be so stupid." The words are too much of a rasp to be hurtful, "I could have warned you. Five years before-"
"You think they'd have believed you? They'd have locked you up in some top secret lab and we'd still have Kaiju only you wouldn't have been here to code the Jaegers. It's not your fucking fault!"
And the worst part is that he believes it, white hot conviction written a mile high between their minds. That Hermann is a good man- Kaiju- whatever- and - you did all you could.
Newt was always kinder than most. And an idiot.
He must have seen something of this, because Newt scowls and pokes Hermann in the chest, "You coded the Jaegers, you mapped the Breach, and you stopped me from getting my brain fried. You can stop feeling like a shitty human being, because you're not." He pauses, Hermann raises an eyebrow. "Not a shitty person, I mean, not not a human being, although you're not, I guess. Oh wow."
Hermann buries his face in his hands, this is going to be a long flight.
He can feel Newt's eyes on him, as they wait, miserably, for the final news in the control room. There's nothing. The screens in front of them are empty bar the fading life signs of the last Jaeger crew, a final tenuous link through the Breach.
He can't even try and get an approximation in his own head because time doesn't exist on that other side. It seems to have ended here too, only the ragged breaths no one is daring to take marking the minutes. Seconds to get through the throat, maybe, his own recollections are hazy, obscured by hive and orders, and he'd never really thought of time before.
He'd tried to work it out once, with a view of calculating his own age but the only measure he has is of his own body's hunger, and that calculation put him at several centuries old.
The display begins the countdown. It gives only seconds but those seconds could be years on the other side for all the relevance they have. Hermann grits his teeth until they come loose. He's not even sure if nuclear physics work on the other side. Yes, he's run the numbers and compared them to his own experiences and judging by that they've got a good chance, but he doesn't know, he doesn't know.
Ten.
Bitte, bitte Gott. Let them not know what to do with the Jaeger. Let them be confused and uncertain. Hermann doesn't know if Gott reaches into that other world, or if He is a match for the Masters that rule it, but please.
Five.
No one is breathing. Hermann's hands hurt, he can feel blood on his palms.
Three.
In the shadows of his mind, the hive stirs, disturbed, an irritation he cannot reach, an ache somewhere in the rear of his jaw that urges him to bite. The hive is angry.
One.
Strong fingers uncurl his, and a hand works its way inside his. Hermann looks down, and Newt's hand is in his, slick with mixed scarlet and blue blood.
Newt smiles at him, and the world erupts in a corona of white.
He cannot scream, he has no mouth, no breath, no tongue. He burns with the sick hot fire of radiation, so fast he has no time to hear the blast, see the white flashfire. His skins are peeling from his bones, his bones are charring, and every word the Masters ever carved into him is so much ash.
He stands, a charcoaled skeleton, for a split second before the blastwave strikes and hurls him apart, shattering him to dust.
It takes heartbeats, less than seconds, but time does not work in that other world, and every moment, every burning, screaming moment stretches for en eternity.
Hermann catches his breath, cold in his lungs. His skins are taut across his bones, he can feel every stitch of his clothes. His hands are clenched so hard that Newt's face is tight with pain. It takes an act of deliberate will to loosen his grip.
The hive is dead. His bones are stripped bare. For the first time in Hermann's unknowingly long life, his mind is silent. He closes his eyes, tilting his face up to an unseen sun. The first warmth of a new star on a new world. He is free. For the first time in his life, he is free.
Everyone else is shouting, screaming in joy. The Breach is gone, and the other world is silent. The hive, the Masters. They are gone. He is finally, finally free.
Newt nudges his shoulder gently. A warm pulse of not being alone. "You okay?"
Yes. A thousand times yes. He gives a terse nod.