Work Text:
~
It was hard to know where to look, in the new world.
The brightness of the sky on blue sun days, the soaring heart feeling of remembering that the kaiju were dead, gone, locked away with our world safely shut up away from all that—it swept you up when you believed it. It caught in your eyes like sharp rain.
Most people—the majority of humankind—I think they lived out the aftermath the way they’d survived the kaiju themselves. They ignored or absorbed or rejected all of the intolerables. They lived the minutiae of their days, day by day, because how could you look clearly at the world now, a staggered range of scars and cataclysms, and not fall to how much more hopeless the return of our hope had made us?
I understood why, but I couldn’t muffle my senses against what was stabbingly obvious. Whenever it seemed I didn’t understand (or why would I not be more agreeable?), someone would come and explain it to me, until what I understood best was that they wanted to forget as desperately as all the countless desperate people whose determined obliviousness they were defending. They wanted me to shut up.
“Let people soak up a little relief, Gottlieb,” Major Hansen had said, before we shut everything down. Before we obliterated all that we’d built in the jaeger program, everything there was, every piece of information and scrap of metal that could be withheld from the outside world. That was another act of heroism on our parts. When the wars over our liberated lands inevitably began, human-against-human, there would at least be nothing left of us for any country to plunder.
It was bitter takings, destroying our only defenses and all our work, killing these pieces of ourselves in advance of the certain monstrosity of man. I never liked being told to quiet down, but it became a harder pill to swallow. I think it nearly destroyed Tendo. Dr. Lightcap, the creator of it all, didn’t even come to see the end. I wondered at that, whether she didn’t care or cared too much, or whether something worse was happening. We had never really known one another except in passing; perhaps I should have called her, but I didn’t.
There was no patience with cynicism, and what counted as cynicism was as little as a partial list of our losses. Of what we were still losing, what was shifting and sinking and burning on every side of us.
So we destroyed our work, and I thought, Let the people feel they’re safe, and by god, tear the safeguards down before the soldiers come to find them.
I could not turn off my vision of the world, and it wasn’t often you could say anything along those lines before you began to get shut out of the reunions and the after-hours drinks. They weren’t friends, and I hardly felt the loss of that on top of the rest. I couldn’t lie so hugely for something so small. It was all around, so violently visible. I couldn't lie just to make them like me.
But they was everyone. The heroes of our hour drifted like silt into retirement. Marshall Hansen, I think, was to be found working a deep sea fishing boat off the Australian coast. I couldn’t guess how he decided on that. Could I have settled down as a fisherman, calling the secondary shots, remembering what comes out of the sea and what never did?
What was there to fish for, anyway, in what was left of our oceans?
Perhaps he was too weathered to let it torment him.
Raleigh and Mako must have felt that all the saving they needed now was one another’s friendship. So Raleigh, seasoned and tenacious and unkillable pilot of every Gipsy Danger, was test-driving construction vehicles in San Diego, and Mako, brave, collected, eminently competent, was an instructor at a dojo.
They were living together. As friends, they said. At completely normal jobs, tame, easy for tucking your head down. I’d seen them on one occasion, when I was visiting a lab in the city. Raleigh had looked at me like I was the one of us that was lost. He made some joking comment about taking up painting. Maybe he meant that for himself, or maybe for me; I wasn’t ever sure if he meant it, either way.
With some fresh study, I entered the field of seismology; years of massive trauma makes our planet tremble against itself, as though all it wishes is to crack apart and end its own misery. Volcanoes breathe warning signs, and coastlines change, driving those who survived the kaiju inland against the rising waters. Our continents shift more than they should, year by year, seeming to crawl with greater and greater haste towards some striking new configuration.
It was our duty to make less of the disasters each of these events could have been, and we did. We saved lives, week by week. But there were days when under the smog and hail, the sick scent of kaiju corpse traveling a hundred miles on the wind, I could not imagine why. Every earthquake was followed by a sigh of the relief of millions, who were only glad their near-death calamity was no such terrible thing as a kaiju. Naturally; what could be so bad as that? And in four years, they became as used to it—horrified but unsurprised—as they had the invading beasts.
Death is death, I muttered under my breath. It was coming after us all, after all, after all we’d tried to do to stop it.
Newton didn’t have any patience with me, not now more than he ever had. Newton loved to talk, loudly, over every objection and counterpoint. Newton refused to be unhappy. I could feel it like an ice wall pressing up against everything I tried to tell him. It was infuriating, how he could know and how we could choose one another, and he still wouldn’t listen. He still wouldn’t look at me at times when I wanted him to.
“Things are only getting worse,” I said.
“You’ve gotta tell yourself otherwise,” Newt would demand. “You’ve gotta say, There are things to be happy about, Hermann.”
It made me so angry, his deliberate obliviousness. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t incapable of observation. But he hid in his work and told me to think happy thoughts, and wouldn’t even list his, and things were so tangled up between us, behind all the niceness and the old familiar skirmishes; I had no idea what he was so smug about. He was happy enough with me, when I wasn’t ruining his peace of mind--but his work and—other things, made him ill and absentminded, and it wasn’t what he’d wanted.
They snapped him up for the cleanup crew almost before we’d gotten out of the hospital. After all there were dozens of enormous, rotting corpses, sinking into our cities and poisoning them over years. What miracles kaiju dung performed in the fields of two or three farmers, their bodies undid a hundred times. Nothing grew around their remains. Any close by water supply was rank with the runoff of their decay.
We had tried to dispose of the bodies, while the breach was still open; but no one with any expertise had been spared for a cure. When their door was finally shut, we knew the symptoms but not the cure. Respiratory illness, cancer, neurological disorder. The rates of mental illness—trauma, depression, anxiety—spiked at some sites of landfall, and there were other changes, sometimes small and sometimes violent, in places other people knew better than I, that seemed almost certainly to stem from the same root.
Newton was still throwing himself at the monsters without any sense of self-preservation. He’d need another kaiju with its teeth gnashing a meter away from him before he’d understand exactly what they’d do to him.
Which was, I thought, possible. I had never given over to the optimist’s mantra, that the kaiju could not, would not come back now. That was absolutely untrue. If no one else would rouse themselves to think so, I did. I knew the math, and I used all that I had. My clock started again almost as soon as it stopped. I could not stop making predictions, and before long I couldn’t bear the thought of stopping, because no one else would do it. Someone had to.
Someone still had to do everything.
~
Hermann grunts and turns the page on his reader and doesn’t look up from the couch. His good leg is dangling off the side, and his bad leg is stretched out in front of him. He looks pale around the edges, which Newt takes as confirmation that he’s in pain, and probably stressing out as usual about the state of the world. Newt can understand that. Newt feels like his eye has been twitching for hours. His eye isn’t twitching. It feels like it’s twitching. It won’t stop.
“Hermann,” he says again. “Hermann. Hermann. Hermann. Hermann—”
“What?” Hermann snaps, his reader slapping against his lap.
“See, this is what I’m talking about?” Newt says. “You’re no fun to talk to, you won’t even argue, all you do is sit here thinking about how everything is ruined. Did you go to a doctor today, like I’ve been telling you for the last eight months? No.”
“—I don’t need any more doctors than I already have. And I don’t plan to poison myself with any mind-clouding chemical concoctions engineered by profiteering pharmaceutical corporations.”
“Unbelievable,” Newt says, staring at him. He’s heard it all before, but he can’t help pushing when Hermann gets nasty about brain stuff. It’s a point of pride in him, or maybe it’s just a real need he has, for Hermann not to stop being his ally right at Newt’s sore points in fits of pique.
“It’s all very well for you,” Hermann says. “You have an actual disease. You have several. I don’t. I have concern.” He picks up his reader again, and looks like he wants to snap it like a newspaper. Too bad for him. “I don’t want my senses dulled when everyone else has lost theirs.”
Does it really seem like Newt’s senses are dulled? Hermann is ridiculous. Newt says, “I’m getting takeout,” and wanders out of the room.
“That’s the fourth time this week!” Hermann calls. “We have a kitchen!”
“Who cares what I eat, Mr. Concern?” Newt yells back. “It’s all gonna kill me anyway, right?”
“Newton!” Hermann barks. “Come here.”
Newt sticks his head back into the living room.
“I’ll cook with you,” Hermann says. “Come here.”
Newt does, but he doesn’t lean close until Hermann says, “I don’t think you’re dull. I think if you stopped taking anything you’d be so sharp it would kill you.”
“Best I’ll get, I guess,” Newt says, and kisses Hermann’s nose. Hermann drags him down to his knees and kisses him until he’s weak. Then he hefts himself up and hurries off to the kitchen while Newt is still blissfully trying to get to his feet.
~
I was released from the hospital first, and I went home. We hadn’t been apart before then, so I hadn’t known what to expect. But in England, with my parents, with all the familiar old things around me and a brief abatement of post-apocalyptic despair, I felt him with me. Everywhere I turned, he was at my elbow. Whomever else was speaking, I paid half my attention to his ghost. More than once, I almost asked for his opinion out loud. It was uncomfortable, like being a fish on a hook, jerked back with pain and force every time I went a little too far.
When I returned, the first thing he said was, “We could get two bedrooms, if you want. Or there’s bunk beds.”
I didn’t know how much of it was the consequence of drifting, and how much was the consequence of friendship that endured and survived a war. It probably didn’t matter. We found two bedrooms, in Seattle. The second of them wasn’t much use.
Periodically someone has expressed surprise that we would endure each other’s company by choice. As if the war against the kaiju had been enough suffering for anyone, without our having to live together afterwards.
Newton let them say what they liked (mostly I think that he didn’t attend closely enough to notice them at all). I, however, didn’t have his patience.
“I can’t believe that you’re living together,” some presumptuous acquaintance would say. Half-joking, or not. You must fight all the time. You must want to kill him sometimes. Bet he drives you to some serious drink. Does he ever shut up?
As if one of us was any better than the other. I can only imagine what they said to him about me.
“We go out for plenty of drinks,” I would say, bright and burning. “He always shuts up if I put my mind to it. Not that I don’t prefer him loud.”
Newt liked that I wouldn’t let anyone misunderstand us, even if he would have let them go as unimportant (and he never would make innuendo). But I didn’t only do it to please him. We had always been friends, which was why he felt no need to defend us. Plenty of people had mistaken our quarrels for enmity over the years.
I didn’t mind until someone made it clear that they considered Newton a nuisance to me.
I had helped to get rid of the kaiju—and the pilots, every one of them, and Pentecost and Tendo Choi and a thousand others beside—but I remembered with absolute clarity that Newton had thrown himself into something he’d known would damage him terribly, if it didn’t kill him outright. I remembered the way he pushed me aside when I pulled him out of his first drift with the kaiju, the way he threw aside what it was doing to him as irrelevant, focused and racing like the terrier he was.
It was brave, and I saw it, and he was already my closest thing to a best friend. If I’d required anything more than what he always was to want his lasting friendship, that would have done it. I didn’t need it, so my need for him winded me.
My affection was largely private, but I could no longer hear anyone slight him without seeing his pale, bloody face, determined to dive back in, exhausted and unhesitating, absolutely focused. I could not stop feeling his heart in mine. I could not stop imagining him bleeding and limp with the kaiju still scraping his mind for usable materials, imagining him choking to death on kaiju fumes, thinking of him growing sick, sicker and sicker, and leaving me. I could feel his fear and fascination.
So when an insult was thrown at him, intended to flatter me, I went a bit berserk.
Newton moored me when I felt like the sea would swallow me. When I wanted it to swallow me, he was the reason I fought not to allow it. Damn everyone else, myself very much included, but how could I leave my exasperating, mad, manic, obnoxious, mess of a friend? Of all of the people who adored him, how many of them were his friends? How many of them did he really want? How many did he need? How alone would I leave him, if I left?
I couldn’t be the thing that hurt him. Not when the world was in pieces, and even that had not broken his interest and charm and hunger, and that unquestioned hope burned at his center, protected by a hidden serenity from every wind that had me on my knees.
I couldn’t hurt him. What if somehow it made him disappear?
~
It’s been the same list since the world got saved, pretty much. The list goes: you’re not dead, the world’s not dead, you didn’t lose your best friend, you still have a job, only two people have physically assaulted you for your kaiju tattoos since the breach was closed.
(That one got added at the end, and it’s changed one time. Two different people, two different attacks. Sometimes he wonders if he should carry a copy of his CV to wave in people’s faces when they start to come at him.)
But. The big one is, You’re still aware of who you are. That’s a legitimate success, considering what forming a psychic attachment to a massive, militant, alien hive-mind does to your brain. Considering how close he comes to forgetting, sometimes, slipping into Hermann’s memories, slipping into something else and going deeper and deeper before he realizes he can barely see the sunlight at the surface.
You saved the world and it could be worse.
Could be worse. Could be worse. He always gets free. He likes his job. He’s finding some interesting things. Hermann is right here, within arm’s reach, and when he’s not so low he can’t see over it, he sees Newt almost perfectly. He knows when to tuck little pockets of absolute kindness into the middle of his grumbles and tempers and long-winded explanations of things that aren’t as cool sounding as what Newt does.
That’s one of the reasons he’s got to keep it together. Because, you know, he can’t get this itch out of his head, like this sharp flat heavy thing, like a piece of steel or slate, and he knows it’s Hermann pressing on him, and he bets even though they don’t talk about it that Hermann feels him pressing back.
Hermann doesn’t feel good. Newt—well, Newt’s used to having a lot of things going on in his head that no one wants to deal with. He’s already drowning them in drugs, he’s already the master of never being anything worse than hyper and a little quirky. He can say his list under his breath, as many times as it takes, as many days as he’s got to, and when Hermann feels him pressing back, that’s all Hermann will feel. Newt can handle the new world, why not? And if things get dark, there’s nothing to fear in feeling him out in the shadows.
~
“The groceries are coming after me,” I said. “Should be delivered at seven or so.”
“Great!” Newton said over the hitch in his throat. He knocked the spoon against the coffee maker to dislodge the last of the coffee. “We’ve only been asking for two weeks. I know there’s a budget or whatever to being the rogue last bastion of human survival, but for god’s sake a few lightbulbs and at least one—” He held up the spoon as a counter. “--one comfortable desk chair is not going to put them under.”
Newton sometimes startled me in the worst ways when I least expected.
“Oh?” I said.
“Uh, yeah,” Newton said. “Next thing they’ll turn my bubblers off and all these beauties will be worthless.”
“Newton,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, and your math thing. Why don’t I get one of those? 3D interactive imaging isn’t not useful when you’re handling toxic alien biological samples.”
“Newton,” I said, swallowing bile.
“What?”
“Are you making enough coffee for two?”
“Course,” Newton said. “Come on, Gottlieb, I’m not about to give you a reason to pick a fight. I need you to help me convince them to give us more money.”
“We have plenty of money, Newton,” I said. I stood utterly still, waiting for the ice to melt.
“We do?”
“Yes. The groceries are coming soon.”
“Oh, good. Good. Hey!” he said, blinking at me. “Hermann, you look like shit. Long day, buddy?”
“They’re all long days,” I muttered. I put my hand in his hair, only for a second. “Is that really enough coffee for two?”
It was, but he put in a little extra, in case.
~
Newt really hates that part, because he’s the one who’s doing all right, and Hermann is the one who keeps not going to a doctor, and honestly, even Newt can’t always tell when he’s right anymore. A Hermann who’s mean sometimes is one Newt can cope with. No problem. A Hermann who’s wrong, and never realizes—no. Nope. No. That’s why, sometime, in one of these conversations that he doesn’t avoid, he has to win.
Not this one. He stops this one, says, “Hey, let’s go to the beach,” and waits for Hermann to stop laughing his ass off. Okay, he gets that beaches now equal bad memories for a lot of people, but a little cold ocean shouldn’t be some bizarre, unthinkable thing for a guy who grew up in England.
“What is it?” he demands. “The sand? I’ll help, whatever.”
“Newton,” Hermann says. “Why do you always act as though the world is what it used to be?”
“Why do you act like that was so good?”
Hermann considers. “That’s a fair point,” he says. “We’ll go to the beach.”
It’s late and the beaches are empty, mostly. It’s dark. They can feel how cold the firm, wet sand is under their feet.
When they’re standing there alone, Newt says, “What are you so scared of, Herm? I mean what’s the one thing, specifically, in this whole big ol’ shitstorm of a post-apocalyptic world, that you just can’t let go?”
“Don’t call me Herm,” Hermann says. His arm around Newt is the only warm thing. Newt waits.
Hermann huffs a breath out of his nose. “I don’t think you see yourself, Newton. I don’t think you see that your job makes you ill, of that sometimes you have conversations with me that happened three years ago. I don’t think you understand how small you are in all this.” He indicates everything with his free arm. He looks at Newt.
Newt says, “Are you telling me I’m delusional?” Just checking. Because, if so, he wasn’t aware of that.
“I’m saying—” Hermann checks himself. “Yes, I am saying that. You ought to get it looked after, that and that cough you’ve got.”
“I guess I didn’t notice,” Newt says oddly.
“I know you didn’t. Anyway, the point is that you’re it.”
“It?” Newt says. “It what?”
“It,” Hermann repeats. “Everything. What I’ve got. What I’m afraid to lose. You are my hangup, Newton.”
“Oh,” Newt says. “Okay. I see how that could be a problem.”
“I don’t think it’s so bad as you’re making out, now,” Hermann adds. “On my end, that is. I’m not crazy. My concerns are completely valid.”
“Most of the time I come home figuring you’ll be dead,” Newt says. It just comes out like that. Easy as pie. Sounds harsh. He shrugs. “Maybe that’s just how you feel, not what you want to do. I don’t know. Are you going to kill yourself, Hermann?”
“No,” Hermann says, shocked. “Christ, Newton, why would you think that?”
“I told you,” Newt says patiently, although he’ll run out of that patience soon. “I feel it. I feel like you feel like that’s what’s going to happen. That you’re going to die because everything is hopeless and violent and, and specifically out to end. Sometimes, I mean, not every single second.”
“How do you know that?” Hermann says. “Am I your latest biological obsession? We aren’t drifting, Newton, this is the normal, everyday, catastrophic but completely undrifting world.”
“So what?” Newt says. “It works how it works. We made it weird, going in there with a kaiju. Maybe we caught a little hive mind and it made us a little more connected than other people. You want me to figure it out, Hermann, I’ll figure it out! Don’t act like it’s not true, though.”
“I’d only point out that, given how detached we’ve been of late, what you’re suggesting would seem unlikely.”
“Detached?” Newt demands, feeling harassed. “Are you kidding? How grateful is that! Sorry that my obsession and the cohabitation and my dick weren’t sufficiently cluey to clue you in. I feel very fucking attached, thank you so much.”
Hermann hesitates. “Then I suppose it’s me.”
“What,” Newt says. “Gonna dump me?”
“No. You idiot. No,” Hermann says. “But I don’t know how I can be optimistic, surrounded by facts.”
“No one’s asking for optimism, Hermann,” Newt says. “You’re not so much smarter than the rest of us that you’re the only one who noticed things are in the crapper. Just find a little joy, buddy. You know, in what we’ve got. It wasn’t ever that much, so don’t piss on it now like it’s not enough.”
“Find a little joy,” Hermann grumbles. “Easy for you to say. You’d find joy in the back of a tic-tac box if you started reading it.”
“And I’m crazy,” Newton says, waving his hands. “Okay, I get it, whatever. But, I mean, I am happy, right? How’s that going for you?”
“Good point,” sighs Hermann. “You do have a lot of those. Good points.”
“Oh yeah? As in, awesome personal characteristics, or excellent judgment?” Newt says. “Whatever, I know, I’m great. Get in the ocean with me.”
“What?” says Hermann. “Newton, it’s freezing. It will literally kill us. We don’t have changes of clothes, we’ll get hypothermia and die.” He doesn’t say, Or I’ll just slip and fall and drown, but Newt thinks he’s probably thinking it. He almost never says that kind of thing, though, because he doesn’t like fuss or being dismissed. Which is pretty much what happens.
“I’m not going to let you drown,” Newt says. “I mean, die. Of hypothermia.”
Hermann glares at him thoughtfully.
“I didn’t say drown,” he says. “Why do you think I’m going to drown?”
“I don’t,” Newt says. “I mean, even if you fell I’d just grab you.”
“If you could. Why did you say that?”
“I know,” Newt says. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“You know me too well, that’s all,” Hermann says, shrugging at him.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Newt says. “Come on, Hermann. Christ. Go in the ocean with me, just for a second.”
“Fine!” Hermann says. He pulls free and starts off toward the water before Newt is ready.
“Hey!” Newt says. “All right, catching up.”
Hermann is taking off his shoes and rolling his pants up, hopping stiffly along the cold beach. Newt trots behind, following suit. “Hang on, hang on!” he says. A rock jabs him between the toes, and he says, “Ouch, ouch!” and then they both stumble up to their ankles into the frigid water.
“Oh,” Hermann says. “God, that’s cold.”
Newt grabs Hermann’s arms, laughing and wobbling and chattering. “Shit,” he says. “Sorry. It really is cold. Is your cane going to get stuck in the sand? My feet are going numb.”
“Oh, you think you hurt,” Hermann growls. “And no, it’s not stuck!” He pulls on it to demonstrate and wobbles a little. Newt is so stupid. Stupid, stupid.
“We can get out,” Newt says. “Christ, this is cold.”
Hermann nods. “Yes, yes. Let’s.”
They climb out of the water, shivering and hissing like geese. Newt grabs his shoes and Hermann’s without really letting go.
“Want to go get a drink or something?” he asks, teeth chattering. Hot chocolate.
“Scotch,” Hermann agrees. He winces and Newt says, “I’m stupid, sorry.”
“It’s all right, dear,” Hermann says, patting his hand. “I wanted to go.”
~
It hurt like hell sometimes. I should have known; we’d been friends for years, never mind any drift, and I was aware that being in near-constant pain did not always translate to a communication of that pain. One took it for granted, at some point. Newton did. I hadn’t realized. I should have guessed.
It was only once in a while that I saw all this with utter clarity. I could feel the differences between us, my floods and lakes and stormy seas to his meteoric tempers, brilliant and burning and deadly at landfall.
At odd moments, when he spoke, I knew without a moment’s thought whether his noise was a product of blustering ego, or of his fevered and teeth-gritting efforts to hear his own rational thoughts over the clamour in his head.
It explained why he was always talking over me, I suppose. That, and sometimes he was just being rude.
But understanding notwithstanding, I was not always patient. He wasn't always patient with me, and I couldn’t abide how he continued to turn away from serious discussion.
And I did not like feeling guilty over my own temper. I had reason for my annoyance. What did I care if Newton’s brain was like an excited plasma lamp, a fizzing little ball of electricity? We all knew how to be overwhelmed, we all knew about psychological suffering. At least his body didn’t hate him.
Sometimes, that tiny, incessant hint of Newton itching at the back of my mind drove me to complete distraction. I was certain it was only there to ensure I never forgot that, in some ways, Newton’s riotous emotions counted where mine did not. They were legitimate. They were named. They were diagnosed, catalogued, and medicated.
That nagging notion grew and grew; I found it hard not to snap when we spoke, and I began to worry, every day when I went home, that Newton would have found some better, less bitter way to live, that he had seen enough of my heart not to want it anymore.
The smallest part of my fear was realized the first time Newton said offhandedly, “You can see a doctor. That’s what I do.” He said it often enough that it stopped being offhanded.
“I am allowed emotions without them being an illness,” I told him the last time. “Because you can’t manage yourself doesn’t make the whole world sick.”
He normally put up with anything I had to say, about everything, including this. But not at that moment. I saw him bite back some retort, no doubt about my hypocrisy and nihilism. Then he stood up from the sagging green sofa which he wouldn’t throw away, and he left.
I was equally certain that he wouldn’t return, and that he would. I called and left a message apologizing, for when he wanted to hear it. At least I didn’t have too much misplaced pride for that.
I paced until I was shaking, paced a little further after that in penance, and then collapsed into my chair and tried to swallow the pain without crying, hands pressing together hard enough that I couldn’t see the tremor.
Newton came home while I was still sitting there, but my breathing was quiet, and I don’t think I looked more than a little guilty and pale. I wondered with a spark of fear if he had felt anything.
He didn’t say. He said, “We’re going on a trip.”
“We are?” I asked.
“I called ahead,” Newton said. “Raleigh called you an ass. What did you say to him?”
~
First they fly to San Diego, take a cab to the small, square, brightly-colored house where Mako and Raleigh are living. Newt loses track of the neighborhoods they’re passing through before he can really start ticking them off in his head. By the time they step out of the cab into the warm afternoon light, surrounded by wide skies and front yard palm trees, his unpracticed mental map is totally gone.
He’s glad they didn’t try to drive.
Hermann has been in a placid mood all day, but he isn’t communicating, either.
“Oh, jesus,” Newt mutters, looking over at him, and rings the bell.
When Raleigh comes to the door, he’s got his uninterested face on. He gives Newt a normal, firm handshake, and Newt says, “Mr. Becket.” He has a title, oh well, Newt doesn’t remember that either. Ranger Becket. Raleigh. Raleigh gives a weird, short handshake to Hermann and neither of their faces say anything. Newt doesn’t think his own face ever says absolutely nothing. He doesn’t know how they do it. Amazing.
“Miss Mori around?” Newt asks. It’s their house, so she’s got to live here, right?
“Soon,” Raleigh says. Sticks to the basics, Raleigh. A man of business. Newt’s heard all about him as a hotshot pilot, but he’s pretty sure that ended when Raleigh’s brother died. Now he’s a guy with guts and gut feelings.
“Cool,” Newt says. Maybe that can stop Raleigh from noticing that Hermann is making a wide, crooked line with his mouth and refusing to speak.
Raleigh lets them inside. They wait for Mako in the living room, beers in hand (real-beer, real-beer, ginger-Newt-beer).
Aside from a guy that does not go out of his way to please people, Raleigh is also a guy that a lot of people vote for as The Guy Who Saved the World. Mako takes second—sexism, probably. Newt and Hermann get a portion of the nerd vote, but Choi gets more than his fair share because he actually looks good on TV.
Raleigh says, “You geniuses still saving the world one day at a time?”
Newt thinks it’s a fond half-joke, half-compliment. He says, “Well, you know, we’re trying.” And then Raleigh rolls his eyes and Hermann coughs, which is suspicious timing, and Newt says, “Or we’re not, maybe it’s that we’re not.”
“Well, you’d better be doing something fucking fabulous,” Raleigh says. “Or your boyfriend’s a giant hypocrite.”
“Oh, what the hell is happening,” Newt says, surrendering in advance. Hermann is scowling. Raleigh is looking so bored it hurts. Hermann clears his throat.
When Mako finally comes home, they’ve been sitting in awkward small-talk canyon for twenty minutes.
“Oh,” Mako says. “You are already here. You should have called. I would have hurried.”
“That would have been great,” Newt says. “Can you explain what—” He waves his hands at Raleigh and Hermann.
“Ah,” says Mako. “Raleigh is offended. On his visit before, Doctor Gottlieb said that what we do is cowardly and not worthwhile.”
“Oh, of course,” Newt says. He turns to Hermann. “Hey, buddy, here’s a question, did you have any particular reason for being horrible?”
Hermann scowls. His mouth gets wider and wider.
“Don’t think he liked that buddy thing,” Raleigh says, arms crossed.
“Back off,” says Newt. “We need help. There’s this thing, I think it’s all part of the same thing? It’s because of our drift with the kaiju. That stuff really screws with your brain chemistry. Do you guys have a permanent psychic connection?”
If the world worked how it should, he would already know this. But pilots were always crazy private about their neurological memory-lane, body-sharing make-outs. Memories: more personal and dangerous than spit.
Raleigh and Mako exchange a look, which, again, Newt can’t get a read on. Mako says, “We are more—aware. But there is not a psychic connection.”
“Ah,” says Newt. “Ah.”
“I apologize,” Hermann says. “For what I said. It has been suggested by certain parties—”
“He needs a shrink,” Newt says over him. “I would know. We might be stuck in each other’s heads a little.”
Raleigh blows air between his lips.
“Minorly,” Hermann emphasizes. “But constantly.”
“It might be more empathic than telepathic,” Newt says. “If you’re into that kind of distinction.” He doesn’t say, it feels like getting a migraine, forever.
Mako says, “You tell us what you are feeling. We will tell you how it is supposed to work.”
Hermann says, “I said to him, didn’t I? Don’t. Drift. With. The. Kaiju. Drifting with a kaiju is a terrible, terrible, dangerous idea.”
“Well,” says Newt. “Yeah. But it totally worked.”
~
When he first proposed the idea, I said no; but that didn’t last. I still saw a hundred barriers, but whatever the obstacles, I slowly saw it was the good idea, the right idea, the necessary idea.
We worked at it on our own for months, and it came to nothing. The killer wasn't that we were failing, but that we were of one mind in every sense and yet at odds. We couldn’t even argue, at the worst of it. We were sweating away all our free hours trying to free ourselves, and a brusque word at the wrong moment would have been painful. Disastrous. Permanently damaging.
You have to understand that I loved him. How much I loved him. He’d been my best friend for nearly five years, and by now we were a hundred more things to each other than friends.
Bickering was our balance for each other, sometimes meant but almost always needed, and closeness between us was as familiar to me as sleep, or the sky, or the ache in my leg. When we were silent, working side by side, it was the only time I was terrified.
The world had seemed perilous to me since I was a child. It was always violent, always in some form of obvious decline. That was tolerable, and I was often nearly content. I was more often happy.
But over the course of these years, despite the cracks in our world, I had become dependent without realizing it on comfort.
I had learned what it could be, in morsels of safe-feeling, and tasting it, I’d been addicted. It did not have to be much, but it meant everything. Before we’d kissed, it meant everything. And now—well. I had avoided thoughts of loss, so I hadn’t known how afraid I could be of losing this.
I was afraid; and one night, working late, I grew more and more reserved while Newton worked himself into a red-faced, erratic fury. I didn’t know if he was planning to cry or smash everything in sight to pieces. I knew he would spend some unnecessary words on me.
He looked up, and oh, I could feel him boiling over. I didn’t deserve anything he might say, and he was going to regret it in half a moment.
“Newton,” I snapped, before he could. “There’s not a reason in the world not to ask Tendo.”
The way he looked at me then I knew there were a dozen extremely good reasons to leave Tendo Choi out of it. But we needed him, and if we were selfish, we were also desperate.
“Come here,” I said. “Come here. Drop that.”
Newton was frozen, but I waited. He looked stiffly down at the tablet in his hands, halfway to crushing it, and shook his anger out of himself. He put the tablet down. He looked at me with his hands still open, resting against the table like they ought to be full. He looked at me for some hint of what to do.
“I will not let the solution be the thing that ruins us,” I said evenly. “Come here. Come here, love.”
We weren’t entirely choked at the end of our leashes. We weren’t out of breath, and we still had room to move, and if I hadn’t reminded Newton or myself of that often enough, I would now.
“Good lad,” I murmured.
He fell into my arms at a word. He never stopped holding me up.
~
1. Choi hates them.
2. Newt gets it.
3. Choi said NOBODY LOOK FOR ME.
4. Newt did one time, and that sucked.
5. Choi is actually okay and they might make things less okay.
6. They immolated Choi’s life work and it wasn’t a democratic process but in a popular vote, they immolated Choi’s life work.
Newt really, really gets it.
However, most of the time that they’re not talking to Choi, they’re also not trying to resurrect the mechanical love of his life. And even if that weren’t the thing they were doing, Newt has limits for putting the feelings of other people first. In this case, he feels comfortable accepting backlash from Choi on the chance that he’ll keep Newt and Hermann from going completely nuts.
It was better to announce themselves to Raleigh and Mako, but Newt and Hermann agree they’re better off getting the drop on Choi.
None of them ended up where they started. Choi is running a lab in Boston that builds intelligent prosthetics. He shows up in the media once in a while, but his head is firmly kept down.
They find him in his lab, because that makes it really awkward for anyone to try to make a scene and throw Newt and Hermann into the street. Maybe awkward enough. Newt hopes so. They get inside by means of being those semi-famous guys Tendo used to work with, which is honestly the best way to override a series of code-locked doors. The first guy drops them off with a second guy mid-route, and the second guy is Choi’s lab mate, and that guy says, “Oh, my god, I would totally mind-meld with a kaiju,” before leading them back to the lab.
Hermann mutters choice things under his breath, but Newt drags him along and keeps his mouth as shut as he can get it. Don’t chew the nice guy out. Don’t tell Hermann to his face that you would probably, totally, hook your brain up to a kaiju again.
They find Choi in the lab, leaning on someone else’s desk, pointing at a figure on the screen.
“—would be sweet,” Choi says. Newt wonders if any of his intelligent prosthetics are weaponized. Or here.
He says, “Hey, Choi, sorry, we normally don’t.”
Choi spins around. “Fuck me,” he says. “What are you doing here? Both of you?”
“We tend to be found together,” Hermann says, firmly and drily.
“Oh, right,” Choi says. He’s got a distantly confused attitude towards queerness of any kind. Newt remembers that, now.
Choi’s lab mates are big old nerds, so they all know Newt and Hermann are the kaiju guys, like Choi is the jaeger guy. Newt notices them noticing before Choi does, but he catches on pretty quick.
“I told them I’d totally drift with a kaiju,” says their guide.
“Then you are an idiot, my friend,” Choi says. “Come on, let’s take it somewhere private.”
Somewhere private is a server room, which is loud and cramped and Choi has to unstick a few chairs before he can offer Hermann or Newt a seat. He sits on his own chair backwards and says, “Okay, kids. What the fuck do you want?” He gets out a cigarette with shaky hands. As soon as he lights it, Newt starts coughing; Choi shrugs, stubs it out against the tile floor, and says, “Well?”
Hermann just sits there watching to see if Newt’s about to die, until Newt waves him off. Slowly, Hermann says, “You’re right. Drifting with a hive mind, and a malicious one at that, is dangerous, overwhelming, and has completely unforeseeable consequences.”
“So I win, you buy the next round. So what?”
“So,” says Hermann, “when we drifted with that kaiju brain, it had unforeseen consequences for us.” He’s getting to tell all the good parts. Newt’s not going to let him tell all the good parts.
“We’re semi-psychic and slightly crazy,” Newt wheezes, on cue. “We need to recalibrate our connection without kaiju interference. We think correcting the link between us will help to offset the negative effects of the kaiju mind. You know, hoping maybe the crazy-crazy symptoms will go away once we align everything else? But obviously we need the right equipment, and we’re getting nowhere trying to reverse engineer it from nothing—”
“We don’t want to impinge on your good will,” Hermann says. “Or your life, or your desire to stay out of prison. But would you consider helping us achieve one or two little drifts?”
Choi, suddenly as still as a dog with a squirrel in its sights, says, “You want me to reinvent jaeger tech.”
“Not that it’s legal,” Hermann says, “but yes.”
“Haha, legal,” Choi says. “Shit. Shit, man. Yes. Yes. Let’s do this fucking thing.”
~
Newton complained at the pace, which was slow, because, he reminded me a dozen times, he had done the same thing in two hours with a pile of junk.
“But we couldn’t do it now. And look how you turned out,” I said. “Newton, if it’s meant to correct the problems, we can’t afford to do it wrong. Precision is not a crime.”
“That is exactly what it is,” Newton said. But he complained less often.
Truthfully, I was no happier about the waiting than he was. We were paralyzed in the interim, emotionally speaking. We were poised on the edge of change, yet, since we could not depend on any change at all, dug ourselves ever deeper into the things that made us miserable.
Still, we planned. We shared a few carefully timed “reunions” over the next two months, and the Pons took form. We were careful toward each other, as well, both petrified of breaking the civility and affection that was being rubbed raw by entanglement. Every day was a series of careful breaths and slow exhalations, moments of relief that nothing had imploded yet.
Newton’s cough lessened as time passed, and I was grateful enough not to comment for weeks. One day, though, as we avoided all the world’s evils to the best of our abilities by making morning coffee and going straight back to bed, Newton said, “So I want to talk about the plan, for when Tendo’s done? I have, like, this whole plan. Been keeping it kind of quiet. But, do you know? Because it’s been bugging the crap outta me, not knowing if you know.”
“Know what?” I said. “Don’t be obscure, Newton.”
“Ah,” he said. “Yeah. Well. I wondered. If you know why I was getting sick, and the rest of the team...wasn’t.”
“I don’t know,” I said stiffly. “I didn’t realize it was only you.” That I hadn’t known pointed to Newton being reckless in some way I was bound not to like. He’d known I wouldn’t like it, too, or he wouldn’t have forced himself calm to hide it from me. Typical. I was furious already without any specifics.
I clenched my hands around my mug, pressed down against the blankets over my stomach. “What did you do?”
“Well, I wanted to know if you’re right,” he said. “You know. You’re right a lot. And the kaiju, you know, they’re fucking terrifying, you just want kind of a general idea if they’re one of the things you have to worry about, so—”
“I know,” I finished. “What did you do, Newton?”
“I was just looking for an unspoiled sample,” Newton said. “Just a little bit. The dealers didn’t have any but I thought maybe some freak—preservation or something might have happened in one of the bodies—But, you know, all that involves a lot of gut-crawling, and I couldn’t exactly sign out a suit at work in the middle of the night. I jury-rigged. I mean, it kind of worked, but there’s only so much you can do, and I figured the Pons would come later.” He shrugged. “Which h it is, right?”
I sat up fast and my coffee sloshed over the edge of the cup, onto my hands and my blankets.
“You were trying to drift with a kaiju again?” I demanded. “Are you completely mad? Are you completely stupid? What the hell were you thinking?”
“Present tense,” Newton said. The shameless bastard.
“Tell me you stopped looking!” I barked. “Tell me you gave up on—on plugging yourself into a hunk of rotten alien! Your cough is better, you must—”
“I found one,” Newton said, so reasonably, good God. “And we’re getting the equipment in, like, three days!”
“I could kill you,” I said, heartfelt. “Where is it? Where did you put it?”
“Around,” he said cagily.
I don’t think he realized yet how angry I was, although he should have known by then. He should have felt it. He should—
I set my mug down and shoved myself to my feet.
“Don’t even think of calling me irrational,” I snarled. “Where is the goddamned thing?”
“In the—Hermann, just calm down, I just want to prove you right, okay? We’ll have the equipment, and then it’ll just be a quick little peek—”
“Don’t you put this on me, you complete misery of a human being!” I snapped back at him. “It isn’t my idea that you walk back into the worst thing you’ve ever done to yourself. It’s not my idea that you commit suicide, crawling through corpses until they suffocate you. Don’t you dare call that a favor to me, Newton. Don’t you dare. Don’t.”
Newton chewed his lip.
“It’s in the basement,” he said. “Side note: drifting with a kaiju is not the worst thing I’ve ever done to myself.”
I snatched at my cane and rapped it against the side of the bed. “Of all the things I’ve done to myself, Newton, you are the worst.”
I turned and left, heading straight into the cellar. Damn him, he knew. I never came down unless I had to, and he’d made sure there weren’t any more reasons months ago. I couldn’t even imagine what he was doing to make sure I didn’t get an inkling, trickling along our peculiar connection.
The thing was hidden under a blanket, bubbling away in a modified fish tank. That explained the electric bill.
I clenched my jaw tight and did not say any of the choice words that wanted to hiss out of me.
“Hermann,” Newton said from the stairs. “Hermann, calm down, okay? It’s not a big deal, I just wanted to corroborate your hypothesis.”
“You were dying,” I shouted, turning on him. “It could have killed you. It still could! It would, if you went through with this idiotic plan! For God’s sake, you put it in our house! And you lied, Newton, don’t think I missed that. You made me think you wanted us set right, but, what a great surprise! All you wanted were your damned monsters.”
“No way,” Newton said. He was pale, but I was in such a white-hot fury that it seemed like nothing.
“I swear to you,” I said, shaking my finger. “I know you’re reckless, Newton, I know you’re curious and fearless and all those things, but I swear, if you’re a liar, too, then as soon as we’ve seen Tendo Choi, I am walking away from you and never coming back.”
“No,” Newton said, immediate and even.
I glared back at him, flat and raging.
“I was helping,” he said.
“Don't,” I said. “Don’t excuse yourself. I don’t care. You can be a fanatic and an addict all you like, but you aren’t doing it to me.”
Newton chewed on that.
“Want me to get rid of it?” he asked. “No biggie. Only took eight months of life-risking and gut-crawling. No problem.”
I did not bother to answer. He came down the remaining steps and halted in front of the tank.
“Might need a dolly or something,” he said. “I don’t really remember how I got it down here.”
He sounded peculiar, and the force of his emotions butted up against my own so fiercely that I felt ill.
“Newton,” I growled. “What on Earth possessed you?”
“Don’t know,” he said, faint and far away and deep inside me. “Couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
He’d thought I was dying, too. He was compulsive, manic, and fanatical, yes. But the reason for this was me. He’d wanted to surprise me with the truth, not that the world was in imminent danger of being attacked, but that it wasn’t. He wanted me to see that the world hadn’t ended, so that I would stay in it.
“God,” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “Just a—just a kaiju.”
We poisoned the sample, shriveled it past use, drained the tank into jugs and hauled the whole mess upstairs under cover of darkness. We drove it out into the mountains and burned it, no doubt destroying a small area of delicate ecology in the process. We barely spoke until we arrived home. Newton parked the car in the drive, and we sat in silence. I waited for whatever it was he wanted.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
“Where the hell would I go?” I demanded, too loud because reflexively I tried to speak over the sharp cold pain in my heart. Bury it. Banish it.
“I don’t know,” Newton said. “You have friends.”
“I don’t have friends,” I said savagely. “I’m too strange for friends. You’re too strange for friends, too, you infuriating animal. And you are the sum total of everything I have. So no, I am not leaving!”
Newton leaned forward until his forehead rested on the steering wheel.
“I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings,” I said. “You worried me badly.”
“Shut up, Hermann,” he said into the wheel.
We went back to bed after all that, like Hong Kong, the last fortress before an unstoppable force. But at least we could face each other, if we thought of something else.
~
Also, in the last two days, Newt has noticed Hermann looking aghast at him, like all his worst fears are right there where Newt’s face is. It’s driving him nuts. Also, he doesn’t remember doing anything that would cause that face, which means he’s probably still having hallucinatory blackouts. He wonders what he says, but he doesn’t ask.
On the day of the test they go to the airport in separate cabs, because Newt is so angry he suggests it sarcastically, and Hermann is so angry that he does it for real. Newt spends the whole ride, and the whole humiliating gauntlet of security, and the whole wait by the gate, wondering if, while he was checking them in and Newt was getting distracted by nerves, Hermann put himself in a seat as far away from Newt as possible.
When they start boarding, Hermann says, “They might let you board with me, Newton, since you are my party.”
“What?” Newt says, and Hermann shakes his cane, but Newt got that. “I thought we were sitting apart,” he says without thinking, and Hermann looks so angry with himself that Newt has to grab his hand and squeeze until their knuckles are white.
Right before they board, he adds under his breath, “If they think I’m not your party I’m making out with you, okay?” Hermann laughs, and they both get on at once.
Everything has really hit its breaking point, Newt thinks, and if this experiment of theirs doesn’t work, he’s not sure what will happen. Something bad. Something really bad will happen. Newt thinks probably if Hermann dies, he will too. Beyond that, he doesn’t know. He flicks the safety card in its seat pocket with his nails until Hermann growls at him, and then they grab hands and think furiously about nothing as the plane takes off, with too much taxiing and not enough air to let them breathe.
~
Newton had a tendency on airplanes to put himself into a small coma, and refuse to interact, and to lose entire track of his surroundings, so that he came to just as the plane was landing feeling perfectly fine. It was irritating beyond belief.
I could not stop watching him, on this flight. I could not stop thinking of how grateful I was for every moment just since I’d known him that he could have died and didn’t. Even now. Even when everything between us was a jagged and rickety line. Even when we were disjointed and spread thin, alone in the universe and too much not alone. I’d only ever been that grateful to one other person in my life, and that had not lasted the test of time.
I tended to avoid projections where Newton was involved. I was an obsessive forecaster, yes, but there were things I did not want to map. Things I could not, at least now, bear to lose.
It was worth the fare of the cab ride to Tendo’s house. It always was. We arrived jet-lagged and out of humor, and were pulled into the house by a resignedly forgiving Tendo. All the easier today, of course, because today he could show off.
“All right,” Tendo said, once we were hydrated and sitting. “It’s all set. Should run great, and I haven’t even been arrested yet. I’m still not clear on what you think this thing’s gonna do for you. If you’re sick of each other, it’s not gonna fix that. Maybe you don’t remember the Hansens? But, whatever.”
I did not want to say that I’d feared the same thing—perhaps seeing each other clearly, over a stable, strong connection, wouldn’t change a thing. Perhaps it was us, not our drift, that was damaged. Perhaps—I sometimes thought, where Newton could not see it—we had spent all the care that we could on one another, a needy, adrenaline-fueled alliance that couldn’t survive the strain of our incompatibility. Maybe we couldn’t live peacefully and live together.
Newton said, “Choi, man, I don’t care if Hermann has a tantrum in my brain for the rest of my life—”
Doctor, I thought. Gottlieb. Tantrum? Wait, no—
“I just want to flush out the kaiju parts,” Newt said. “I want their tentacles out of my brain and I want them to stop poisoning everything I like. I want us to get better.”
I must have made a horrifying face, because Newton turned to me and said, “Hermann, what the hell?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Everything is fine.”
“You two need a—minute?” Tendo asked.
I looked at Newton.
“No,” I said firmly. “No, I don’t need as much as a second. Newton is right. Let us see what a nice fresh drift can do.”
“Aw, yeah,” Tendo said. “Gentlemen, have seats. We are going to do this, and it is going to be great.”
Tendo Choi was a genius. He was tasteless, he was crude, and we hardly had a thing to say to one another; I had no doubt that his machines were the next best thing to Lightcap’s own. He knew his business as well as Newt and I each knew ours.
It was nearly instinctual, the ritual of drifting. We’d only done it the once, without mediation, against orthodoxy in every respect. But I had watched so many times, and heard Tendo’s own voice so many times, saying these words and giving these commands. Acquaintance did not make it easier to relax, but at least I knew what I was meant to relax into.
Newton looked at me, with one of his crooked, half-cocked, crazed expressions.
“Don’t you dare make me insane, Newton,” I said. “Don’t become the world’s only case of communicable bipolar disorder.”
He laughed, and then coughed, and then grinned. “Come on, baby!”
“Hermann.”
“Initiating neural handshake,” Tendo said, surely trying his best to ignore—
~
Let it wash over you. That’s the rule.
~
holding up a snail, watching its foot curl in, counting stripes and drinking up the texture of its shell through small fingertips
and on the first day at university I already knew, stone walls, new clothes, fresh faces and we were all young, and I fit, I fit, I knew it when we
doesn’t look at me when we get introduced, the jackass, too busy caressing his stupid blackboard, who even uses chalk, how am I supposed to work with
There are monsters screaming venom into all our memories.
the day the monster on the television wasn’t fiction, and my heart got harder and heavier the higher up that thing got onto land and I
I want to know what the fuck that thing is.
even among our allies we are strangers, you meet my eyes and we are holding hands in spirit on the last raft in a vast sea
We could save the world and I burn the image of that clock into my mind.
everything is brighter and cleaner, and I am so happy with
Gipsy Danger falls through the air and Marshall Pentecost is not enough of a neighbor to share it with. If you were here I wouldn’t hold your hand, but
I can feel you touching me, Hermann, you can’t possibly want to be that close to
Something shifts in us, in me, something clambers over the monsters.
Yuck, it says. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
I’m what’s disgusting.
“Newton,” I say. It pulls me in, too powerful, too hungry, and I am too ready to pull away. I have enough memories of my own, but I can’t, I can’t.
“Don’t,” Newton says. “H-Hermann, don’t you fucking chase my fucking R.A.B.I.T.!”
“I—”
afraid, afraid now, afraid in the drift, afraid in the past, it’s the only sensible thing, I’m too close to my own skin, furious and frightened and I haven’t even met me, I don’t even know I ever will, and that
Sharp. Deep. Self-inflicted.
“Herm, stop!”
I jerked back, and the memories burned past fast, bright and clean and chemically harsh.
“There we go,” said Tendo. “Holding and strong.”
Newton and I looked at one another, shivering and linked and overflowing. Oh, not overflowing yet. We were too startled. Maybe it would catch us soon, and this was only the calm moment before the blow, when panic sets in.
“Don’t fret,” I said through my teeth. “You knew I liked you. I still like you.” I tried to blink the memory out of me, while Newton eyed me sideways, inside. I could feel us holding each other’s hurts, off in a corner, not meaningless, and not more meaningful than everything else.
“Wow,” Newton said, “Wow. This feels way different.”
“Better, I think you mean,” I told him.
“I completely adore you,” he said.
“Huh,” said Tendo. “Save it, boys, can’t you?”
It was the strangest thing. I could still feel a complete and separate being fitting itself into my mind, and yet there was no more grating, no screaming, nothing compelling me with increasing rage to be the same as it. To be it.
I felt—clean.
“Newton,” I said. “I think—”
“It’s working,” Newton said. “Holy crap.”
“It’s working? Seriously? Okay!” Tendo said. “So who’s the man?”
“Obviously you,” Newton said. But he was looking at me, inside and out.
I believe we lost track of time. Not for long--only long enough that Tendo sounded overly patient when he said, “So...you guys want to hang out like this for awhile, or?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think we have—recalibrated as desired.”
“Yeah,” Newton agreed. He was still looking at me. “Right as rain. We can come back for checkups, thought, right?”
“As long as I can keep this baby under wraps,” Tendo said, patting the machine. “Okay, my satisfied customers. Let’s do this. In three, two, one—”
~
Hermann has some shame, he must, because he shows it.
“Yes,” he says. Oh, he’s honest, too. “But I’m not any happier that you might be making something of my--history. I’ll try not to make anything of yours.”
“It’s nice that you can get back to driving me up the wall in the usual way,” Newt says. “Cute, even.”
“I apologize,” Hermann says stiffly.
“So maybe you didn’t notice,” Newt says, “but the situation still sucks.”
“Pardon me?”
Newt shifts his hands under his head. They’re lying on a blanket on the dirt with the branches and peaks and stars over their heads, and it’s cool, but not too cold, with long sleeves on.
“Well,” Newt says. “You seem more normal. You know, like, not as messed up? You seem better. I thought it was a situational thing, but the situation is still kind of the same. World still in crisis. You really doing okay, Herm?”
“Yes,” Hermann says. He’s biting his words out carefully, clearly uncomfortable and trying to prove that it’s not a discomfort that matters. “It’s odd. I still worry, I’m not stupid. But I—yes. I do feel better.”
“Good,” Newt sighs. “Good. I like you to be pissed off, not falling to pieces.”
“Hrm,” says Hermann. “And what are you doing?”
“Keeping it together. More or less. Kind of how I roll.” Newt blinks at the sky. “So are you just pissed now because you think I’ve got emotional leverage? Like, you can’t get mad at me because if you do I’ll kill myself and it’ll be all your fault?”
Hermann is quiet.
“Well, guess what, Herm,” Newt says. “Not even the end of the world got me. And neither did you, even when you were in my head ranting about the death of hope all the time. Was it really just sharing brainspace with me that had you all screwed up?”
Hermann snorts. “I’m an introvert, Newton. I can’t help that I appreciate the alone time.”
Newt plucks at the edges of the blanket and gets pine needles on it.
“In the drift,” Hermann says, and Newt’s gut gets tight, even thought he keeps his shoulders loose and keeps playing with the blanket.
“I did think of you as an interruption,” Hermann says. “When we first met. You were right about me.”
“Obviously,” Newt says. Meeting. Meeting. Not the other thing. He can bring it up, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Why would he want to talk about it?
Hermann doesn’t want to talk about it.
“But there was never anybody else like me there,” says Hermann. “Not even Tendo Choi. There wasn’t anybody else who—understand, Newton, I was grateful for you as soon as the first intelligible words made it out of your mouth.”
“Oh,” Newt says. “So, eventually.”
“Nearly right away,” Hermann says mildly. “Even if you are exasperating in the extreme.”
“So,” Newt says. “How are we now?”
“Ah,” Hermann says to the sky. “I’m used to being in pain, you see. That’s all right. I manage it.” He’s wrinkling his nose, with his hands on his chest. “I can’t tell if I’m being selfish or selfless. It’s so much less bearable to realize that you’re in pain as well.”
“You just wanted to be the special one, huh?” Newt says. He exhales hard over the skip in his heartbeat, and bites back a dry little cough. Not too difficult. “So, what? Is that one of us too many? Too much needy in one relationship?”
Hermann clenches his fist like an alternative to sitting up.
“Where would I be,” he asks, “if you weren’t here?”
It’s a key in the lock to his own front door.
“Trapped on a mountain with no way home,” Newt says. “All alone on Planet Doom.” He puts his hand near Hermann’s hip in case Hermann wants to reach down and take it. He can feel the heat coming off Hermann’s body. He can feel Hermann relax, because Newt understands him.
“Exactly,” Hermann says, and Newt breathes. “You’re exactly right.”