Sisyphus in Love

by sweetntwenty

A rainy, midsummer night in Vienna. Cigarettes that burn too swiftly. A never-ending party and a rising body count. Hermann as a solution, a substitution, and a means of satisfaction. This is Newt Geiszler, dragonslayer, who will take the sublime wherever he can find it, and his attempts to discover his place in a world that didn't end as planned.

For Sawyer, and with several nods to the writer of Divergent Paths on AO3.

Written by J, with the encouragement of E, who is currently screwing around in Portugal.

---

Sisyphus in Love

---

Newt Geiszler quits smoking the day after the closing of the Breach.

It is not entirely a conscious decision. Habit runs abreast with its trigger and sans trigger- sans the obligation to drag himself out of bed and into his laboratory at dawn, sans blue sleeves of nitrile creaking and catching between his fingers, sans monsters emerging from the sea- the hour at which he would have abandoned his station for the back alley just out of sight of the PPDC's helipads, with its painted yellow lines and reinforced bins stained with corrosive Kaiju Blue, chimes and passes.

He does not fish out his box of Parliaments, slightly crushed from the wrap of his figure-hugging jeans- he does not carefully tip out a single cigarette and dig into his pockets again for his lighter. He does not pace the yellow lines, one foot after another as if he is traversing a tightrope, waiting for the flame, glinting and winking, suspended between his digits to gray and fade.

Instead, at 11:00 a.m., mere hours after what should have been the apocalypse, Newt Geiszler is sitting on the roof of his laboratory, eyes cast towards the Victoria Harbor and the row of damaged skyscrapers beyond.

He ought to climb down. He is decidedly in a mood, the symptoms of which he has learned to recognize but not necessarily dispel. There is a silent but persistent force that he suspects is his conscience (hello, yes, hi again) barraging him with the thought that he ought to quit kicking his heels and scuffing the façade because 1) it is childish; 2) he has eaten, slept, sweated, and cried in that building for five years and it's disrespectful to kick the thing; and 3) it's already rundown as it is and Stacker Pente- no, Hercules Hansen will not expend any amount of resources to have it scrubbed clean of Newt's frankly unnecessary display of insubordination.

"Are you kicking along to In the Hall of the Mountain King?" Hermann asks drily.

Newt leans back on his palms, squinting at the sun, at Hermann leaning grimly on his cane.

"How the hell did you find me?"

"Wasn't hard. That partition is made of aluminum and you left the maintenance hatch open. One tends to notice when one's office suddenly has a skylight," Hermann snorts. "What are you doing up here?"

"Itemizing the destruction caused by Gipsy Danger. Are we liable? Is the UN? The local government? Surely someone's liable."

"Well, that's somewhat sensible. I imagined you were, I don't know, graffitiing something profane for all the helicopter pilots and their United Nations passengers to see."

"Now that's an idea. A capital idea. Such a great idea that I'm actually kind of pissed I didn't think of it myself. I will get to it immediately and I will tell everyone it was my idea and not yours. Apologies in advance." He swings his legs back onto the roof, popping to his feet. "What kind of profanity did you have in mind? Just one big FUCK? Fuck what, though? Is it actually necessary to bring a subject into the equation? Or maybe I could draw a dick. People are into phalluses, right? Or- how about NEWT WAS HERE, arranged in three rows, all symmetric-like. That'll get you going."

He knows exactly how he looks- pacing a roof, taking his turns with increasing velocity, running his fingers through his hair to skew it, all of it still reeking from last night's victory march. As a rule, Hermann hates him when he's like this- he's not the sort of person who can stomach the erratic. He has said so much, in so many words. Newt is big enough to admit that he has come to enjoy irking him, simply because he can do so without fail, and after all, Newt is one for instant gratification- but the affectation had taken a life of its own and as of late he cannot tell where his febrile antitheses to Hermann end and Newt Geiszler begins.

"Newton."

Crushed in his pocket against his right thigh are his cigarettes. Moments before Hermann had clanked across the roof to him, he had encountered the impulse to have a smoke, and actively decided to ignore it-

"Newton."

"What are you even doing here, Hermann? Shouldn't you be hungover? If you aren't hungover you didn't celebrate correctly. Luckily for you, I think Tendo's rallying the troops for another rager tonight."

"I think you had better come down from the roof for this."

"Why?"

Hermann doesn't reply right away. Newt pauses and finally looks at him. "What's that face? Why are you making that face? I don't think I've seen that face before." When Hermann merely passes his cane from one hand to the other, he continues, "Someone's terminally ill! Someone's dying. Someone's dead- my god, someone's died. Yours or mine?"

"Don't be silly. No one's died," Hermann says, and Newt's eyes involuntarily flicker to the decimated city on both sides of the harbor and back. Already there are yellow cranes stalking high above the rubble.

"You haven't ruled out the possibility of someone being terminally ill."

"None of our friends, relatives, or associates are in any mortal peril. I am here to talk to you about us."

Well.

"Let's go back to the lab," Hermann says. "I don't want to do this here."

"No. And you're not going to do what, exactly? I'm not going anywhere. Not until you tell me what's going on."

"Newton-"

"Seriously, Herms-"

"We're being fired!" Hermann exclaims before Newt can interject again.

The city is creaking. The coast is crumbling and Newt's heart thuds in his chest. "…no. No, no, we aren't."

"Newton," Hermann says, more gently this time, approaching Newt carefully as if he has suddenly become a delicate thing, as if he is a fleck of ash waiting to be taken by a gust, as if he is someone who really would cast himself off a roof for this. "I spoke with the Marshall. We have two months to take inventory of all of our equipment and data and what remains of your samples. Of course the data you have amassed over the years is yours to do with and publish as you will, but it has been intimated to me that you should be made aware that you are legally obliged to surrender any and all Kaiju parts to the jurisdiction of the PPDC and-

"Shut- shut up! Please, for a second. Just shut up."

"Newton-"

"I told you not to call me that! Now please- no- you stay right where you are. I need a second. Please."

Newt turns away from him. Away from the harbor, from the felled city across. But its other half stands before him, filling his entire field of vision, everything gray and cracked and jagged.

He can feel Hermann saying his name. He is not uttering it out loud but Newt can feel him thinking it, with that particular evenness he attests to each syllable, the click of the second despised beat across his teeth. Drawing it out even though he knows Newt hates it- as if he owns it-

"I was having a good day," Newt says, and he dimly becomes aware that he is shaking. "It was not great but it was goodand I am using the post-K-Day definition of the term but it was most certainly that."

"How on earth am I supposed to reply to that?"

"You don't."

"Don't be a child about this," Hermann says. "You see? This is why I didn't want to do this up here."

"You keep saying that and yet-" Newt lets out a huffed, exasperated laugh- "What the hell are you trying to say?"

"I only meant- oh, it doesn't matter. Let's go back to the lab. Alright? Let's go back inside and we can talk about this and if you have any concerns we can draft a letter to the Marshall-"

"Fuck the Marshall."

"You know this wasn't entirely his decision, don't you? He did everything he could to retain us but the entire Shatterdome is essentially being liquidated, they're hardly doing anything for Mako and Raleigh and even Tendo is being decommissioned, and he's been in JET Force longer than any of us, and while it's hardly just you know we've always been on the bottom rung of things-"

"Why'd you come up here?" Newt spits out, and the sun is too bright, and Hermann is so persistently ineffable, and the harbor smells of extinction, heaving with corpses wretched and abyssopelagic and all of it holds him captive, suspends him over a chasm with the unfulfilled promise to let him plummet. "Why the hell did you follow me? You think I wanted to hear- about- about this! I was having a nice day. I was having a good week. I was on top of the world and- god, Hermann. You could have at least waited."

"I texted you."

"Oh- well- good!" Newt exclaims sarcastically. "Was that all? Was that it?"

"Yes."

Deep in Newt's pocket are his cigarettes. He can feel them beating upon his thigh, meeting and matching and elevating his pulse, and he is an enormous, resounding tremolo, he is a viciously wound piano wire with no more room to give, he is holding his breath and suddenly remembering to breathe, and forgetting again and silently gasping.

"If you want to talk to the Marshall," Hermann continues, "I will gladly accompany you. It will not do much and he will present the same explanation he offered to me but you deserve to have your voice heard. Yes, tell him what you think, and I think it would be fitting if you thanked him for keeping us on until the very end- I did-"

"Enough about the fucking Marshall! He was never on our side- and you've always groveled after him and Pentecost and I never could fucking understand that!"

Hermann lets him stew in silence before uttering, "…you didn't really think we would stay here forever, did you?"

To be honest, Newt had not thought about it very much at all, which he supposes is one and the same thing. But it hits him the wrong way. Hermann is suffused with pity for him- for poor, lost, lonely Newt Geiszler, finally being called back from Neverland. That's how Hermann sees him. Someone who needs guidance, someone positively deluded-

"Fuck you," Newt says, facing him sharply. "Fuck you-"

"Unbelievable-"

"Fuck you, Hermann. Did you hear me? Fuck you."

The wire- the chain- the tenuous, wavering thread that holds them together snaps and they are hurtling low, into a too-familiar place where they are their idiosyncrasies and nothing more, and they will say things to each other that they will not regret the next morning. Newt is in a fog as he marches across the roof, lowering himself onto the fire escape and clanking through his descent.

---

In the eleven years that they have known each other, Newt has never apologized to Hermann. He has never encountered the compulsion. There was the sarcastic "Well, sor-ry!" that Newt had shouted after Hermann's retreating figure during their first meeting at a bar in Vienna, and there was the huffed "Sorry" when they were forced into a laboratory three years later in Hong Kong, but Newt, unaided, came to the conclusion that he shouldn't have to apologize for his own ontology, disastrous as it may be. He doubts it would have done much good. Hermann has always been quick to point out Newt's faults and slow to forget yesterday's missteps. They passed the phase of silence for courtesy's sake in their relationship entirely.

But this time is different.

Newt is in his room. There aren't many places to hide in the Shatterdome. He could have gone to the LOCCENT hub, but given the news of their recent demise, he doesn't think he can muster up the energy to perform a feat of social immolation with Tendo or disingenuously comfort him. Tendo will cry onto his last good shirt or he will careen towards the bellicose and rage against the establishment; for him there is no in between. Newt does not think he can stomach either.

LOCCENT is ruled out, as is the cafeteria- he does not want to run into any of the kitchen staff, or the Jaeger technicians, or the medical team, or anyone with whom he might be forced into making solemn small talk about the virtual end of their universes and how everyone's going home to their wives and children but Newt actually has no one and has never actually wanted those things, and how going back to Massachusetts will only remind him how young he isn't, and wandering in Berlin would mean sucrotic suffocation.

And so he is in his room, lying on his bunk bed, kicking at the superfluous half suspended above him, wondering if it might not be better if the thing collapsed and crushed him like an ACME anvil. He stores twenty-seven textbooks and the fractured components of a rusted gramophone on the top bunk. The weight would make for a quick and painless death.

This time feels different. He is still angry at Hermann but he is harried by the notion that he effectively shot a messenger, a grumpy and overly combative and grossly insensitive one, but a messenger all the same. It is, in short, something that a grumpy, overly combative, and grossly insensitive asshole would do. Newt is that asshole. This was established eight years ago in a bar in Austria.

None of this is Hermann's fault. He had ribbed Newt a little bit with the joke about the graffiti, as if there is something wrong with graffiti, as if Newt would be worth so much less because of it, as if it is not within the realm of possibility that Newt might have come up here because he needed it, because he couldn't breathe when he got out of bed and believed, somehow, that diving into the open air would cure his agoraphobia.

Newt extricates himself from his bunk. Hermann knew where to find Newt this morning; Newt knows exactly where he will be. He could walk to the laboratory blindfolded. He could find his way through the bunker in his sleep.

Saint-Saens greets him as he enters the lab. Hermann is propped up on the highest rung of his ladder, chalk perched at an angle of perfection in the crook between his thumb and index finger. His back stiffens as Newt approaches.

Newt is ready to apologize but he doesn't know how to say it. "I'm sorry" won't do. Between Newt and Hermann, "I'm sorry" is the flimsy dollar-store card of apologies, where all of the colors are wrong, skewed one shade to the left, and the cover looks like it was cobbled together out of online stock photos and the whites of the paper are bleeding through the ink of every letter.

He waits. If Hermann feels safer atop his tower- and my god does that say a thing or two about his flavor of hubris- Newt will leave him be because he is starting to believe he deserves whatever Hermann will see fit to throw at him.

It is uncharacteristic of Newt not to speak. Hermann plays the silent treatment game, not him. Hermann must have noticed because he's descending now, and placing the stick of chalk on the ledge beside all the other crumbling little pieces, and he's wiping the dust off his hands with his head a little bowed.

"A little Top 40 of you, isn't it?" Newt says, gesturing towards the MP3 player plugged into the speakers.

"Excuse me?"

"It was a joke. Really. I mean as far as Saint-Saens goes, this is a little predictable, but I do love this."

"I am choosing to assume that you are being sardonic."

"I said it was just a joke-" And at the irascibility crossing Hermann's face, Newt stops and sighs. "See, I'm doing it again. That thing that I do. I can't not escalate when it comes to you and I'm not saying it's an excuse or that it's always going to be my M.O. but-"

Hermann impassively arches an eyebrow.

"I'm going to try," Newt blurts out. "No promises because to be perfectly honest, I respect you way too fucking much to lie to you. But it will be the most concerted of efforts because, again, I respect you way too fucking much. You're right. I'm an ass. You didn't say as much but you're thinking it and I deserve it. I'm not good with change and you brought the worst of it to my doorstep. I've been a little in denial for the past few days and I needed you to say what you did and I shouldn't have stormed off like that. It's not your fault. None of this is your fault. No one's fault, really- well, depending on the situation it would by default be my fault, but- fuck. Never mind. Go on, say something. Tell me I'm myopic, and you can get colloquial about it but please don't cut any deeper than that because as I have mentioned and you have deduced, I am not in the best state of mind given the current state of things."

"Alright."

"Excuse me?"

"I said, 'alright.'"

"That's all? Just… 'alright'?"

"I listened. I responded. Positively, I might add, in case my tone didn't make that perfectly clear. What else would you have me do?"

Newt doesn't know, and the violin over the speaker is laving its way through copper and graying-greenish basement air to him when Hermann suddenly says, "We should go out tonight."

Newt blinks. Hermann is staring at him, calmly rubbing chalk dust between his thumb and forefinger.

"Say that again."

"We should go out tonight for a drink."

"Why?"

"Well, if you don't want to-"

"It's not that I don't want it, it's just- you know- why?"

"Because you have had a terrible shock. Because I do not want you to attempt to sweep this under the rug, nor fall into believing that I am doing the same. Because this deserves to be talked about and you and I have not spoken since the war ended. Because I did not know you liked Saint-Saens, and I did not know of your background in classical music until we Drifted, and I would like to ask you about your favorite 18th century composers over a glass of wine and your opinion on their interpretations of the sublime."

"Oh."

"Is that a yes or a no?"

"Yes-" Newt coughs and clears his throat. "Yes. Yeah. Let's do it."

"Where?"

"I don't know. I don't get out much. I don't have to tell you that."

"I will not have you anywhere near the Bone Slums," Hermann says bluntly.

"No- no, of course not." He waits. "…anything else?"

Hermann leans on his cane thoughtfully. "No."

"Then- it's settled, then. We're going out. You and I are going out and- well, I've got to pick a place, and also probably an hour, because I never really understood that thing they do in rom-coms where the dude says 'See you tonight, then?' and the girl just sort of grins and blushes? And that's it? Does he text her the logistics off-screen? Do they think audiences will be bored by that? I think I speak for everyone when I say that a play-by-play of the proceedings would have helped me immensely as an undergraduate."

"We'll go at eight," Hermann says simply, returning to his chalkboard.

"Eight-? Yes- eight. That's good, that's- you know, sensible. Pretty standard. Which is good! We should start small. Sorry. That was a lot of assumption packed into four words. I'll, ah- I'll just- hang around until tonight, I guess." And he stands there, wringing his hands, remembering that he is in the lab, his lab, and so is Hermann, and the conversation is over and this means he has to spend the next eight hours acknowledging that Hermann asked him out for a drink, and he said yes.

Newt considers returning to the roof. Or his room. Or trying LOCCENT, because Tendo will want commiseration, and for once Newt has the emotional energy to spare. The last plan seems all well and good until he remembers that he hasn't technically clocked out of the Shatterdome quite yet, that there are mountains of viscera to catalogue and subject to cryonics, and a hospital ward's worth of equipment to sterilize, and a section of Kaiju brain to select and squirrel away for his trophy shelf because fuck the United Nations and really, what kind of PPDC bureaucrat will even notice that it's gone?

He wanders back to his station, a touch feverish and more than a little lost until he hears the familiar grainy scratch of Hermann's chalk against the slates that saved the world. Bizet is playing over the laboratory speakers now and Hermann is humming. Newt embraces the frisson and, joint by joint unwinds, rediscovering their usual rhythm.

---

"If you had one wish, how would you spend it?"

Hermann's nose quirks. "'Spend' it? As if the celestial were currency."

"You know what I meant. Extrapolate, Doctor."

They're shouting at each other- shouting, for the first time, for good reason. The music at the club is one droning downbeat after another, synthesized swirls and visceral drops. To Newt's surprise, Hermann doesn't seem to be frustrated by both the repetitive beats and their inability to escape the speakers.

"Well, I suppose one would wish that the Kaiju never emerged from the Pacific. One could go so far as to wish they never existed at all."

"Imagine the ecological and climatological impact if you were to wipe an entire species off the face of a planet!"

"We've no idea how to calculate a hypothetical of that scale. We still can't predict the long-term effects of Kaiju Blue upon the aquatic populations that have somehow managed to survive the last decade's unparalleled acidic assault upon their environment."

"I said imagine."

"Well, what would you wish for?"

Newt remains silent. The bass is thrumming, as much a part of their conversation as he, and now he remembers why he has always gravitated towards this kind of scene.

"Wrong answer." Hermann smiles wryly.

"There's only one 'right' answer."

"Are you holding back out of your deep-seated resistance to the conventional? Or is there something else?"

"I wish for a time machine," Newt says, because his drink is stronger than he expected, because his drink is still not as strong as he wanted it, because Hermann is crammed onto a rickety wooden stool beside him, wearing a navy blazer Newt has never seen before and today, all of a sudden, they are in their mid-thirties.

"And what would you do with it?" Hermann asks, as Newt knew he would.

"End the war." Newt's prepared this time. "I would go back in time and hand 23-year-old me the blueprints for a nuclear Jaeger and the coordinates of the Breach. Or I would go forwards, befriend the locals, steal our new tech, and wipe the Kaiju out with a bite-sized ray gun. You know. Whatever's simpler."

"If the war never happened we never would have met."

"Amazing how you can say that with a straight face."

"I know very little about the nuances of time travel, but I think it's safe to say that would be one of the direct repercussions." When Newt does not reply, and perhaps because Hermann's drink is stronger than he wanted, he continues, "Make a pact with me. Promise me that if you ever find a way to travel back in time, or even forwards, though I find that plan a little more far-fetched and wholly superfluous, that you will use that power to prevent the war that we gave twelve years and millions of lives to."

"And lose you in the process?"

"Yes."

He knows this song. Tendo's been whistling it since Monday and it's funny how there are just as many pop songs being churned out now as there were before K-Day and the lyrics are still thematically the same, hold me like that and need you now and dance dance dance dance and he supposes that people, normal people will always have their biological priorities-

"I promise," Newt says, because he's learned to recognize when something is expected of him, and this is one of those moments where he suspects that Hermann is in the camp that thinks K-Day is the worst thing to ever happen to humanity.

"Now that we're on the subject-"

"That we never, ever leave."

"We don't have to talk about it."

"We don't, but it's why you brought me here. We made an implicit deal. You buy me a drink, I put out. In a sense."

"I brought you here because I wanted to participate in a dialogue about the war we just poured our twenties into, not hold an interrogation."

"I'm clearly dead-set on making it an interrogation, so fire at will."

Hermann regards him unflinchingly, and his tacit acceptance gives Newt a twinge of shame. "Why are you so convinced I'm attacking you?"

"Why is that even a question?"

"Fair." Then, after a beat, "Are you happy?"

There's no sense of expectation now. "No," Newt replies truthfully.

Hermann waits.

"I don't know what I expected. That time would crunch to a halt?" Newt says with a shrug. "That I would wake up and find out that this was all some kind of fever dream and I'm actually a subpar accountant digging my nine-to-five grave?" He swirls the little plastic red straw in his drink, knocking the ice against the glass, breathing life into a bite-sized, electric-red hurricane.

"Put your tie on properly in the mornings and you might pass for one already."

"I'm serious! Did it ever occur to you that maybe fighting the Kaiju was what we were born to do? And now that that's over- now that we've accomplished the one thing we were meant to-"

"Dear god, Newton, don't tell me your frankly predictable and utterly human existential crisis has got you believing in predestination. Or a higher power!"

"Who's the asshole who's been insisting for ten years and counting that math is the handwriting of God?"

"'God' as in the forces that destroy and create. 'God' as in the combination of events and decisions, out of the infinite that might have occurred instead, that led Ada Lovelace to attend a very specific party on the very specific night of June 5, 1833, run into Charles Babbage, and write the world's first algorithms. 'God' as in the Cartesian, the Plutarchian, the Pythagorean- the, dare I say it, Newtonian."

"I resent your use of a fictional spiritual figure as a catch-all term for things that turn you on."

"You brought Him up in the first place," Hermann huffs, but he's preening just a little, just enough, and he's trying to hide behind his glass but Newt knows. "It's your turn," he adds, setting his jaw because he is trying oh so hard not to smile. "Where do you see God?"

"At the bottom of my drink."

"Maudlin and a little desperate. Fine, I'll buy the next round."

"I meant it. At the bottom of my drink, in the friction of my thumb flicking against my lighter, in the convergence of a hundred experiments on Kaiju bone marrow. In that sweet spot at 3:00 a.m. where all of a sudden I am awake and a solution I've been searching for for months just clicks into place." He lets the straw alone, watches it glide across the rim with the last of its momentum. "…in the rise and fall of Casta Diva, in Mendelssohn's piano trios and the way the violins slide in, when the trio waltzes together on the next page with such force-" And now he is thinking about France during a time long before the Kaiju stranded him stateside, about his mother, the illustrious Monica Schwartz with no endurance for him but plenty for her Parisian symposium, and a red-headed girl whose fingers played so trippingly upon the keys and later, across his skin. Maudlin indeed.

"In the relentlessness of the counterpoint of the fugue," Hermann supplies thoughtfully.

"You would." And Newt has to unhinge himself a little, un-cringe himself and his hand's death grip on his inventive container of melting slush, uncurl his mental preemptive defense because he is used to people shrugging, and absent nods, and Hermann had simply sat there and parleyed.

"Counterpoint is a marvelous machine- forces in tandem and simultaneously at war. Hurtling towards one another and never colliding- and never, ever deviating in their velocity."

He could kiss Hermann right now. He wants to. They're talking about something other than Kaiju and Hermann isn't trying to rip his throat out and Newt needed this. They're leaning towards each other off the barstools, their knees beginning to interlock and Newt could reach out with no effort at all, take Hermann by the lapels and close the distance.

He wants to. Thudding against his skin is his pulse- it's beneath his jaw, in his thigh, reverberating in the blues of his wrists, demanding attention from a pair of hands that isn't his own. He should kiss Hermann- kiss him while he's looking at him this way, as if, for once, he doesn't think Newt Geiszler is more trouble than he's worth.

The lightshow along the Victoria Harbor erupts.

"Kiss me," Newt blurts out suddenly. Now, while things are a little picturesque, and they aren't in a grimy lab full of corpses, where storms rattle the doors and there isn't a slash of yellow paint between them- now, while Newt can still hold onto the fantasy that they've only just met and there was never an aborted apocalypse and he never had to stop and wonder where he might be tomorrow. "If- if you want to. If you were planning to. Because I-"

Hermann kisses him and he can see how tightly Hermann is gripping the bar for support and when he finally lets his eyes flutter shut, he imagines that he can feel the collage of lights from the harbor lapping across his cheeks.

"Did you want another drink?" Hermann asks in a low voice when he pulls away. His hands settle lightly on Newt's waist. They've never been there before.

"Don't be a goddamn gentleman with me," Newt replies. "What do you think I want?"

"In the Drift, I saw-" Abrupt stop.

"What did you see?" Newt prompts. He hadn't quite known how to ask, although the gleaming ring of red persisting around Hermann's right pupil had made him feel, ever since that day, as if he ought to.

"You writing me letters, hunched over your computer, the screen reflecting blue off your glasses, back when we did such things. You reading my letters and laughing, finding me clever, with a particular smile I've never been treated to in the flesh. You in a park, in a café, in an emptying lecture hall, scrolling through your phone and voraciously devouring every word."

"That was a decade ago. We've made ten heliocentric revolutions away from each other since then."

"Eight," Hermann replies lightly. "Seven and a half if you count my last missive wishing you a merry Christmas, to which you did not respond to, except to say that you were in Munich."

When Newt is silent, Hermann continues, "What did you see in the Drift?"

"I don't know," Newt replies.

"I don't believe you."

"I don't remember."

"It was something like a dream," Hermann concedes. "I suppose that can't be helped."

"Can I ask you something?"

At Newt's obvious trepidation, Hermann immediately relents, dropping his hands to his sides and now they're back to where they started, hovering on separate perches.

"Yes. Of course."

"Why did you Drift with me? How did you know that you and I could- that it would be enough and that it wouldn't just fry us both?"

"You already know," Hermann replies.

"Then why am I asking?"

"Because you need constant and literal assurance. Because you believe, to an extent, in verbal contracts. Because you have been alone with no one but me for company for the better part of five years. Because you want to drift again."

"Drift again?" Newt frowns.

"Drift, and by that, I mean get inside my head. Get under my skin. See and know parts of me that no one ever will."

He hangs back, lets Newt initiate, but Newt is already there, headfirst, ready to collide. They kiss to the curb, into the cab, and then they are staggering across PPDC helipads and crashing against Hermann's door.

"Are you sure about this?" Hermann says as his hands slide beneath Newt's jacket, underneath his shirt, searching for his skin and finding Hundun, Trespasser, the edges of Kaiceph.

Newt kisses him harder, and they stumble backwards into the dark.

---

Newt wakes up in a bed that isn't his own to the incessant buzzing of his cellphone. He starts to rise, finds resistance- it's Hermann's arm, draped across his waist. He eases himself from out and under Hermann's hold, shivering as he leaves the den of warmth and his bare feet touch the chilled hardwood floor. His jacket is in a crumpled heap on the floor, the pocket reverberating insistently.

On his phone's screen is a number he doesn't recognize. "Hello?" he croaks out, snatching up his boxers and his jeans and padding out as quietly as he can to the kitchen.

"Newton. Did I wake you? I wasn't quite sure what time it is in Hong Kong- I've got the zones a bit muddled-"

And Newt has to put the phone down for a second and bite down on his knuckle because the voice on the other end belongs to his mother.

"-apologize for not calling sooner but I was tied up in Vienna for the past six months."

"It's alright," Newt finds himself saying, as he always finds himself saying whenever the great Monica Schwartz deigns to remember she has a son. A shiver runs through him and he one-handedly tugs on his boxers. He struggles with his jeans, clamping the phone between his neck and shoulder as he wrings them past his ankles, and catches a fleeting-

"-ppy birthday!"

"My birthday's tomorrow."

"Ah! Well-" A high, tittering laugh. Newt eases his jeans over his hips and tries to remember that he ought to give her some amount of credit for dragging him around in her womb for nine months and bloodily expelling him into a doctor's arms. Credit not quite leading to deference- credit where credit is due and so he supposes he will give her credit for making some semblance of effort this year. "So," she continues, a little too girlishly, a little too sing-songy, as if she forgets that this is her estranged son on the other line and not one of her patrons or this-or-that-tenor, playing the Don Juan triumphant to her Elvira. "The news says the world isn't ending. And I've got my son to thank for that."

"I did my part," he says, thinking of Hermann curled up in the other room.

"Nonsense! Forgive me, but the Kaiju and Hong Kong are all anyone is talking about these days, and of course I throw your name out at every possible opportunity. Do you remember Lisette Dupont? The redhead from the Conservatoire de Paris who played the most charming set of selections from Songs Without Words? That was all the way back in 2006, I think, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's slipped your memory- but anyway, I ran into her just the other day and naturally we got into talking about you and she had no idea you had joined the Jaeger Academy, or gone to Hong Kong at all and- oh, Newton, it's such a thrill to see your name bandied about in the papers! Everything's Dr. Geiszler this, Dr. Geiszler that-"

Newt sets the phone down on Hermann's kitchen table and rubs at his temples tiredly. His mother chatters on, her voice issuing faint and tinny from the speakers.

"I've got to go," he says abruptly, cutting her off midsentence, mid-anecdote about a young organist Newt had met the night after parting from Lisette. He doesn't know how to ask his mother to stop bringing up other people who were also chronically neglected by their globe-trotting, applause-hungry parents when they were children and who happened to induct him into his sex life, and definitely don't spend a single moment these days thinking about him and whom he also doesn't think of any more, of anything past them as a vague symbol for the days that led him to discover just how many ways and degrees to which he was an outcast from the general populace, the days when his uncle would have to pay for plane tickets just so a son could see his mother, a mother who would then proceed to ignore him and leave him to his own devices at the hotel. He doesn't know how to avoid revealing information to her that would have only been relevant to a parent nineteen years ago so he says, "Mom. Sorry. The world might not have ended but I've still got work to do."

"Of course, of course-"

He hangs up and buries his head in his arms, phone clenched in his fist.

"Who was that?" Hermann, already fully dressed, clicks his way into the kitchen.

"My mother."

"Ah."

"Before you ask, no, it wasn't great. Yes, she congratulated me on defeating the apocalypse and saving billions of lives. No, she did not do it tactfully. Yes, she is essentially referring to me to all of her friends as Dr. Geiszler the Kaiju Slayer. No, she did not correctly recall my birthday. Yes, she still thinks of herself as some kind of deflowered ingénue and apparently my accomplishments are giving her such a thrill!" He caps off his diatribe with an exaggerated German accent, topped with the sighing falsetto of the coquette. He's had a lot of practice. "Sorry. I didn't mean to wake you up. I suppose it's too late to go back and cuddle. I bet you've already made the bed. Just a guess, with you being you. Was breakfast part of the deal? Do you want me to leave? Did I miss a social cue? I haven't done this in a very long time and to be honest I wasn't any good at it to begin with so if I did, I-"

Hermann kisses him. He shuts up long enough for Hermann to ask quietly, "Do you want some tea?"

He nods.

As Hermann fills the kettle and sets it with a clang upon the stove, Newt says, "But seriously. Do you want me to leave? I don't know what your post-coital expectations are but if I'm crowding you I totally understand and I can-"

"Newton. I am making you tea. Do you think that I am the kind of person who would prolong an experience they did not want to have?"

"I think you're the kind of person who would be unreasonably kind for the sake of some sort of gentlemanly code of propriety, yes. Come on. I know you're an asshole but not that kind of asshole. If you put up with working with me for five years I don't see why you wouldn't put up with even the most obnoxious of one night stands."

"You're not a one night stand."

"Neither are you."

Hermann, reaching for something in the cupboard, stills. Newt escapes to the bedroom with the pretense of retrieving the rest of his clothes- if they're going to have this conversation, which his gut tells him is a bad idea but his masochistic streak insists he should pursue, he'd rather do it clothed.

He takes his time in buttoning up shirt, pulling on his leather jacket, and attempting a half-hearted Half-Windsor because he's decided he won't go back into the kitchen until he hears the kettle whistle and he'll be spared for a few seconds from having Hermann's eyes upon him. Last night at the bar Hermann told him he hated his ties. Well, he hadn't exactly said that but he had essentially done so with the joke about looking like an accountant and it's not the first time Hermann has criticized his wardrobe but things feel different now, and Newt doesn't have this urge to carry on with certain behaviors just to spite him for the sheer satisfaction, and-

For a dizzying, dazzling moment, the room spins. Newt comes to crouched on the floor, one hand clamped over his mouth, the other curled around his knees, barely supporting him. His heart- his heart is hammering in his chest and his breath is coming out in short, shallow little gasps.

The kettle whistles. Hermann is clanking around the kitchen.

Newt forces himself to take deep breaths, and hauls himself up using the bed, staggering to his feet. He just had an anxiety attack. Anxiety had come along and taken a sledgehammer to his face and he hadn't heard it coming, didn't think he had experienced the usual telltale signs. He had been fretting about his tie. Fretting but several large steps away from agonizing so he doesn't know where that sudden assault came from and why it had decided to come now.

"Newton! Do you want a croissant?" Hermann calls.

Newt squares his shoulders. He's alright. It had gone as swiftly as it had come and if he breathes he'll be alright, he's just a little shaken but it's nothing.

"Yes," he says as he returns. "Last thing I put in my system was Ultra Cherry Paradise or- whatever that thing with the two umbrellas and the funny glass was called. And you would eat croissants in the face of war rationing, you privileged twit. Don't think I don't know how much you had to shell out to get a hold of them."

Hermann swats him playfully and sets the table, and then they are sitting on opposite ends of it and light is streaming through his PPDC-regulation window, and they are staring at each other in silence.

"I know you're not supposed to say this after sleeping with your coworker, but I don't think I could ever look at you the same way again," Newt says. With the way Hermann's body is angled towards the light, he can see the exact crimson extent of the drift's assault around his right pupil.

Hermann considers Newt's ravaged left. "Because the sex was very good or very bad?"

"Okay, man, you've seriously got to stop using that voice. It's giving me chills."

"What voice?" Hermann is grinning over his mug and Newt's suspicions were right. That asshole knows exactly what he's doing and it's infuriating because they're both supposed to be out of their comfort zone here, both of them tragically single since 2016 because they were busy trying to keep the world from ending and it's not fair if Newt's the only one being awkward.

"The will-you-Drift-with-me-Newton? voice. The Newton-I'm-waiting voice. The I'm-an-asshole-and-I'm-going-to-make-you-commit-a-dozen-workplace-violations-and-it's-going-to-be-awesome voice. There, that's what I'm calling it now. Kiss me?"

Hermann laughs and complies.

---

Today is January 19, 2025, and it is Newt's birthday.

In a corner of the hangar, Tendo has amassed his team from LOCCENT, most of the Jaeger technicians, a good number from the medical staff- everyone who has been forced to remain in Hong Kong despite their positions having been categorically concluded. It's another post-apocalyptic Tendo Choi affair, and Newt is here because it seems like the kind of thing one does on one's birthday.

"Man of the hour!" Tendo declares upon sighting him, pinning a blue foil cone into his hair.

"I look like an asshole," Newt says when he resigns himself to Tendo's ministrations and the very likely possibility that Tendo only had this hat at the ready because he expected Newt to show, which, for the record, Newt resents. He scowls at the rest of the hatless crowd.

"You look sober. Here, I've got something for that too." And Tendo is taking him by the hand to the universal point of interest, the collapsible picnic table laden with glass bottles both half-empty and half-full. When Newt expresses no especial interest in any of them, Tendo pours him a concoction of something heady and bitter and bronzed.

"Why so glum, chum?" Tendo says with the trademark affability of the Shatterdome's self-styled bringer of bacchanalia, handing him his drink and giving him a playful nudge.

"Take a wild guess."

"I really can't, my friend, when it comes to you."

"I appreciate that. I think." Newt peers down into the amber murk in his glass. It took an afternoon of agonizing and an ultimately split-second decision to come to the party; it will only take another split-second to leave it. "This was a mistake."

"What's the alternative? You sitting in your room in the dark?"

"I could have gone to a bar," he says halfheartedly.

"Okay, in the dark and in the cold."

"Better than swamping your party."

"I don't give a shit if you sulk but I will not stand for self-deprecation. You know what you need? A birthday chorus. And I can get you a birthday chorus."

"No one cares that the one jerkier jerk from the lab lived to see another year and their Jaeger heroes didn't."

"Jesus Christ, you're feeling guilty for being alive! Am I actually going to have to have that talk with you?"

"I'm not guilty, it's just- this is weird, okay? I'm not saying don't have a party, I'm not saying I think it's wrong that you've partied every night since they closed the Breach, but- it's just weird as fuck because they're dead, they're all dead- Cheung, Hu, Jin- the Kaidonovskys- Chuck- fucking Pentecost is dead, and it's just us and Raleigh and Mako and that's it."

"You think we should be in mourning? Forty days until their souls are laid to rest or- however the story goes?"

"No."

"And you promise this isn't about some bizarre need to join the Hong Kong martyrs' club?"

"Absolutely not."

"Then give me a hint, man, because I want to understand you, I really do."

Tendo is more than a little convinced that Newt is a ticking time bomb. That's the vibe Newt is getting from him. And that's okay, that's fair, that's actually more than fair. Newt accidentally makes eye contact with one of the nurses, who is either staring at his hat, or maybe his tattooed forearms, or his current level of pathetic straining all the way to the bathetic- or, more likely than not, she's put off by all of the above. He looks away hurriedly, face burning.

"Do you remember that phase in Hollywood when everyone was obsessed with the end of the world? Plagues, zombies- fucking Cloverfield, which, by the way, is being treated like gospel by the cult down in the Bone Slums."

"Sure."

Newt sips his drink and powers through the burn trailing down his esophagus, trudges through the haze of all things that he was promised he would have answers for in his third decade of living but doesn't. "Why were we so fixated with our own eschatology?"

"When were we not?"

Newt shakes his head. "I'm talking about panoramic CGI shots of New York being destroyed, and manufactured natural disasters, and Us Against Them and Team People and aliens we could slaughter with machine guns without feeling guilty. And for the most part in those movies, no one makes it out alive. I've seen as many apocalyptic movies as the next guy and I still don't understand- what was the sick fascination we had with the destruction of our planet? Maybe we were tired of it. Maybe we really thought we needed a new one. Maybe we wanted the world to end. I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm doing. I- I just need-" Newt hasn't finished his glass but his breath is reeking, and against his thigh his cigarettes are thrumming, wool mallets straining against hide allegro ma non troppo, and he's fiddling with the plastic cup in his hands but not enough to make it slosh, and with difficulty he finally says, "I need acknowledgment."

Without missing a beat, Tendo declares, "I, Tendo, see you, Newt."

Newt laughs, incredulous, because even after living in a universe where fish monsters emerge from the deep, there are still things left in this world to surprise him. He watches Tendo top off his own drink. "You're the only one I can talk to about this kind of shit," he says.

"I don't believe that for a second."

Tendo claps Newt on the back, murmurs "Happy birthday!" in his ear, and because he has always been unnervingly perceptive, leaves Newt be. Newt remembers that for his last birthday Tendo had barged into his room at 11:58 p.m. with a 40 in each hand and a shit-eating grin and they had ended up sloppy on the floor, curled at the foot of Newt's bed dazedly listening to old Star Trek reruns. Tendo will make it out just fine. They all will, but Tendo especially, with a resume like that and his knack for bureaucracy.

Newt wishes he could find some fun in this. Everyone else seems capable. He wishes he were content just as he wishes he were somewhere else entirely. He wishes he had something more to drink but also less; he wishes for the stinging, the nepenthic, something to eradicate him at every turn, and he won't stand here and make small talk with anyone, he just won't. Going to bed seems sensible, but he'll only toss and turn with the way his nerves are going haywire. Maybe the bar wasn't such a bad idea. He won't go far. He won't cross the causeways, or the harbor, and he won't go so far that the Shatterdome will be out of sight. As he collects himself, pats his pockets to make sure he has his keys and his wallet, and strategizes his escape route so as to avoid having to admit to Tendo that he's running off, Hermann cuts through the crowd. They lock eyes, need crashes into Newt full-force, and involuntarily he is remembering Hermann, and Hermann's hands across his skin, and the dizzying rush from his front door to his bed and he wants. Hermann is walking towards him with a funny smile and he puts up a terribly awkward wave that has never had a place in their relationship.

"It's my birthday," Newt blurts out.

"I know. Happy birthday."

Newt shifts from one foot to the other, regarding his drink, the creases in Hermann's shoes, the wordless tracks replete with reverberating bass that Tendo is blasting over the speakers. Feeling stymied, feeling Hermann's eyes upon him, he drags the foil hat out of his hair and crumples it into his pocket.

"Having fun?" Hermann asks coolly. He isn't drinking.

"I did. The first time, you know? The first night after. I remember dancing just like everyone else the night after the Breach closed and it was- it was like we were in this kind of grace period where it was okay to mostly forget the dead." Free laughter, breathless smiles, grins of acknowledgment across the room at strangers you had seen for five years in the halls, in the cafeteria, on the lots, but that night there was no such thing as strangers because they had all done something so utterly singular, so remarkable that for a little while there was a near-palpable bond between Newt and the entirety of the PPDC.

The drink in his hand is growing tepid. He regards it with ambivalence, throws it back, finds that despite his disinterest he could stand to drink more, he could always stand to drink more, but something stronger beckons.

"Let's get out of here."

"Are you sure?" Hermann says.

He sets down his empty glass and takes Hermann by the hand. No one knows they're involved, and for whatever reason, he hasn't told Tendo. It never seemed relevant. He's a touch self-conscious as they weave through the party and walk alone through the hangar, shoes clicking past empty Jaeger docks and rusted shreds of Gipsy Danger steel- but who actually cares about what the two assholes from the basement get up to in their spare time?

Relief immediately soaks into Newt's skin when they enter their lab. He's standing a little straighter, breathing a little easier. But he does not want to linger next to his equipment, or Hermann's chalkboards and the graffiti that saved the human race, and all the things now turned ephemera that they must shuttle away into crates and containers because none of this ever belonged to him anyway, or so he was told. He takes Hermann out to the loading dock, walking faster, walking harder, to the alley with the enormous Kaiju bins on lockdown and the hint of the sea just beyond.

"Newton?"

Newt grabs him by the lapels of his jacket and kisses him so forcibly that they stagger backwards, colliding against the wall. He murmurs his apologies even as he tears at Hermann in the dark, hands fumbling and searching for warmth, for sparks, for something to quiet his mind long enough that he might have the means to discover who Newt Geiszler is when he isn't slaying dragons.

---

.:Dear Hercules Hansen:.

"Dear? He's not a dear."

.:To Whom It May Concern:.

"Yes, can you advertise any louder that this situation is out of our control and our lives will be dictated by the whims of the disinterested and the inadequate?"

"My god. You write it then." Hermann shoves the computer away without any real vehemence, gesturing dramatically at Newt, who has been largely unhelpful for the duration of this exercise.

"I am not currently capable of niceties. I highly doubt I will be capable of behaving cordially until- well, I don't know. The short of it is I'm not over it." Newt ignores the proffered computer and flops backwards onto Hermann's bed.

"I am writing to inform you of my discontent with your decision to- well, what would you call this? Newton? Your decision to relieve… both myself and Doctor-"

"That's got as much tenacity as my sixth grade book report on plankton. Or the three branches of American government. Delete it all before you accidentally hit send and force me to live with my name forever attached to it. And then get on the bed so I can kiss your neck and then some. Also, your room is freezing. Don't you ever shut the window?"

Hermann rolls his eyes and abandons his laptop. He methodically props his cane against the chair and loosens the top button of his shirt before settling into his bed beside Newt.

"Are you alright?" Newt says, pressing against the wall to grant him more room. "You should throw this into the postscript of my letter. Something about your dissatisfaction with our living quarters and how every decent person over the age of twenty deserves to have a full-sized bed. At the very least."

Hermann makes a humming sound in indolent affirmation, curling an arm around Newt, drawing him closer. "I believe you said you were going to kiss my neck."

"Knew you'd be bossy," Newt says, acquiescing. "Hold on a second-" He carefully clambers over Hermann to the floor.

"The letter can wait."

"I agree." He boots up Hermann's computer again, pauses for a moment of contemplation, then flicks his fingers across the keys. The lilting arpeggios of Debussy's First Arabesque fill the room, and suddenly things are not quite so gray- they are timeless and suspended and safe as long as they're here. Satisfied, Newt slides back onto the bed, burying his face in the crook of Hermann's neck and plying at the rest of the buttons on his shirt.

"A little Top 40 of you, isn't it?" Hermann murmurs, lazily threading his fingers through Newt's hair and tapping along in triplets.

"Hush," Newt replies. "Lie back and think of Monet."

"The age of the wonderful arabesque," Hermann recites softly with a faint smile, "when music was subject to the laws of beauty inscribed in the movements of Nature herself."

"We should go. To Giverny, I mean. Take our own stroll along the bucolic. I make a point to avoid France- well, Paris, to be specific, but for you I can make an exception. And I expect you will hassle me about already being on the continent, so we might as well visit the city, and this is me telling you in advance that I strongly disagree but again, for you, I… Hermann?"

Hermann's chest rises and falls with his paced, even breaths. Orderly under eschatological duress, orderly in his sleep. He has never seen Hermann this way before- Hermann has never allowed it.

"You look so much younger when you're not frowning," Newt whispers, briefly hoping that Hermann might stir, that he might have been awake the whole time, that he knows that Newt is watching him so intently and can read things into it that even Newt can't, so Newt won't have to explain himself. "You look the way you did when we first met."

Rain-splattered in Austria, pewter windbreaker dotted darkly. Strands of hair plastered to his skin and the August mist that clung to it all, that pierced his joints and then he was crossing the bar to Newt and his face was falling; he was shaking Newt's hand and finding with each step the disjoint between expectation and grossly tattooed, tin-voiced reality. They meant to have a beer and go to the Viennese Musikverein that night for Mendelssohn, for the opening performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream but they made it all of fifteen minutes after their introductions before Hermann stormed away. For the last eight years Newt has wondered. From that moment onwards he has been convinced that if they had gone to that concert hall- if they had only gone and seen that there was something vital that they had in common and could share-

But they were doomed from the start. By Newt's propensity for the bombastic, the leering, the keenly unapologetic- by Hermann's inability to reconcile the things he could see and the things Newt could not say without first steeping them sardonic. By the ever-unsatiated need to be right, wholly right, but Newt can't blame them for that because this war was a zero sum game and a matter of being entirely right or being entirely dead.

If only they had met under different circumstances. If only they had come to Vienna as strangers of their own accord- Hermann for family, Newt for the sightseeing, both drawn despite the mugginess to the open ballrooms and the redolent stone arches, the concert halls where golden things beckon and sway, a place full of baubles resplendent and triumphant. Everything gilded, everything bright- a perfect, porcelain week and a decade to follow. Not this, whatever this is right now, this testament to pettiness and wasted time. If only he had chased after Hermann into the rain. If only he could go back to August of 2017, forcibly take himself by the hand and say, this, this is what you are walking away from, this is what you have screwed yourself out of.

He is going to tell Hermann. Twelve years and a few hundred missives later and he will aggregate all of the things they have done and seen and shared and exulted over and lamented and he will say Hermann, there is something about you that has never sat quite right with me. There is something about you that lingered and some days I cannot tell if we fight because we are too different, or perhaps too alike, and I have not done this- 'this,' whatever 'this' is supposed to be in a very long time and I know we swore to each other that if we had a time machine we would go back and prevent K-Day from ever happening even at the cost of never meeting each other but this is me telling you, because I am always and forever parodically me, that I am glad that things went the way they did, just a little. I am glad that I did not go into this war alone. So I am here to tell you that I think of you constantly, that I want you night and day, that I cannot believe we went so long without having this conversation and I guess that is my fault, I declare it my fault, because I am forever fucking up you and I.

I didn't plan this. I hope you know that and I am emphatically asserting this partly because to be in your bed is to be Caspar thrust over the sea of the sublime, and partly because, in the event that I am wrong and this- "this" goes terribly, I think it would hurt me more than if I had schemed us together, because when I am with you I can see a piece of the divine. I can see, finally, what makes someone want to write a symphony.

He will say all this and more when Hermann is awake, and he will kiss Hermann again and again and although it will never be enough he will try and feel like it is.

I'm sorry, he will say, or so he plans. I'm sorry I am me. And I do not apologize for being me, per se, but I apologize for being me when it was not doing either of us any good and I may or may not have pushed your boundaries on purpose, just to see how far you could bend for me.

But even as Newt swears this to himself, he wants more, he wants now, he cannot wait until Hermann wakes of his own volition, he wants the tactile and the fleeting, he wants the clipped euphoria he never knew another human body could bring him. He wants the mindlessness, he wants to be made to pay attention-

"What's the matter, sweetheart?" Hermann murmurs so drowsily, so devotedly that Newt, starving and guilty, pulls Hermann closer and imagines it is midnight and the lost overture is still ringing in their ears.

---

Newt shoves his hands in his pockets, hunched against the downpour that falls in steady sheets and beats against his shoulders. Through his rapidly fogging lenses, the streetlights flare, and the pedestrians ever-present on this side of the harbor are swaying, frowning wraiths. In his haste, he steps prematurely into the road. A car honks and swerves. He curses and presses onward, fist clenched around a pair of dearly-bought tickets for the premiere of The Bartered Bride by the resident philharmonic.

"Top 40 enough for you?" he'll say, and present them proudly, as if they were golden tickets, a pair of aces, and Hermann, if he has any sense will say, "I thought it sold out ages ago!" and Newt will slyly reply, "I have my sources," and Hermann will worry himself about it and spiral into pointless admonishments because Newt is obviously fine and eventually Newt will tell him about the hawker near the ferry off Salisbury Road who stood a little too close for comfort and looked like he wanted to sell Newt a kidney, or buy one of Newt's, and how that hawker gave him a last, slimy once-over to size up the goods, and to that piece of crudity Hermann will scoff and roll his eyes, but he will kiss Newt all the same and say, "Wonderful, you're wonderful."

For the first time in eight years he feels a sense of absolute clarity. He sees, now, where they erred- it is what he has always known about them, he and Hermann as "them," as a unit, and it is always better late than never when it comes to the Geiszler-Gottlieb saga of unrequited, one-sided admissions of emotional dependence fostered through enforced physical proximity.

He does not quite know what he will say to Hermann after the bestowing of the tickets. He hopes he won't have to say anything at all, that the tickets and his rain-splattered jacket and the sweat he worked up and the story about the touchy-feely hawker will speak for itself, thus proving that he and Hermann have actually been on the same page all along.

He finds Hermann where he will always find him- in their lab, on his ladder, and when he hears Newt coming he's descending on long, spindly legs, and with each step is the intent to see Newt, to speak with Newt, to be with him, and Newt is there too, fishing out the slips of printed cardstock that he thinks will rectify everything, and they are meeting in the middle of the lab when Hermann says, "Good, you're here."

Not exactly I'm glad you're here, but Newt will take it.

"What's up?" Newt says, which is what he would have said in either case.

"There's something that I must discuss with you," Hermann says in that grim way, that mincingly careful way that Newt would see in his uncle Ilia when he was seasonally convinced that Newt ever gave a damn about who he spent his Christmases with; in Lisette, worrying the hem of her skirt in his Parisian hotel lobby, revealing that she was suddenly meant for Belgium in the morning; in his undergraduate flame who stood him up one New Year's Eve and appeared the next morning in his apartment reeking of someone else's cologne, just to retrieve his hookah and cellphone charger- and Newt knows now what this is, because the plummeting decrescendo of reality subverting from expectation is a feeling he already has catalogued under the familiar.

"Sorry-" Hermann says, "You look like you wanted to say something."

"No, no, you first," Newt says with the ready graciousness of The Mature Adult.

"Well, I-" Hermann pauses, rubs the chalk dust between his fingers. "Yesterday I received an offer from Tokyo University. It's a research position in their applied mathematics division. I was told I could explore the discipline with as broad or narrow a scope as I like- they no doubt wish for me to explore the intersection of the Breach and its consequences on the field of quantum mechanics, and if given the opportunity I will oblige them, but-

"'If given the opportunity'? They've already handed it to you," Newt replies as harshly as he intended. "In twelve-point Garamond with a typified letterhead and a signing bonus ready to be cashed, I expect."

"The salary was never a point of my concern. The existence of a salary, yes- and you know as well as I that the severance we're receiving from the PPDC is a pittance and by no means sustainable. I am collecting options, Newton. That's what this is. A possibility."

"And if it's not Tokyo, then it's- what, Seoul?"

"Don't be rash-"

"You think I'm jealous," Newt concludes with vindictive triumph. "You actually think I give a damn about your fan mail. My god, how full of yourself can you be?" He's not jealous. As if he could ever be. He's got six academic certifications under his belt, so many he may as well use his least favorite ones as coasters. Newt Geiszler can find a job and that isn't why he's boiling, and of course Hermann, typical fucking Hermann thinks it's about something so petty as employment. "And you said you heard about this yesterday? When yesterday?"

"Sometime in the afternoon."

"I was in your bed yesterday afternoon."

"And I was on my phone."

Newt falls silent, aware of the water logged in his sneakers; the uncomfortable, clammy plaster of his hair on the nape of his neck; how he smells faintly like petrol and overwhelmingly like the gutters at the wharves. "Why didn't you say anything?" And his unabashed viciousness melts and sloughs like the grime pooling beneath his toes. He is an idiot. He is naïve. He should have sensed it yesterday afternoon but he was too caught up in Hermann, in the elation of what they could be, what he was so sure they were about to be, in seeing his own shoes by the door and a second pillow on the bed and the implications of those things, and maybe that was his first hint, that they were only ever innocuous actions leading to implications fabricated by Newt daring to be hopeful for the first time since the world decided to go ahead and off itself.

Hermann shrugs and Newt hates that because he wants answers and not half-truths but also not these answers. "I didn't know how I felt about it myself. But I've had a good few hours to mull it over and now-"

"Now you're telling me you want to go."

Hermann reaches for him, tries to squeeze his shoulders in the shoddiest form of a hug Newt has ever seen. Newt twists out of his grasp.

"I'm going to think about it. Okay? I am going to consider it. That's all I can say for now but you must understand-"

You didn't really think we were going to stay here forever, did you?

"Oh, I understand. I understand perfectly."

"Honestly, Newt, don't tell me you're surprised that this happened! And what about you? We're meant to clear out in little more than a month and if at this point you haven't even the vaguest notion of what you might be doing- I know this has all been very hard on you- I know you're not very good with change-"

"Excuse me?" Newt says even though there is no question about what Hermann has just uttered, and Newt has always known this about himself. But saying it out loud somehow makes it more real, and given who Newt is these days it feels like an unpardonable offense.

Hermann tries to hold Newt again, and he is not exactly an expert on all things Newt Geiszler but it doesn't take an expert to know the disgusting part of him- that being touched will more often than not make him shut up, that all it takes is the right word at the right time, the right smile in the right lighting, and Newt won't necessarily forgive but for that moment he will certainly forget.

As sorely as he wants to be held- and that's the sick part- Newt wrenches out of his reach.

"Newton, wait-"

"Fuck off, Hermann."

"But-" Hermann falters, then tries to smile placatingly, as if this conversation is still being held, as if this is an entirely new conversation, as if things are peachy-cordial and he, too is One Mature Adult. "You were going to tell me something when you came in?"

Numbly, unable to look Hermann in the eye, Newt hands him the crumpled tickets.

"Oh! That's-" Hermann frowns as he scans them. "That's tonight."

"Yeah."

"I adore Smetana."

"I know."

"We could-" Hermann gestures helplessly. Flounderingly. "We could still go."

And there's the punch line.

Newt laughs- outright laughs- and Hermann makes that face again, the floundering face that he reserves for the moments Newt does something he considers so preposterous, so loathsome that he cannot immediately muster a retort. And because Newt is a monstrous human being he laughs again, just to see if Hermann will give him an even more intense iteration of that face or an entirely new one, and it feels good to hurt Hermann this way, it has always felt good-

"Newton-"

But Newt is leaving, shoving his way through steel doors to his back alley with the viscera bins and the painted curbs stained with pressed ashes. Out of habit, out of a need to close in on himself and hide his skin from the world, hide his everything, he shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. His right hand closes around his carton of cigarettes, the pliant cardboard giving way to his grip. At the same time, his left hand rediscovers his lighter, and he takes both out and stares down blankly at them, as if he's Moses holding two tablets' worth of commandments for the world.

"Fuck it," he says, but the cigarette is already pressed to his lips. He lights it and inhales deeply, and as he exhales and lets the headiness carry him upwards and backwards, until his shoulders meet beaten concrete walls, he wonders why it ever occurred to him to abandon the closest thing he has seen to euphoria.

---

Three days after The Bartered Bride, Newt is sitting on the roof of his laboratory in a haze. The afternoon sun is catching the harbor waters and the light is reflecting off the glass facades of the skyline, setting the concrete and steel of the Shatterdome ablaze to match the flaming end of the cigarette lodged between his lips. He is awash in gold, he is bathing in it- he is luxury, he is wealth manifested, he is luck wrapped in leather and tight pants and new suede shoes. He is because he declares. He is thinking about the Opera Garnier in 2006- seems like whenever he has a moment to catch his breath Paris is on the tip of his tongue- about his uncle Ilia clamping down on his shoulder with his enormous, calloused hand, whispering, You see that glittering thing up there? That is your mother and how they were crammed in the pit beside the rouged understudies who wanted nothing more than for his mother to drop dead, and how Newt's knees ached and his new shoes were blistering but he did as he was told- and he is thinking about Lisette laughing and sighing in his ear, If only you could stay in Paris a little while longer and the few times during his life that he was on the same continent as his mother and how she would place her hands all over him when they were in public, as if declaring to the world, this is my son, mine! Newt is not angry with her for this- he has never wished for picket fences and sandwiches with the crusts cut off and someone to peck him on the forehead and whisk him out the door. He does not know what he wants from her, if anything- maybe an ounce of regularity to her claims of ownership over him, but that is something he wishes from everyone.

Newt is thinking of all the things that last (a few) and the things that don't (many) when the hatch screeches open and steps thud against the roof, sending reverberations up his spine. He exhales pointedly, fogging the horizon, knowing who it could only be, and promptly takes another drag. Occupied, a sign around his neck should read, Occupied until further notice.

"Newton."

Feeling calmer than he has in weeks, feeling more in control than he has in years, he lazily flicks the gray ash off the end of his cigarette and hums absently in response.

Hermann joins him at the edge of the roof. He sets down his cane, eases himself down carefully, sidles closer than Newt expected him to, and still not as close as he wants him to, and Newt is sick, sick, sick. "I understand that you are angry with me. I understand why-"

"As if you could ever-" On the infinitive, Newt's voice cracks, skips up an octave, and that is all it takes to wither his facade and remind him of the murk settling in his lungs.

"I have been inside your head," Hermann says. "I have been beneath your skin. I have seen you inside out and you have seen me too. Give me some credit."

It infuriates Newt. He doesn't want to be understood, he wants to fight. He wants to attack Hermann and destroy him with rhetoric that cuts too deep and shout at him until he leaves him alone to smoke his lungs out in peace. He wants to hurt him, just a little. Hermann is supposed to be screaming at him right now. That is how these things go. Newt says something uncouth and Hermann criticizes him and Newt tells him to liven up and it descends rapidly from there.

"You saw Newt in his mid-twenties getting hot and bothered over a penpal who, it turns out, didn't actually exist, at least not in the capacity that Newt-in-his-mid-twenties led himself to believe. You saw nothing."

"I saw you in Vienna."

"And I saw the back of your head."

"You think all of this has to do with Austria," Hermann states, perfectly punctuated and perspicuous, cornering Newt in the open air. "You think one stray day in Europe in August of 2017 is the reason it took me over a decade to end up at your side. You think an unattended Mendelssohn concert blighted us."

"At the very least, it's a direct correlation!" Newt shouts, zero to flooring it, the smoke curling about him in wild, ophidian tendrils. "Tell me you didn't despise me the moment you laid eyes on me. Or the second after when I opened my mouth. Tell me to my face that I wasn't an enormous fucking disappointment. And that I didn't continue to be that disappointment."

"You were not what I expected, no. But was I everything you hoped for?"

"God no. But that's not the point!" Newt exclaims, and his cigarette is slipping and he's inadvertently crushing what's left beyond the filter and he doesn't understand how Hermann can be so calm right now, because twelve years with the man have taught him that the Gottliebian breaking point should have made itself known long before Newt's first expletive.

"You think all of this is your fault," Hermann notes, cornering Newt again. "Some days. Today is one of those days."

"Did you honestly come up here to give me a lecture on myself?"

"That bears the hint of an implication that these are things you did not already know."

"Seriously. Get out of my fucking head."

"I don't think I could if I tried," Hermann says with a curious quietness. "Really, Newton, there is something I must discuss with you."

"If you must."

"The morning after- after our first date-"

Newt crushes the mangled stump of tobacco against the concrete roof and noisily lights another.

"You were on the phone with your mother," Hermann continues, unmoved, "and then you retreated to my bedroom to retrieve your clothes. I was alone in the kitchen, and I was forced to reflect on what we had just done. I could not stop thinking, I have slept with him and now things will not be the same, and I do not know if I want them to be the same and I wonder what he is thinking right now, if he is repulsed by me, if he now finds me dull because the mystery has vanished and all of a sudden I was so afraid of appearing dull to you, of all things. That this facet of our relationship had immediately lost all intrigue for you and we would retreat to the laboratory and remain on opposite sides, as if nothing could upset the five years of animosity we spent in Hong Kong. I was leaning against my kitchen counter and the moment I stopped to consider the nature of our relationship and how it had irrevocably transformed- I was gripped with this terror."

"I had an anxiety attack in your bedroom that morning," Newt says slowly. "I was putting on my tie and to be honest I was a little self-conscious about it because I was thinking about how you've always given me shit for it, but I wasn't worrying myself sick over it. But all of a sudden I was on the floor and I had this- this flood of uncertainty and it was so bizarre and- you're not saying what I think you're saying, are you?"

"I believe we've been ghost-drifting since the day we closed the breach," Hermann confirms grimly. "There have been numerous instances where it was as if you were shouting your thoughts. I thought it was empathy- sympathy- you simply being you, and loudly, and my having known you for eleven years rendering you predictable. But I felt your annoyance during your birthday party, and I sought you out instinctively. When you stormed out of the lab after I told you about my offer from Tokyo, I was suddenly furious. But it was the most displaced feeling- I could distinctly feel how it wasn't mine. It was as if I was slathered in paint and it was just resting upon my skin, and I could chip away at it if I tried. It must have been your anger coloring my own perception. I felt, inordinately, that I had been abandoned. I was frightened more than furious and the more I considered the nuances of that feeling, I concluded that it could not be organic. I was upset with you for being childish, for walking away when I attempted to communicate with you. The sense of loss- of loneliness- that was you, not me."

"But aside from that morning, it's just been me in here," Newt says, tapping at his temple. "I mean, I think? Our understanding of this is purely anecdotal."

"You're much more of an open book than I," Hermann replies. "I suspect that contributes greatly to it. Even when we weren't in the same room, you were there in the back of my mind. Humming. It became harder to deny whenever your temper flared- and it does flare often."

After a moment, Newt says, "I think I liked you better when you were screaming at me."

"That's not true," Hermann replies. "May I have one?" He gestures at Newt's cigarette.

"You smoke?"

"You forgot?"

Newt twists, digging into his pockets to retrieve the flattening carton. He flicks open the lid, offering it to Hermann without looking. The box caves; Hermann takes his piece. He offers his lighter without being prompted, and Hermann cups his hand around Newt's and the flame as he breathes in.

"Who was your first?" Hermann asks, pulling back, crossing his ankles.

Reddish copper hair curling down her back, weaving through his senses, filigree dress and-

No, not her.

A rainy day in Massachusetts and bong water on the kitchen tiles and ice gutted in the sink but that's not the way to drown a party-

"Megumi Eto," Newt says. "I was 20 and she was a grad student in the bioengineering department at MIT. We were at a party and she followed me out onto the balcony, and I didn't really think about it at the time, what it would mean to take her cigarette and in retrospect I suspect it was less of an act of communion between two very tired scientists and more of her way of making a pass at me. Also, in retrospect, I kind of regret asking for the second cigarette and then deciding not to at least do her the courtesy of walking her home. It was certainly if not categorically a series of dick moves. And you?"

Hermann settles back on his palms, and with a suddenness that leads Newt to suspect that he never intended to answer the question at all, says, "I'm not going to Tokyo."

"Seoul, then."

"No."

"Bristol."

"Wrong again."

"Reykjavik."

"If you like."

"Come again?"

"Newt Geiszler, I'm not leaving you for Tokyo."

Newt falls silent and Hermann contemplates the harbor. Then, Newt's voice cracking, "Say it again."

"Because you need constant and literal assurance."

"Your words, not mine."

"I'm not going," Hermann says, taking Newt's free hand in his own. "I'm not going anywhere without you. Not unless you want me to."

"What is happening right now?" Newt says, looking down at their hands, at his cigarette, at the concrete helipads below. "I'm sorry, I- I just need to be walked through these things."

Hermann cups Newt's chin, gently turning him, and kisses him. And when Newt anticipates that he will pull away he doesn't, he kisses Newt again and again, guiding him through the haze to the here and now, desultory and pneumatic.

"Satisfactory?"

"If I say no, can I have another?"

"Will it horrify you to know that I had a Drift-induced feeling that you were going to say that?"

Newt laughs and kisses him and musses his hair until he murmurs something about his leg, about his spine, how they are on a goddamn roof in the middle of the day, Newton, and one of the J-techs will see and his reputation has been intact so far and he would rather leave this place with it pristine, thank you very much.

"It was my fault too," Hermann says when Newt isn't laughing anymore. "I'm a little bit intolerable and even more intolerant and I am just as responsible, if not more so, for- well!" The smoke issuing from between his lips hovers, sinks, dissipates against the sun, and Newt knows what he means- that he is sorry for this, for being here, for letting his actions choose this timeline and not the other, for Vienna, for the lost Mendelssohn, for having to have this conversation on a rooftop.

"What are we supposed to do now?" Newt asks. "Because you're right. You're absolutely right. I'm lost, I'm wandering. I don't know who I am without this war. I have nowhere to go, I have no one to be. And it's absolutely fucking frustrating because it seems like everyone, literally everyone else at this Shatterdome is fine with the way things are. They adjusted. Instantly. And I get the feeling I'm supposed to shrug and move on and I just- I can't, Hermann. I don't have a family back home waiting for me. I don't have an 'old' life- all I have are the things I decided to pursue that led me to be here, to be this person in Hong Kong prepared to chain smoke and stare at a coastline polluted with alien guts until I go blind. I don't know if I can be anyone else and I don't know if I want to be." He flicks the ash off the end of his cigarette, inhales deeply, and with smoke issuing in a wild gust from between his lips he continues, "You know the story about the guy forever doomed to pushing a boulder up a hill? And when he would get to the top Zeus would show up and smite him just enough so that would lose his grip on the boulder and it would roll back down and he'd have to start over, and over and over again for eternity? What was his name? Well, that's not important, because right now his name is Newt."

"Do you want to go back to Massachusetts?" Hermann asks quietly after some time.

"No."

"Do you want to return to teaching?"

"Still no."

"Research? Publishing? The general sphere of academia?"

"Well, when you put it so broadly."

"You don't have to know these things," Hermann says. "You don't need to have all the answers today, or tomorrow, or for as long as you like."

"You seem to know what you want. At least, you did three days ago," Newt says accusatorily.

"I know the set of things that I would not mind doing, and in that set are things that I suspect would make me explicitly happy. But I am in no rush to achieve any of them, and I have no pressures to pursue them. They can wait. Everything can wait." He taps off the ash collecting on the end of his cigarette. "Do you want to stay in Hong Kong?"

"No." The readiness of his answer takes them both by surprise. "Up until today I thought I wanted to. But I don't want to hang around and watch them take down the Shatterdome brick by brick."

"Where, then?"

"What are you asking me?"

"I'm asking you to travel with me, Newton. We owe nothing to the world and we can go anywhere you like. We'll still have our names when we get back, and while we may not have been the pilots on the front lines, I think we're rockstars now in our own right. There will be a dozen Tokyo's waiting."

"You seemed to respond positively to the idea of Reykjavik."

"Reykjavik, Krakow, Rome, Shanghai- all of them in a fortnight, if that was what you wanted."

"Vienna?" Newt in his mid-thirties dares.

"Yes. Yes, of course," Hermann replies.

They are Drifting and they are drifting-

"And I don't know where we'll land," Hermann murmurs.

Newt shuts his eyes and leans against Hermann, his forehead against Hermann's shoulder. The flame between his fingers is winking, the light is dimming, and the haze is settling and steeping.

"You've gone quiet," Hermann says. "Ever since we Drifted I could hear your every screeching thought and now…"

Newt thinks of strings fluttering along to avian strokes, a trumpets' fanfare flaxen and triumphant, winds taking gossamer steps and the metallic slide over hills and dales and now Hermann can hear it too, and Hermann is echoing and amplifying it back to him across the Drift and perhaps this time, when they are in Vienna it will not rain.

END

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Feedback is encouraged and appreciated. I hope to revise this story over time.