They first meet as college freshmen two weeks before the start of the fall semester, and there isn't anything cheesy like "hate at first sight" or "instant frenemies" or any of that sentimental bullshit. Though to be fair, it's probably pretty close.
They're randomly assigned to the oldest, and consequently the shittiest, dorms of the school, and as he stands in front of the building, part of Newt's brain (the part with the common sense) tells him that perhaps this structure doesn't quite adhere to state building codes anymore. Nevertheless, he grimly shoulders his backpack (overstuffed) and drags his suitcase (oversized) along after him.
The interior appears fine until he takes a good, close look at it. Spiderweb cracks line the topmost edges of the walls, where some sort of fungus is happily growing on the damp wallpaper. Everything smells of concentrated cleaning fluid, a noxious odor that burns the inside of his nose. A sign on the elevator announces its out-of-orderness, and he takes a moment to roll his eyes before pushing his sleeves up and dragging his hulk of a suitcase up the stairs.
As he stands in front of the door to his new dorm room (they put him on the topmost floor, of course), he fishes around in his pocket for the keycard to the door. It's a credit-card-sized piece of plastic, and he knows, just knows, he'll lose it before a month is up.
He's relieved he got there before him roommate, and he takes his time weighing the pros and cons of each side of the room. The door is on the right side, but so is the window, and he sure as hell doesn't want to be woken up every morning by the glare of the sun in his face (he really isn't a morning person, and those blinds look like they're at least a hundred years old). He unzips his suitcase and starts dumping his notebooks on the desk to the left.
By the time he's becoming comfortably settled in and increasingly convinced he needs to move the closet (it's right under the fire sprinklers, for Pete's sake, what good is that supposed to do?), all his personal belonging are strewn all over the left side of the room. He shoves the empty suitcase under the bed just as he hears muffled irregular footsteps approaching.
"What is all this damn mess?"
His first impression of his roommate is this:
Oh God, he's a nerd isn't he. I mean we're all nerds here, but he's that kind of nerd, the nerd kind of nerd. The nerd nerd. The one your mother always warned you about.
But of course he only says, "Yeah, sorry about that. I'll get it cleaned up in a bit. Do you mind having the right side?"
"Keep to your side, and I won't care." His nameless (so far; he'll have to rectify this) roommate stalks irately into the room, worn sweater hanging loosely around his sad, thin frame. Newt notices the cane in his hand and the limp in his left leg, thinks he's much to young to be needing a cane. Thinks perhaps he'll keep his tongue in check around this fragile-looking wisp of a person (who, he can't help but note, is still somehow taller than he is).
"I'm Newton Geiszler, hopeful biology major with an emphasis in animal physiology. I sometimes bring home the odd specimen or two, so if you see any jars with floaty things in it it'd probably be best to leave them alone." He sticks his hand out in what he thinks is an amicable gesture, but his roommate turns from his suitcase to give him an impatient glare.
"Is that allowed in the dorms?"
Newt shrugs. "Hey, what they don't know can't hurt them."
His roommate's lip curls in disgust. "Then I suppose I must establish right now that you may not, under any circumstance, cross over this line – " he draws his cane in a line along the floor between their beds " – or otherwise place any of your… specimen in my space without my permission. Understood?"
Newt gapes at him, running the entire speech over in his head again. What is he, a child being scolded by a teacher for running into the classroom after recess with mud all over his hands? He's already sixteen now; who does this guy think he is? His mother? Actually, no, his mother is several times cooler than this curmudgeon rummaging through a battered old suitcase filled with horrible knit sweaters (which number much too many to be presents from elderly relatives; he actually likes them doesn't he).
"I gotta get to the door, man," he replies, struggling not to rise to the challenge with a flurry of colorful adjectives. "It's on your side of the room."
"Very well. You may have a small pathway with which you may access the door."
"Kinda like the Polish Corridor, huh?" Newt tries to joke, World War II history lessons still fresh in his mind (hey, his teacher had been attractive and he'd actually stayed awake in class to impress her). His roommate only bristles in response.
"If that was supposed to be a joke, I didn't find it amusing at all," he spits.
"Whoa, chill man. Are you German? I've been trying to place that accent. Thought it sounded familiar. I was born in Germany, by the way. Berlin. Barely two months after the Wall started coming down. Pretty crazy, isn't it?"
"My nationality has nothing to do with the fact that you have a terrible sense of humor."
"Well, better terrible than none at all," Newt snaps. "Are you always like this or do you just have some sort of complex? Whose shit idea was it even to put us together?"
"Get a transfer then." He doesn't even look up from his unpacking, that absolute bastard.
"You get the damn transfer."
And that's how they come to hate each other's guts whilst simultaneously refusing to just get the hell away from the other (both of them are much too stubborn to back off; I said you go ask for a transfer, dammit).
Newt has a theory, which he thinks he has plenty of viable data to support (starting from, say, sophomore year of high school perhaps), that his brain doesn't became fully functional until he's had at least five shots of black coffee and the time is after ten o'clock at night. The day before classes begin both conditions are met (and in the case of the coffee, far surpassed), and he's fidgety, his fingers restless to do something - anything - thoughts racing along faster than the speed of light (not actually possible, he's aware, but nobody ever accused him of coming up with the most creative hyperboles; he's a scientist, dammit, not an author).
He's so wrapped up in his own world, blasting the music in his headphones so loudly he can feel his head vibrating, the entrails of a very legally-acquired squirrel carcass laid out neatly and lovingly on a tray in front of him, that it takes him an entire five minutes to register Hermann's (Newt finally found his name) loud conspicuous throat-clearing.
"Some people," Hermann hisses, "don't sleep at ungodly hours and would like some peace at night."
"I've got headphones on, haven't I?"
"At that volume you might as well not have them."
"Oh really?" Newt unplugs the headphones, and the heavy guitar and drums rush to fill the aural void of the room. "This ok then?" he shouts over the din.
"Dammit!" Hermann storms over to the laptop on Newt's desk (storms as best as he can with his leg) and slams it shut, cutting off the music.
"I thought we weren't allowed to cross onto each other sides," Newt snarls, grabbing onto the front of the Hermann's pajamas (an oversized t-shirt; he's surprised it isn't stuffy old-man pajamas). "You think you can make all the rules here? You think you can break 'em?"
"Get your hands off me!" Hermann shoves away Newt, who stumbles into the edge of his desk. Something rolls off onto the floor. He hopes it wasn't anything delicate or expensive. Or small and hard to find.
"Will you two shut up?" Someone from the room next to theirs pounds on the wall between them. There's another muffled voice, but thank God there's only a supply closet to the other side of their room or they'd rack up enough complaints to get themselves kicked out of the dorm or something. Newt isn't sure, and the part of his brain with the common sense is telling him he shouldn't find out but other parts of his fully functional brain – more belligerent parts – are drowning it out in a chorus of messy emotions.
"Fuck you! You wanna go?" By now he's so hopped up on adrenaline and the fourth cup of coffee in the hour that he's this close, this close, to plowing straight through the wall like the kool-aid man or some other stupid shit like that. But somehow Hermann manages to pull him back from kicking the wall out of sheer pent-up energy and he's reconsidering the recent considerable increase in his caffeine uptake (it probably wasn't exactly the best idea now that he's taken a second to think, to really think, about it).
"You are impossible," Hermann says once Newt calms down and shrinks from the Hulk back into a pouty teenager. "It's the first day of the semester tomorrow; go to sleep, and for God's sake, stop drinking coffee at one in the morning."
When Newt rises blearily from the last dregs of sleep, the room entire is glowing with a terrible angelic light because dammit, Hermann most definitely left the blinds open on purpose to get revenge for last night. He groans and rolls over to face the wall, cocooning himself in his blankets to escape from the aforementioned terrible angelic light. From underneath his pillow, his phone vibrates and the first movement of Beethoven's Sonatina Pathetique (he's not even sure how or why he knows this song, classical music not exactly being his usual genre) blares, muffled, into his ear.
"Shit." He lets the word hiss slowly from between his teeth like steam from a thin pipe (again, that whole figurative language thing; he's not an author). Reluctantly, he fishes under his pillow to drag out the offensive phone.
"Shit." This time he spits it out like a watermelon seed. It's a good thing he set the alarm to repeat every ten minutes until he manually shut it down because it's 9:15 already and the alarm had been set for 8:15. Not to mention his Biochemistry class started at 9:00 and he'd been hoping to secure the seat next to the cute blonde.
He throws on the first t-shirt and pair of jeans he finds in the closet, takes a few seconds to brush his teeth (definitely not the dentist-recommended length of time but good enough), and shoves his laptop into his backpack, praying it has enough battery left to power through the lecture.
The hall isn't too far away; he can get there in twenty minutes by bike, sixteen if he ignores traffic laws (which of course he won't do because he's a law-abiding citizen).
He gets there in fifteen minutes.
He's still late, but luckily it's one of the general ed selections so the lecture hall is packed to the brim with half-asleep teenagers and no one notices one more creeping in through the doors in the back. Except the people already crammed into the back. They don't look too pleased (he gets what he thinks is a death threat when he accidentally elbows someone while digging his laptop out of his backpack).
"Did I miss anything?" he whispers to his neighbor.
"Nah, nothing much if you took AP Bio. Though you did miss him struggling to spell 'professor.' Got it right in the end, but you could see him wondering if it was one or two fs." The kid cracks a grin, and Newt stifles a laugh.
They become best friends after that, and Newt briefly reconsiders his decision not to request a dorm transfer (but only for about the same amount of time he spent brushing his teeth that morning).