Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

They will consume your sweet resistance

And they'll carry your heart in their teeth

But I am always feeding them

The ugliest parts of me

All of the words I've swallowed

All of the sharp things I've kept in my mouth

I am always bleeding out

Take me to war

Honey, I dare you

—The Crane Wives, Take Me To War

One drop.

Two drop.

Three drop.

The blood falls from the nostril after a drift with a kaiju, after a drift alone in a jaeger, at the end of the world, at the end of all things.

A seizure echoes. The ocean retreats, leaving room for a few months of blood dripping onto the beach, every permutation of possibility spiralling out for a few breaths that a person can take if they know what is going to happen next.

But they don’t. They never do. The seismic shockwave echoes out—

And then it slams back into the shore, a tsunami washing over every structure that ever considered itself stable.

---

It starts like this: there is a slip of the tongue. A misplaced pronoun. 

One would not think that a single world could make an entire world detonate in on itself with the force of a nuclear bomb exploding within a breach between dimensions, and yet, here they are: the atom splits. The world realigns itself around the gaping hole. 

The fallout descends, and it is fucking nuclear.

"Precursors," Hermann murmurs, because that's the truth. Because this is not Newt, and it has not been in a long time, has not been since before he arrived in Shanghai, before Shao, before fucking Alice, except it was all fucking Alice at the end of the day, wasn't it. 

A quick exchange of works, a you finally figured it out, said by a half-cracked, half-condescending voice that isn't Newt's, is Newt's, hasn't been fully his in so long, in so many years, and then Hermann fighting back, urging him to fight, because this isn't him, can't be him—

“I am not strong enough,” Newt chokes out, and his eyes are shining, bright with tears, bright with regret, bright with the sort of screams that have been ripping through a voiceless throat for so long, screams that Hermann couldn’t hear, coded into the name Alice, the name that made Hermann want to scream himself, because he knew that Newt wouldn’t just leave him like that and yet—(And the infinite yet. The eternal what if. What if the bridges hadn’t burned? What if the bombs hadn’t detonated? What if Newt hadn’t fucked off to Shanghai with nothing more than a note left on the pillow between them that he wanted to find a new life, to see other people, people who weren't smothering him, weren't stooges to the altar of PPDC fascism, weren't a reminder of a war he didn't want to fight anymore, except he never stopped fighting it, did he?) “He is not strong enough—"

And his hand swings up, towards Hermann, but there is still a ghost drift singing between them, a wretched, twisted thing, aching, rotting, decaying for so long.

For years, it broke down to a hum, a whisper of a thing. The sort of thread that could only be felt in dreams, in the moments in between, where dark, spindly things grasped at Hermann’s brain and all he could dream of was Newt’s mouth, a country away, so close and yet so far, and all Hermann wanted to do was scream at Newt to come back to him but all that remained was the faceless suit who stood behind Liwen Shao at press conferences, only occasionally being called upon to present himself with all the charisma of an acolyte to hypercapitalism and the black-hole draw of fame.

But in this moment the drift gasps back to life, a broken, gasped plea to look, Herm, before they destroy you, if you died, I would die—

And Hermann’s hand swings up on instinct to catch Newt's hand before it strangles him.

There is a strength, a muscle, to Newt that didn’t exist before. A heaviness to his touch. An iron beneath his grip. His fingers curl around Hermann’s, twisting, pressing, squeezing—

It is almost too much to stand against. Newt’s new body, his new mind, the fucking hivemind pressing against them both.

If Hermann doesn’t fight, if he doesn’t find a way to get Newt to fight, the hand is going to close around his neck, squeezing tight enough to strangle the breath from his veins and trap Newt in the precursors' iron grip forever.

Hermann's knee is threatening to pop, threatening to give way. There is lava pouring into his veins, into his bones, protesting the very fact of standing upright, but he will not let go. Not here. Not now.

If you died, I would die.

It’s a sentiment that bites both ways. A vow that carries ghosts along with it.

They never married, never came close to it, but in so many ways, the drift was more intimate than a wedding. More solidifying than a ring. Feeling the way that their minds and heart intertwined, in an instant rooting into each other, forever bound together, their flesh one flesh, their minds one mind, Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments—

Nothing can be too much. Not when he’s here. 

Not when the world—but more importantly, Newt—is on the line.

“You shall fight them,” Hermann orders, and his voice brokers no argument. He gives no way to argue back at him. No way that Newt can press in on him, that Newt can fight him.

This close to each other, Hermann can see that the suit that they currently have him in is different from the last suit, the one he was wearing when he first spoke of Alice to Hermann’s face. That suit, maroon, bold, bright, had a black tie down the middle, holding the collar up—a relative of Newt’s old skinny ties, at least.

But this suit? There is no tie.

Rather, there is a chain beneath the collar. A collar, meant not for a person, but rather for a dog.

And like the creature they’ve made him into, Newt growls. Snaps. Bites. “I’m going to kill you,” he spits, voice echoing up the barrel of an iron maiden, and he doesn’t mean it, because Newt’s eyes shine with tears. Salt burns through his eyes.

He is there.

He is still fucking there.

And Hermann is going to do whatever it takes to get him back. To bring him fucking home.

“I’m going to make you fucking rue standing against us," Newt bites, "You’re going to regret the day you were born. You are going to choke on the wreckage of your fucking ambitions—"

They have made Newt into something feral. Something not born wild, but made mad by being trapped, imprisoned, chained for so fucking long against his own instincts, his own aches, his own wants and needs.

But Hermann knows the threats, the gnashing of the teeth, isn’t for him. That Newt might be some wounded creature, some dog crushed up beneath of the ache and the torment and being forced to fit into a cage that did not fit him for far too long, abused and tormented and chained down.

That Newt would do many a thing to save the world, maybe even to doom it, but he wouldn’t hurt Hermann. That is not just a line that he wouldn’t cross, but a line he would burn down the world so that no one else would cross.

If Newt is pissed at him, if he is angry, then he will have to turn it elsewhere, will have to fight the ones who are yanking the leash around his neck.

If Newt wishes to break someone’s hold, like hell will it be Hermann’s. 

“No, you’re fucking not,” Hermann swears, and it is as much a vow, a command, as a curse. “You are not going to kill me, because this isn’t you.”

There is sweat beading at Hermann’s brow, pain popping tight through his knee, threatening to tear him asunder. His muscles are burning as Newt’s hand gets closer and closer, as his body moves forward, pressing Hermann against the dashboard that controls the drones that are currently wreaking havoc on the Shatterdome, on the PPDC that they both once drifted with a kaiju in order to save.

But Hermann cannot focus on the drones. Not right now. Not when Newt is on the line.

Nothing could ever be more important than Newt being on the line.

“Newton, you shall do this,” Hermann says, and the name is closer to prayer than language, more faith than numbers, a command from a saint, from a prophet, sacred beyond belief because in this moment, he thinks of Newt introducing himself to a group of people as Dr. Geiszler and he refuses to let the precursors do that to Newt. 

Hermann gives Newt a name. He gives him back his own name.

And more than that—

Hermann risks danger. He risks death. He risks everything it takes to reach forward with his free hand even when his singular hand he knows is not enough to hold against a precursor-controlled Newt's attempts to choke him, and his fingers slip beneath the chain around Newt’s collar. Hermann shall dig his nails in. He shall not let the precursors have Newt. They will not have him. They will not stake their claim on someone who has only ever been Hermann’s.

And Hermann yanks.

(The mentions of Alice over the years blistered, Hermann wanting to respond, wanting to bite back, but he knew that he had to respect Newt’s decisions, no matter how much he wanted to grab Newt and press him up against a wall and bite his mouth and demand that Newt tell him in what fucking world Newt thought that Hermann would ever let him get away from him—

He should have. He should have done that. He should have ripped open those fucking suits and peeled Newt open and marked up every inch of his skin, if it meant that Newt exactly where he belonged—free and adored and his, not some fucking aliens’.)

The collar chain breaks, the links hitting the ground with clinks and clatters, as the drift shudders. As an inhuman, strangled sound echoes from Newt’s throat.

The drift shivers, sluggish, aching, rotted, between them, but Hermann will not let it fall. He will not let it slip away from him.

Not this time.

Not fucking ever again.

If Newt is going to slip away into the doom days, into the blood-stained end of the fucking world, all again, then Hermann is not letting him go alone. He will plunge himself into the depths of the any fucking kaiju sea if it means giving Newt the oxygen from his lungs.

He is going to get Newton Geiszler back. He is not going to walk away. He is not going to let Newt slip through his fingers yet again.

A gasp echoes up from Newt’s throat even as his fingers wrench tighter around in Hermann’s, and Hermann knows that he might be about to lose, that the precursors must be pushing with all their might, that they must be pushing hard for killing Hermann, the only current obstacle to their plans, the one person in the entire world that knows the truth about them breaking Newton Geiszler's body down to their puppet, using his mind as their abused pet, and that if they just snuff Hermann out, they can rule the fucking world.

But instead of pressing further towards Hermann’s neck, pressing closer to the choking point, to the strangling—

Newt’s fingers twist. The nails press into Hermann’s palm. The breath rattles like chains at the bottom of a well, a bucket getting wrenched upward, toward the sky—

Newt doesn’t try to bring death, not anymore; Newt’s fingers squeeze Hermann’s like a pregnant woman bearing down with everything she has.

Hermann's palm might be bruised tomorrow but he cannot bring himself to give a shit.

He is familiar with pain. Newt's fingernails digging into his skin to the point of drawing blood is far below the price that Hermann would be willing to pay to get Newt back.

So Newt’s fingernails carve, and it might be precursor, it might be Newt, but Hermann can’t bring himself to care which one it is, because the reason why there is now blood trickling down Hermann’s hand, sticky and iron-hot, and he is alive, and so shall Newt be. Hermann will make sure of it.

Newt must have spent the last decade drowning. Fighting.

Losing.

He has been a dog tossed into the bottom of that very, very long well, drowned beneath the hivemind sea of the precursors, and he has been fighting and howling for so long, unable to be heard, unable to be saved—

But he shall win now, because Hermann is here, and Hermann will not allow him to fail.

“You can do this,” Hermann says, “You have to do this. You will do this. I will not let you go.”

It is a command. A demand. The sort of thing that you might say to someone when you have them on their knees—

In an instant, his hands rip from Hermann’s wrist, from his hand, as he drops to the ground—not just falling to his knees, but slamming, harder than an anvil falling from a plane, achieving terminal velocity.

Terminal, as in final. As in the extreme, the end, the end of the fucking line.

Newt is gasping on the ground. “I won’t,” he growls, clawing at his own chest, nothing more than a dog painting the floor with his own viscera. Each word comes out as a clang, hitting the ground heavy and hard as a feather does not. “I won’t.” A gasping, bloodied breath. “Fucking.” His nails digging into the lapel of his blazer, the nails not quite sharp enough to rip through the fabric and yet enough to start shredding it with the force of his ache, his refusal, the stubborn line of a spine so used to proving itself against Hermann’s arguments that it doesn’t know how to surrender when Hermann challenges him to save himself. “Hurt him.”

Blood drips from Newt’s nostrils. One drop. Two drop. Three drop.

Years ago, one of the cadets had accused Newt of bleeding kaiju blue. Of being nothing more than a kaiju-fucker, electric blue in his veins.

But right now, the blood is crimson as the Blood Falls in Antarctica, all iron-rich nanospheres, all ache bleeding through the edge of the glacier after too many eons buried—

The evidence of a fight. Of a battle. Of a war.

A wounded creature, made prey by infernal predators, shredded beneath the diamond drill bit of the precursors’ rage, flayed open by their hatred, their hunger, their stomach—

Newt’s eyes roll up into the back of his head for a moment, and his body sags, eyelids falling shut, and Hermann kneels down in an instant, trying to catch him before he collapses against the floor, trying to prevent him from hitting his head—

But Newt’s eyes snap open, and there is a burst blood vessel in his eyes, a smirk upon his lips, evidence of a battle fucking won.

“Alice doesn't live here anymore," Newt says, voice gruesome, atonal, half a precursor's roar, still, and yet, it's hard to not recognize that it is him, because it's the sort of thing that only he would say, all pop culture references and stubborn flippancy and this is him, crawling his way out of that fucking well, shards in his feet, and yet, still standing.

And Hermann’s relief is so sharp as to be painful. As to rip through him, shredding the end of every nerve raw.

He hadn’t let himself consider the fact that Newt might lose, because for Newt to lose would have invited in the end of Hermann’s world, but now that Newt has won, now that Newt is here, it threatens to swallow him whole, the fact that so often the story ends with the dog being shot for going rabid, not fighting its way out and running away.

Hermann leans over. Cups Newt's cheek, and god, to feel the familiar organic weft of his skin, just a little too dry—though with the slightest amount of makeup on, a strange thing, because the only makeup Hermann ever saw on Newt's face before was a bit of eyeliner when he wanted to return to his glory days when going out to the karaoke bar next to the Shatterdome.

“You did a good job, Newton,” he says, and something in Newt’s shoulders shudder beneath Hermann’s hands, slumping in relief, that beloved, shrapnel face turning up towards the light of the sun.

Hermann wants nothing more than to hold onto Newt for longer. To let his fingers linger against those cheeks, which don’t feel the same, which could never feel the same, because the precursors have carved him open, cut him down, taken out so much of the softness that Hermann once fell in love with, but it’s still Newton Geiszler, at the end of it all, and therefore his face still fits inside of Hermann’s hands like a missing puzzle piece, all of his sharpened edges fitting into Hermann’s, nothing dull between them—

But the screens are still firing red behind them. Every moment that Hermann lingers is a moment where more pilots and cadets might die across the rim of the pacific, across the Shatterdomes that Hermann and Newt spent so many hours dedicated to saving over those long, exhausting years working themselves to the bone in that old lab of theirs, beneath the curve of the grungey walls, all that rust, all that iron—

Hermann doesn’t want to get up. He wants more than anything hold Newt, to reassure him, to cuddle him, to pepper his face in kisses, to praise him, to apologize for all of these years spent apart—

But he can't stay for very long, because there is still a battle to be fought.

Because there is still blood red bathing their faces, red sky in the morning, sailors take warning, and there are likely screams and battles and the like being fought outside, and Hermann wants to be by his side, he wants to not look away from Newt ever again, he wants them to spend the rest of his life with his bones buried between Newt’s ribs, but he can’t just let the entire world continue to burn, because he is not that much of a monster, but also because the longer that things burn, the likelier it is for someone to storm in here, the likelier it is for someone to discover that it was Newt’s body and brain that was behind the drone sabotage, and Hermann refuses to let Newt have to answer for that crime.

The fallback will not fall onto Newton Geiszler’s shoulders. Hermann refuses to let that happen. They are going to stop the “virus” from going through the system, they are going to save the Shatterdome, and then Hermann is going to take Newt home and spend the next decade showing Newt that nothing will ever steal him away again. That he is safe, that he is adored, that he is Hermann’s and no one else’s.

So Hermann has to wrench himself away from Newt. He has to let go, but he cannot stop his thumb from dragging across Newt’s lips as his fingers leave his face, catching one last ghost along the way.

Then he staggers his way up to the dashboard and starts to run the codes.

This is what he knows how to do. Sure, the knowledge is buried nearly two decades deep, but if he can recall every word put to ink in the letters he exchanged with Newt back then, then what is stopping him from remembering the tricks of the trade for hacking and programming?

Hermann coded the first jaegers. Disabling Newt’s drone-piloted ones should be a piece of cake. After all, there is no human brain to carefully program around and account for, no delicate pilot cerebellum to protect; all Hermann wants to do is hit the stop button, to wreck the monsters entirely.

There’s just one problem—after a few layers of firewalls quickly bypassed, he hits a final section that needs an iron-hard passcode.

One last passcode to stop the world from ending. One last set of numbers to deliver the world from the jaeger-kaiju hybrids and the attacking drones and the press of the precursors' hivemind on the rule of everything.

You know it, Newt’s voice curls in his mind, a taunt, a promise, an answer, Same as it always has been—

Of course Hermann does.

Hermann’s fingers race across the keyboard, typing in the most familiar date in the world, the one that Newt changed all of his passcodes in their lab to one night when he was drunk: their anniversary. Not the day of their first kiss or even the day that they drifted and they knew what they were to each other, but the day that they first met in Berlin, all fire, all fury, all regret, because as Newt told Hermann, tipsy on the post-breach-closing champagne, that was the moment that he knew that he loved Hermann, that he couldn’t live without him, and it was also the moment that he knew that they could never have forever with each other in the way that he’d always dreamed.

(Of course, when Newt finally told Hermann this, he was sitting in Hermann’s lap on the sofa, in between kissing every inch of Hermann’s face that he could get to, but looking back, it was almost a prophecy of the future, the sort of premonition that Hermann never would have believed in without proof, without scientific prediction, and yet—)

Hermann has no idea how the precursors would have allowed something so sentimental—save as a way to rub things into Newt's face, and maybe that's it, that they were rubbing in the fact that Newt and Hermann could never have forever together, which Hermann is more than happy to prove them as wrong as possible, because they're wrong. Of course they're wrong. They've always been wrong, and Hermann is more than happy to prove them so as he clicks enter.

He’s in. The drone systems are his to command, the failsafe his to engage—

And thus his to initiate self-destruct upon.

Hermann sends the signal through, and the “brains” of the jaegers explode to pieces.

Likely, on the other end of things, in the various Shatterdomes scatters around the Pacific, those lazarus experiments on the shatterdomes of the past, the shrapnel skeletons of drone jaegers are raining from above.

But Hermann can’t bring himself to give a shit about them all now that they’re gone.

Rather, he turns directly back to Newt, hitting his knees on the ground in front of Newt, and he knows that he’s going to regret that later when his body mutinies against the very concept of pain, but he doesn’t care. Not right now. Not when he has Newt close to him for the first time in a decade—not just physically, though that of course is appreciated, loved, worshipped, but also mentally here, in a way that Hermann hadn't noticed the absence of far for too long.

Newt’s breathing is slowly returning to normal, even as the blood wavers between dripping and drying on his upper lip, but it does hitch when Hermann cups Newt’s face in his hands, cradling him close, fingertips spreading out across Newt's cheeks, brushing against the base of his ears.

Hermann can feel the difference in the face he once memorized here. The muscle, the slight hollowing of the cheeks, so much of the softness that he loved so much stolen away, only made worse by the fact that it strikes a strange cognitive dissonance in Hermann’s chest to look into Newt's eyes without glasses, to ghost his thumbs across Newt's bare cheeks to brush away his tears.

Hermann knows how much Newt has always hated contacts, but he had assumed that there was some sort of dress code here at Shao Industries, this perfect, polished capitalist hellscape where everything had to push the boundaries, had to fit a certain chrome curve of style towards the future—Liwen Shao’s outfits case in point.

But looking into Newt’s eyes this close, seeing no signs of anything in his eyes save his own tears, the blink of his eyelashes painting shadows across the apples of his cheeks, Hermann knows that there are no contacts.

And the only way for Newt’s terrible vision, so zealously guarded for the sake of his glasses, could possibly have allowed the precursors to go anywhere without tripping and falling flat on his face—

LASIK, some part of Hermann’s chest says, his heart shredding holes in the lining of his stomach, sending the acid pouring forth. The only way that Newt could be able to see without contacts, considering how thick his glasses were, how strong his prescription was.

Pinned down within his own body. A laser poked into his eyes. One more chain. One more collar.

“I’m sorry,” Newt is gasping out, voice a croak, voice a rasp, because no word he’s spoken for uncountable years has been his own, under his own recognizance.

Newton Geiszler’s voice has atrophied. His language, the ping-ponging pitter patter pace of his words, the most unmistakable thing about him, was stolen out from under him. 

What greater theft could there be? What greater crime could be inflicted?

Hermann has spent years dreaming about Newt’s words. About the ramble of his voice, the excited patter, the way that Newt, when on a ramble, cannot help himself.

The only time that he could ever stop was when Hermann interjected to place a question in his way, the unstoppable force and the immovable action, an object in motion tends to stay in motion until an equal and opposite force acts upon it—

Newton’s First Law of Motion.

The first rule of interacting with Newt in person that Hermann ever learned. The pace of an argument, the rhythm of a fight, the only way that their conversations ever went.

And now, with Newt’s body the conduit for the precursors, the broken bones and bruised soul functioning as the precursor’s engine, of course Hermann was the only one who could get him to stop. Of course Hermann was the only one that could catch the problem and react upon it.

Equal and opposite. The law for magnetic attraction, the law for motion, the law for how two people manage to find and stop each other after all of these years apart.

Newt is still gasping out apologies, voice stuttering, aching, pressing forward even when he cannot, because he has not had words for so long and he needs to grasp onto them, needs to root himself as he has not been able to for so long—

But he doesn’t need to use these words. It is Hermann who needs to apologize for not seeing the chain for so long. It is Hermann that needs to be the one to state that it was not Newt’s fault, that it couldn’t have been his fault, that he did fight, at the end. He did make his stand, and he won.

Newt might have lost every battle, might have ended up a prisoner of war, chained and starving and broken, but he won the fucking war.

And that is all that matters at the end of the day; Newton Geiszler might be wounded, bleeding, not even yet healed up enough to start scarring, but he survived. He fucking won.

And Hermann refuses to hear him apologize for that. He refuses to hear Newt say sorry for being beaten down by the force of an entire alien hivemind upon his own mind, and not having someone there with him to help hold up the weight of the sky.

So Hermann leans forward to press his mouth to Newt's, and the planes of his face are smoothed away, carved in, makeup and a lack of proper diet and all sorts of other things, most likely, but it is still Newt, mouth chapped, aching, tasting of salt in the sea, all those tears, the blood dripping from his nose—

And Hermann thinks about the taste of the sea on Newt's mouth, the kaiju ocean blue of the drift, the bits of Newt that burrowed into his bones all of those years ago.

Osedax, Hermann's brain thinks, bone-devourer, or in layman's terms: boneworms. Marine creatures that burrow into bones, secreting acid in order to open them up so that they can eat them for sustenance and so that microfauna can inhabit the bone.

One time, a long, long time ago, in a letter, Newt had jokingly asked would you still love me if I was a worm?

Hermann had, of course, pointed out every flaw in such a question. How silly it would be, how much Hermann would be unable to tell one worm from another, the fact that they would not be able to see, the fact that Hermann had a black thumb so terrible that he had never been able to keep plant nor worm alive.

But he had internally thought: we have not even met yet, and you are already the boneworm burrowing its way through my skull.

And that never stopped being true.

The drift opened up Hermann's brain in so many ways, but it also opened up Newt's.

“You have no need to apologize,” Hermann says, and he knows that Newt has as much a need for praise, for reassurance, as he does, but Newt has spent a fucking decade getting none of it as his body swanned about puppeted by monsters from another dimension that carved him down, down, down, collaring and chaining him down. Newt deserves all of the praise he can get, and sure enough, Newt looks up at him with bright, watery eyes as Hermann says, "You did a good job—"

But that moment can only last so long when they are not alone anymore, because Liwen Shao is bursting into the room multiple minutes too late, gun in hand.

“What the hell happened in here?” she demands, "Why are you two on the ground making out when the drone program is going up in flames?" and it is likely that some of her employees ran to her the moment that Newt burst in here, gun in hand, chucking his sunglasses to the side, throwing them against the wall with a crack—where they belong, and shall stay forever.

“Someone hacked your systems,” Hermann says, and it’s through gritted teeth. He wants nothing more than to be out of here, than to take Newt away from this place, than to swaddle him close and soft and never let anyone get to him ever again. Newt has been fighting for a fucking decade—he deserves a decade of rest, only leaving the flat to do what he wants in a lab, to dissect the fucking kaiju that ruined him, not to be forced to play with drones. “And it was us that stopped it before said drones-kaiju hybrids destroy everything.”

Guilt passes across Newt's face, a dozen new ghosts that Hermann knows that he will carry, and Hermann shall help him carry them, but no one else shall ever have to know that they are there.

No one has to know.

No one ever has to know save the two of them, and that might the selfish option, but fuck it. They both deserve some selfishness after too many years being ground up and devoured and spat out.

The precursors aren't there anymore, and even if they are, well, he and Newt can take care of them again, and even if they couldn't—

If the choice is Newt or the world, Hermann knows what he will pick. 

He made the mistake, once, of letting Newt pick the world, letting Newt drift with that kaiju brain instead of saving himself, and Hermann refuses to let that happen again.

“Some of those breaches did manage to open,” Shao says, “And there is now a kaiju heading to Tokyo, wreaking havoc along the way—"

Hermann looks over the feeds. Only a single kaiju managed to get through, thanks to his work stopping the breaches that carved most of the kaiju in two, and there are still a working jaeger or two, plus those scrappy little cadet-engineers and the living J-techs that can put together more. That should be plenty enough.

But that isn’t Hermann’s priority. It hasn’t been since the moment that he found out that Newt had never left in the first place.

Hermann wrenches himself to his feet with an unholy pop.

His body protests. Threatens to mutiny. It does not want to stand. It wants to collapse. It wants to sleep for a million years. It wants anything but to be here, in front of Liwen Shao, lying his ass off so that his partner—what they are beyond that, Hermann has no idea, but he does know that they are the other half of each other’s bitter, bruised, broken souls, and he shall never let anything get between them again—can live his life free.

But he cannot let his body determine their fates. The world has stopped ending again, for now at least, and if he wants it not to start ending again, if he doesn’t want them to take Newt away from him, if he wants a chance at finally keeping Newt by his side, then he cannot let the story spin out from under him, spiralling out before he has a chance to catch every spider before it spins its web.

So Hermann grabs Newt's hand, yanking him to his feet, because he refuses to let go ever again. Hermann has grieved Newt for too long. Lost him for too long. He cannot lose him again. He refuses to lose him again.

If there is one thing that Hermann has realized over the past decade, if there is one thing he should have realized in that first drift, it is that he cannot lose Newt Geiszler. It is that if he has the chance to keep him, he is going to dig in his fingers and do anything to keep him, fuck any moral or ethical obstacles.

Hermann is willing to lie for Newt, about Newt, if it means keeping him. If it means getting to have Newton with him forever.

“The PPDC can take care of it, between Rangers Lambert and Pentecost and the cadets and their jaegers. A single Category Four has been taken care of by a single jaeger once before, much less by multiple." Hermann refuses to wince at pain in his wrecked hand, but he cannot deny that there is something in him that is thankful when Newt leans down and grabs for Hermann's cane to give it back to him as Hermann turns to Shao to answer. "And in case you have forgotten, ma’am, I am not your employee. I am the Head of K-Science at the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, and therefore do not listen to your authority or need to answer your questions in the slightest."

Next to him, Newt winces at that, and for a moment, instinct tells Hermann that Newt is likely jealous, but a second later, that observation is accompanied by the splinter in his heart that tells him that of course he is, of course he’s jealous, because that should have, by all rights, have been the title that they shared after the Breach ended, that there is nothing that would have brought Newt to this fucking city and away from Hermann if he'd had the choice.

Shao rolls her eyes. "But Dr. Geiszler works for me," she points out, "And thus, he is needed to make decisions around here, to make up for the errors committed by a division that he helped develop-"

It would be so easy for Newt to take the comment and to drown himself in the shame, the guilt, despite the fact that he does not deserve it, and for a moment, Hermann thinks that he just might, as he grits his teeth, and he swallows hard, as his gaze flicks to the screens, as they flick back to Shao, as they swallow down her words and Hermann just hopes that Newt doesn't integrate the thoughts behind her words into the organ between his ribs where they do not belong.

Thankfully, Newt clears his throat. “I have something more pressing that I need to discuss something with Dr. Gottlieb,” he says, and his voice is a strained, hoarse thing—maybe from yelling, but still, maybe, from the fact that he is piecing together his own words with his own throat for the first time in ages.

Shao rolls her eyes and hard. “You cannot possibly be thinking of dealing with your love life at this moment in time, when the company is about to face the largest PR crisis in history all because some sort of virus managed to sneak into our systems and sabotage the largest launch we have ever done—"

Hermann could argue that he would never be so unprofessional, but the fact of the matter is that he would. That he definitely would. That they literally did do such things, before the closing of the Breach, making out in the lab, sinking down on each other on that beat-up lab sofa that has seen more sex than sleep at this point.

But the look in Newt’s eyes—it’s not just about romance, he can tell. There is a certain paranoia still in his eyes. A certain dread. And that could just be lingering from the amount of time he spent under the Precursors' hold, or...

Newt has never been the most subtle man in the world when it comes to getting himself out of situations. Hell, having any sort of diversion tactic is a step up for him, especially now, as he provides the best that he can: “Maybe you need to just get someone with better firewalls," Newt says as he scoops up his suit jacket and slides it on—with the suspicious folding-tablet-shaped bulge in the pocket, and oh, shit, what sort of back-up plan might the precursors have that must be taken care of—

“What did I tell you about loyalty and insubordination,” Liwen snaps out in Mandarin, and Hermann nearly flinches forward to claw at her, because how dare she speak of obedience, when Newt has been choking under the collar of the precursors' hold for so long, “You were not supposed to contact Dr. Gottlieb—"

And something splinters inside of Hermann’s chest, something snapping at the idea that it wasn’t just the precursors keeping them apart, that there were so many layers of separation that he didn't see, that he hadn't been able to piece together, that if he'd just known a bit sooner that there was any indication that Newt didn't want to be separated, he would have been in Shanghai in a fucking instant—

“If it wasn’t for Dr. Gottlieb, we would not have been able to stop the drones from malfunctioning,” Newt says, in English, and he’s not lying, if albeit omitting major details. “Your company would be responsible for the deaths of every PPDC employee across the Pacific.”

Shao opens her mouth, gaze piercing, as if to argue, as if to point out that it wasn't her fault, that it was an error in the system, but that would still make it her liability, because she hadn't been paying close enough attention to see what was coded into it, too busy worrying about pr stunts and driving up stakeholder value by not having enough regulations in place—

But she doesn't get to finish whatever argument she was about to make, because the phone crackles over the overhead speakers. “Shao,” comes Jake Pentecost’s voice, a near growl, “We need to speak about your drone program before the jaegers go out to stop a fucking kaiju from advancing on Tokyo—"

Liwen's face twists up into an expression of are you fucking kidding me, why does everything have to fall down on my shoulders on the same day, and Hermann would almost feel sorry for her if she didn't say, "I shall have answers for your problems as soon as possible, Ranger Pentecost," hung up the phone, and whirled on Newt, mouth twisted into a snarl.

“You are to be put on leave, Dr. Geiszler—" Liwen says, “So that you do not continue to raze my good efforts while this company, my child, is in the middle of the worst crisis of our history—"

“Our history?” Newt points out, and Hermann can feel the near hysterical laugh bubbling up in Newt’s throat, cracking raw and uneven as it passes his lips.

He knows what Newt wants to say. How he wants to protest, to argue, that the only we he was ever involved in at the company involved the plurality of voices inside of his head wanting access to the world's most easily resourced and distributed technology, never any sense of company loyalty.

But instead, for once in his life, Newt's mouth snaps shut over the laughter, the argument, every part of him that wants to watch Shao Industries burn. “Good. I could use a fucking vacation. A fucking decade working here and I never took one.”

Liwen rolls her eyes. “Do not blame that on me. You were the one who insisted on working yourself to the bone—"

Newt’s nostrils flare. “Because it was your company culture that lent itself to it, you—" Hermann knows that Newt, now with a tongue unleashed, is about to call his boss all sorts of things, a capitalist vulture, a fascist, all the like, because for the first time in a decade he is able to say the things he's angry about, and he deserves to, Newt deserves to rant for hours and hours and only stop when his mouth grows too dry and he needs to take a sip of water that Hermann shall have ready for him, but Hermann knows that there is likely some sort of very pressing thing on the tablet that Newt was going for in the first place, so Hermann’s hand grasps Newt’s shoulder.

Newt’s gaze snaps to his on instinct, hazel eyes devastating, as Hermann's gaze flicks down to the pocket of his blazer.

And Newt's expression opens and shutters in an instant before he turns and flashes Shao a quicksilver smile. "Vacation, then," he says, "I'll take that leave and be back soon enough."

The second part of that statement is likely a lie—Hermann is sure that there is nowhere in the world that Newt wants to return to less than this place—but it's enough to mollify for now, when Shao has so many other issues that she needs to deal with far more than one annoying, motor-mouthed doctor.

And so Newt's hand, still in Hermann's, pulls them both out of the HQ and into the hallway, where Newt yanks them both into a closet, pulling the folding tablet out of his pocket and unfolding it open into a touchscreen that is currently bleeding the same neon crimson and kaiju blue that the screens in the HQ were before Hermann managed to turn them off.

“I need you to—" Newt begins, and he doesn't even need to finish the statement, to explain what he needs Hermann for, because Hermann would follow him to the ends of the earth and beyond.

“What is it?” Hermann asks, “Let me—"

Newt waves the tablet. “There are these things. Rippers. They’re designed to piece kaiju back together after they’ve been destroyed, with the goal of putting a hybrid together.” There is a certain light in his eyes, a certain indication of fascination with the scientific implications, the sort of thing that Hermann loves about him, but it’s clear that Newt understands better than anyone the sort of devastation that this sort of thing would unleash. “You destroyed the breaches before more than one kaiju could come through, but I need you to deactivate them before they make kaiju basically impossible to destroy.”

It’s a grotesque but incredible piece of technology, Hermann can’t help but think. The implications that it would have for the field of medicine would be immense, if it wasn’t designed for kaiju, but even then, there has to be some way to transfer over the idea to tissue restoration.

“And yes, I know exactly what you’re thinking, dude, about the medical implications,” Newt says, “Because I was thinking about them too, before the precursors took over. Before the Breach even closed, I was originally planning on designing a variation of them to repair torn muscles and wounds, but now—" He swallows. “Right now, we’ve gotta stop them from doing their job with the kaiju, so that the pilots or the cadets or whoever the fuck is working at the Shatterdomes nowadays can take care of them with the jaegers and not have fucking zombie kaiju going after them.” He shoves the tablet into Hermann’s chest. Hermann’s first instinct is to ask why not just smash it and be done with it, but he was a coder, once upon a time. He knows that you have to deactivate the code fully or else the things might just stay on autopilot. “You could do it faster than I could. The only way that I could do it in the first place was because I had a bit of you lodged beneath my ribs.”

(Boneworm, Hermann’s mind thinks, not beneath the ribs, but inside of them, burrowing so far that the holes could never be filled again, not properly, not if one didn’t want to see utter destruction.)

Inside of the tablet, the code for the Rippers is a gorgeous thing, even he would have to admit it. The perfect synergy of biological code and mechanical code, of software and medicine. If downsized and used on humans, they could do amazing things.

And once, Newt had been planning on using a variation of them on humans. For medicine. For healing people. And Hermann knows him now as well as he ever did, knows the kind of person that Newt is, the reasons why he does things, and he can’t help but think—

I know why Newt would have thought of this idea in the first place. I know what inspired this.

An old quote from decades ago—Sarah Ruhl, he thinks—shivers through his brain: “The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. When I met Ana, I knew: I loved her to the point of invention.”

The origin of the Rippers is as much a love confession as Hermann offering to drift with Newt back in the day, Hermann is sure of it, and he will not let the precursors twisting that admission into a weapon pervert that meaning. He will not let them fucking win.

So Hermann goes in and he flips through the code, and despite the fact that he’s spent the last eighteen years completely and utterly devoted to math and physics—and the last decade occasionally dedicated to the place where those two fields overlapped with xenobiology, kaiju blue intersecting with rockets, with astrophysics, with what it takes to explore the universe—it’s like riding a bike again as he codes the rippers away from biological code, away from healing, and toward aided destruction of the kaiju. By the end, he's not quite sure if he's managed the latter, but he is at least definitely certain that the Rippers' function as healing aids, seamstresses, has been deactivated.

Hermann lets out a sigh of relief. “They are deactivated,” he reports, and Newt's shoulders sag.

"You are—" Newt swallows, looking up at Hermann, a certain light in his eyes. "You are a fucking miracle, dude."

"That is Dr. Gottlieb, thank you very much," Hermann responds, an automatic correction, an automatic challenge, and it makes Newt smile, but it's the sort of smile that is for more than just the tablet, for the rippers, for so much more than even this day on its own, Hermann can tell, because Hermann knows Newt, because he's always known him, loved him beyond compare.

"I am much thanked," Newt says, but his voice is a rough thing as he takes Hermann’s bruised and bloodied hand in his own, cradling Hermann's knuckles, raising it to his mouth where he kisses the fingernail wounds, smearing blood against his lips, painting his mouth crimson.

Hermann loves him for it, loves the blood, loves the iron on his tongue when he pulls Newt in and kisses him, sticky and hot and blistering.

This is what Hermann has missed for so long. The bite of teeth against lips. The press of a tongue against the seam of a mouth, licking its way between lips. The iron-hot blood that pumps through his veins, staining both of their mouths.

The swapping of spit. The heat of Newt’s mouth against his, in moments of hate, in moments of love, magnetically attached to the poles of each other’s bodies, unable to be pulled apart by man, by machine, by even themselves.

There was never anything else for Hermann. Never anyone else. No one, in the past two decades, has ever made him feel as much as Newt does.

When they are together, when Hermann tastes iron, when his mouth is slick with Newt’s want, with his own starvation, when Hermann learns what it means to be unable to satiate one’s hunger save on one other person’s flesh—

Hermann needs to worship Newt Geiszler. He needs to reward him, his hunger, his triumph, his blood.

Hermann licks his own fingers—just enough to make sure that he doesn’t go in completely dry—but when his fingers slip beneath Newt’s waistband, they find that Newt is already wet.

And god, Hermann did that. He made Newt react like that, so quickly, after all this time.

Hermann slips one finger in, familiar after all this time, and Newt’s gasp is enough to light his veins up like a live wire. 

Those sounds. That gasp. That moan, as Hermann pulls Newt forward, to the edge, to the cliffface, where Hermann knows that if he yanks just a little—hell, if he just so much as says the word jump, Newt will fall over the edge in an instant.

The want that pours through Hermann is a wave so harsh, so large, that it almost makes him sick. 

He has wanted so hard for so long that he can’t think about the ache in his thigh, in the pain slicing its way through the palm of his hand, in anything more than slotting his knee between Newt’s thighs, pressing their bodies so close that if it wasn’t for the layers between them, those damnable barriers, they would be two bodies in one flesh, blood pumping from one aorta to the next, unable to be separated.

Newt squirms as Hermann slips in a second finger, but he is unable to flee. Unable to do anything but writhe beneath the touch, to squirm, to react.

Newt’s hips buck beneath Hermann’s fingers as Hermann sucks at Newt’s neck, nibbling, biting, drawing forth hickeys, bruises, a claim, because Newt is his, they are each other’s, the ghost drift is snapping upward, wrenching itself into being, and he will carve it into both of their bones.

“You are mine, got it?” Hermann says, blood on his sharp tongue, “Not theirs.”

Hermann can feel Newt’s grin against the side of Hermann’s face. “Who knew that you were this much of a freak, Herm—” he starts, but his voice breaks into a gasp, his body shuddering, his fingers digging into Hermann's shoulders, as Hermann crooks his fingers, as Hermann paints the inside of Newt’s boxers with Newt’s own want, his own hunger.

But Newt gives as good as he gets—after Hermann sucks a hickey into the side of Newt’s neck, beneath that fucking collar where the remnants of the chain still lie, Newt yanks him up back to his own mouth and repays the favor.

Newt bites his lip, nibbling at Hermann’s mouth, drawing more blood, and Hermann loves him for it.

Mark me, he prays, make me yours as much as you are mine.

No one is ever going to get to make the mistake of separating them again, Hermann will make sure of it.

They will be a matched set, Newt’s fingers biting into his skin, Hermann pushing Newt over the cliff as Hermann’s third finger joins the other two, pressing into Newt, slipping in slick up to the knuckle, and god, the precursors can’t have let Newt have any sort of physical interaction, not even masturbation, for the last decade, because that’s enough.

Newt falls over the edge, gushing over Hermann’s fingers, teeth sinking down into Hermann’s lips, breath shuddering into his mouth.

The pain draws Hermann into the moment, sharp, unyielding, unignorable, but he can’t help but love it, because he would rather have Newt biting down on his mouth than Newt fading away once again.

Hermann will do anything and everything to keep that from happening again. From watching his world dissolve into nothingness, because Newt has left him behind, because they have been separated.

They slowly pull away, Hermann's fingers slipping out from within Newt's now sticky and slick boxers, despite the fact that letting go is the very last thing that Hermann wants.

But they need to get cleaned. To talk. To take Newt home, and finally let him rest after everything that the precursors have done.

And Newt understands that, at least somewhat, he can tell, as Newt reaches forward to massage Hermann's thigh as if it's been ten days, not ten years, since they last touched, as if this was just some spat and not a decade long separation, as if he still knows Hermann as well as the back of his hand.

Because despite the split, despite the distance, he does.

And it is only now that Hermann’s eyes burn. That his body threatens to break. That it threatens to give way, because it doesn’t know how to stand anymore, it doesn’t know how to hold him up, it doesn’t know how to hold him together.

Something rattles through his throat as Newt scoops up Hermann’s cane and hands it to him. “You ready to blow this popsicle stand?” Newt asks, a grin on his lips, and god, this is the part that Hermann missed most of all: the crooked angle of Newt’s smile. Something almost free in his expression.

(There’s a slight edge towards self-destruction, too, something self-loathing, something aching, something made of the shards of the man that Hermann once knew, but this is proof that he can help put Newt back together just as surely as he can take him apart. He has to believe that, at least.)

Hermann swallows hard, swallows down the knot in his throat, and nods.

Newt's laughter lines crinkle, in fondness, genuine delight of the sort that Hermann did not realize he saw so little of before he knew the truth about the precursors.

“Time to go home?” Newt asks, taking Hermann's hand in his, kissing it once again, the taste of blood and Newt's pleasure on Hermann's fingers tapped by his tongue.

And Hermann thinks, I’ve been waiting to hear you ask that question for a decade.

I’ve been waiting to take you home for so long.

I’ve never known a home that didn’t have you within it.

Hermann nods. "I can think of nothing better," he says, and Newt adjusts his arm so that Hermann can slide more of his arm through, a better brace for walking than just held hands, an instinct two decades deep.

It’s almost like they’re on their first date again—a disaster of a thing, after a couple of years of the most questionable rivals-with-benefits relationship that they’d had going on, undernegotiated and kinked out the fucking ass, all biting before kissing, hickeys hidden beneath collars and more time spent on their knees in the lab than should ever be wise, all because both of them knew that there was never going to be anyone who meant as much as they did to each other, but both unable to figure out how to actually use words to be vulnerable instead of biting each other's heads off.

But they’d eventually gone on that date, after they’d drifted, and Hermann, for once in his life, had thought—maybe this can last. 

Hermann had seen how Newt saw him in the drift, the beat of his heart a trembling, starving thing, the way that Newt had wanted more than he’d ever been willing to ask for, because asking would risk being wrong and Hermann’s heart was the one and only experiment that Newt refused to allow the prospect of being proven wrong on.

Hermann had been more than happy to prove Newt correct on that question. To test out every step of the scientific method in showing Newt that the hypothesis if I fall in love with Hermann Gottlieb and tell him about my feelings, then he will love me back and we can spend the rest of our lives together could be answered very much in the positive.

It should have been elementary, proving that theory correct. Never any evidence against it.

But Hermann learned the hard way, with a note on the pillow, with a hard clamping down on the other end of a ghost drift, with a scathing interview in the newspaper about the uselessness of the PPDC and Hermann’s work in a post-Breach world, an echo of their first in-person fight, all of those years ago, Hermann and Newt going after each other’s work, each other’s point for studying, that a scientific theory needed more than one test to be proven true. That an experiment needed to be replicable to be proven.

But here, now: 

A trial. The first one without an unknown variable fucking up the results.

Hermann shifts his arm back and takes Newt’s arm. It feels like accepting a second chance at a new life.

"Let's go home," Hermann says, and he doesn't know quite yet where that will be, but what he does know is that it will be with Newt.

---

Newt dips out of work early. Shao Industries’ name is going up in a blaze, nuclear fallout of the fact that kaiju took over the drone system that Liwen Shao promised would save the world, and maybe, maybe Newt regrets leaving Shao to deal with the fallout, but Hermann sure doesn’t.

Newt, as pissed off as he was, had a point. Shao was the one who watched an alien hivemind wear Newt like a sack of flesh, a puppet meant for nothing more than swanning about, grandiose and tormenting the employees and exploiting the masses in the name of capitalist gains.

And all she gave a shit about was what he did for her. What his name and brain could do for her ambitions.

The world is technically intact.

Newt Geiszler very much is not.

Hermann can let other people—Shao especially—deal with the fallout.

This time around, all he can focus on is Newt.

Right now, they need to head back to Newt’s flat and give him a place to maybe, perhaps, finally get a chance to take a breath for the first time.

They make it out of the building and there are cameras approaching, reporters demanding answers about Shao Industries' sabotage of the PPDC efforts, and Hermann's skin shrivels up at the idea of speaking to any of them, of in any way diverting from the course that they are on to get Newt away from this entire fucking mess.

But Newt directs them both to the parking garage where he hails a driver and a fancy car, the sort of thing that Newton Geiszler, ardent defender of the Boston T and all of its problems, never would have done in another lifetime, and maybe if Hermann had seen him on a regular basis, had ever actually gone to Shanghai to see what was going on, he could have seen that. He could have noticed that something was off.

Right now, though, Hermann cannot think about that, because they need to get out of this place, so the subway or public transport is not the name out of the game.

Once in the back of the car, Newt takes a deep breath, but it’s clearly a shuddered, aching thing.

Hermann reaches out and takes Newt’s hand in his and Newt squeezes right back, fingers digging into Hermann’s hand again—but this time, carefully, just enough pressure to be felt without digging in so deeply as to cause damage.

Hermann’s hand, starting to bruise, finally stopping bleeding, appreciates some of that relief at least a little bit, even if there is some part of him that thinks you could dig your teeth into me for the rest of forever and I’d thank you for it, because it would mean that you were here, with me, and that is all that matters for me from now on—

---

One drop.

Two drop.

Three drop. 

The blood falls onto the damp shore.

The ocean retreats to the breach, to the place where it might surge out again, if someone just gets close enough to the tide.

If the humans get close enough to make the mistake of drifting again, the ocean can flood through both of their minds. It can claim their very bones.

There is still one more chance to restart the whirlpool. One more chance to open the black hole.

One more chance to win the war.

Just get close enough to pull the trigger, and then—

Bullseye.

---

They don’t go to Hong Kong. Newt wouldn’t make it that far, Hermann doesn’t think. Newt needs a place to recover, to rest for the night, to have some small measure of routine after having his entire world wrenched out from under him.

So they go to his flat. They go to his flat, and the instant that they cross the threshold, Newt’s keycard getting them into a fucking penthouse—a rather gorgeous prison, it has to be said, though maybe the view was mocking, in its way.

After all, they didn’t have windows back in their lab, that beloved home of theirs. That place was all grunge and metal, barely pieced together with their lack of funding, much of their better equipment acquired through the Kaidonovskys’ connections back home or their own begging of old colleagues.

This flat, on the other hand, is all gleaming chrome, cleaned and polished within an inch of its life, ethanol-bright.

To call it spit-shined would imply some sort of human touch.

There is nothing human about the penthouse that Newt has been stuck in for years, now. Not a single touch to the place that could in any way be attributed to a man with a personality, much less Newt’s level of soul.

There is nothing on the counters. No mismatched towels, no dishes in the sink, no knitted blanket on the sofa, not a single touch that could be conveyed as anything human. This place is as empty as can possibly be said.

There are no posters, kaiju figurines, vinyls, guitars, that modge-podge collection of motley artifacts of one human’s punk-rock existence, lived in defiance of everyone who ever told him that he was wrong. No evidence of a life lived in this space.

And it is no wonder that the moment that Newt steps within the doors of the flat, he is ripping off his jacket.

Hermann takes just a second to close the door behind them, to give Newt his privacy, as Newt yanks off his blazer so fast that it catches on his shoulders as he twists his body out of it, moving like a contortionist, moving like an escaped prisoner, moving like someone trying to tear off the ropes that once imprisoned them—

Hermann can hear it, Newt’s breath is stuttering with panic as he tries to peel himself out of that fucking suit, the edges of a collar chain still hanging from his neck, because the chain wasn’t the only collar holding him in place, the only prison that he had to escape from, it’s the suit, it’s the job, it’s the penthouse, it’s every aspect of the life that the precursors built out of the pieces.

Newt eventually manages the suit, but his fingers fumble on the buttons of the waistcoat.

“Get it off,” Newt says, and it’s half growl, half-plea, all begging, a creature undone, unfurling, broken apart into pieces, each edge ripped down to the tissue and leaking blood all over the place, with no idea of how to bandage oneself off other than to make sure that the shrapnel is peeled out from under the flesh, because at least the pain will stop if the weapon is gone, right? “Get it fucking off. All of it. It’s not—it’s not mine, it’s not me, get it away from me, I can’t do it, I can’t have it, I can’t stand it—”

Newt’s hands are shaking. It’s as if he’s trying to peel something that he’s allergic to away from his skin, so that he doesn’t have the hives, so that he can stop reacting, so that he can stop being poisoned, drip, drip, drip of the precursors into his veins even when they’re gone, even when he’s fought them off, even when they should have no claim on him anymore.

But he can’t do it. He can’t do it on his own. His hands are shaking too badly. His breath is rattling inside of his chest.

And so Hermann reaches forward to help. He’s already ripped the chain from around Newt’s neck—he is more than happy to help Newt get rid of the rest of the bars on his cell.

So Hermann reaches forward to try and help Newt undo the buttons on his waistcoat, and he might be full of his own ache, his leg throbbing beneath him, threatening to give away beneath him, but he can help Newt do this. Help Newt gain some small measure of control after a decade of having it dangled in front of his face and then yanked away from him.

And it does work. They do get the waistcoat off, just as much as the blazer.

But as Newt goes to unbutton his shirt, too, to yank that off as well—

Newt slices open the side of his hand on the remnants of the collar chain and he stares at it for a long, long hard moment.

And then he smiles, this ragged thing, as blood drips onto the suit. One drop, two drop, three drop, maroon crusting itself into designer fabric, branding the suit with something that can never be erased.

“They wouldn’t let me bleed,” Newt says, and he shouldn’t be smiling, no one else would be smiling, he looks more ghost than person, and yet—

And yet. It is a smirk of triumph, because he is here, and it is something that Hermann understands, because he has been an aching hollow himself for the past decade, the ruined wreckage of a structure strewn about by a typhoon, and he has been wanting and wanting and wanting something he knew that he couldn’t have—

And now, they can stain the kaiju sea with their own blood together. 

The rope is gone from the paws. The muzzle has been ripped off.

It took matted fur and hair with it, laying open the raw skin beneath, revealing the places where the fleas were having their feast—

But at least the dog is free. At least he can run and fight and bite as much as he wants.

Newt chucks the suit jacket across the dining room table, right on top of the polished hardwood, giving no care as to the bloodstain or the mess that he is creating.

And good.

Fucking good.

Let him stain this flat with the evidence of his life, the life that the precursors cannot take from him anymore. Let him be someone instead of a something.

Let him live.

Newt hurls the waistcoat against the windows as well, the brocade smacking against the giant floor-to-wall windows of this penthouse, a fucking mockery of the prison that he’s been stuck in for so long, the entire city beneath him but him unable to touch it.

His breathing is ragged by the time that he's done, but at least the offending clothing has met its proper fate.

But then Newt's head snaps up. “We need to—" He swallows. Hard. “Alice.”

Hermann’s rage spikes. “Is she here?” Hermann demands, fury wicking through his veins, burning hotter than a lightning strike, threatening to fry open the world like a nuclear bomb going off—

But Newt nods and Hermann processes that. Not a girlfriend, not a live-in lover, but a hivemind. Precursors.

How would she be here? Would the connection be here?

How had the connection been strengthened over the past decade? How did it not wither away on the vine?

What did the precursors use to burrow their way into Newt’s head and hold him so tightly hostage that he could not choose his own clothes or stop them from sticking a laser in his eyes or ending the entire world?

Newt nods, one jerky answers, but then iron enters Newt’s spine, the line of his shoulders, as he says, “But I think it’s about time I kick her out. The lease is fucking up.”

Newt rolls up his sleeves, and okay, nice to know that that still sends the same reaction through Hermann’s veins that it has for all of these years, lighting him up like a live wire, just begging Newt to touch him with those fingers, so skilled with the scalpel and the guitar pick alike, the fingers that Hermann remembers turning Hermann into an instrument, lighting up his world by the most skilled of strokes between his thighs—

A feeling that doesn’t abate when Newt picks up the fire poker from the fireplace, a light in his eyes that is far closer to feral than to human.

And yet, there is something calculated within his bones as he pushes open the door to the bedroom and Hermann takes in the neon green light coating the room like toxic sludge, the smell of ammonia making the room uninhabitable to anyone with working olfactory receptors.

There is lipstick, smearing at the edge of the glass—at least, Hermann hopes that it is lipstick and not blood, because there is so much red smeared across the green that he thinks he might hurl if that’s the case.

But he only gets to see it for a moment before—

“I don’t give a shit what you’re telling me to do,” Newt rasps, and there is more blood dripping from his nose, one drop, two drop, three drop, onto the carpet, each drop staining the sea.

He steps forward, each step heavier than an anvil, but he’s still pushing. He’s pushing, despite the drip, drip, drip, despite the press of his own ache against the inside of his skin, despite the sure screaming of the precursors in his head, because he is a dog, he is a wounded thing, and he refuses to let the monster that called itself his owner get the last laugh.

Newt is going to bite back. He is going to watch the precursors die on their gilded, neon throne.

And Hermann isn’t going to stop him.

Newt’s arm rips backward like a batter stepping up to base, the poker twirling in his hand, and he slams the poker forward.

The glass cracks, fracturing, fractals shattering outward—

But it doesn’t break. It holds, just enough, because the poker didn’t slam deep enough, because tempered glass forms more of a membrane than it should, because osmosis can only allow water to flow through a permeable membrane—

But Newt doesn’t wait for the liquid inside to press against the new weaknesses in the thick glass, to let pressure slowly do to the tank what rivers have done to shores over the eons and epochs.

No; he draws his arm back and flings it forward again, and with another slam, the glass finally breaks.

The glass shatters, and everything within floods out, crashing to the ground, drowning the floor, ammonia and tentacles and gray-green matter, a stain of existence, an aberration.

A tentacle reaches up, weak, pathetic, too squishy to have been the noose around Newt’s neck for so long, and yet—

Here it is, trying to strangle him again, and Hermann’s arm rises, because he will not let it do so—

But before Hermann gets the chance to slam his cane down on top of fuckin Alice, Newt saves himself. He saves himself, slamming down the poker again, ripping, tearing, shredding the brain apart by his teeth, by his claws, by the edge of the fire poker, all that iron, all that steel.

The brain is an unrecognizable pile of neon green mush and gunk by the end, the noxious smell of ammonia and kaiju blue an unfathomably terrible stench blanketing the room, the only parts of the brain even remotely resembling its past self the tentacles that it once used to strangle its victim whole, body, mind, and soul.

(Boneworms, Hermann’s brain thinks. When the whale falls, when the body decays and the insides need to be opened up, the worms shall have their feast.)

Newt’s fingers fall open, suddenly slack. The fire poker clatters to the ground, landing half on top of some of the shattered glass.

And Newt, breath hitching inside of his chest, a sob catching on the edge of his teeth, collapses, panting, wounded, next to all the wreckage, falling like a puppet with its strings cut—

Except for the fact that the fall is clearly guided, because there is a chair, next to the tank, and yet Newt doesn’t fall into it.

Newt doesn’t fall into it, because there is a PONS unit attached to it, the indent of a body within the embrace of the chair itself, the only furniture in the bedroom that seems to have had any use, especially given the food wrappers scattered around it, evidence of some of the only eating in the entire flat. The gleaming, completely clean, completely empty kitchen sink and countertops and the like certainly spoke to that.

The precursors likely only fed Newt enough to keep him alive, to keep him going—explaining the way that Newt’s cheeks and body felt earlier, skinnier, leaner, quite the change for a man that never cared about such things.

Newt has always been terrible at making his bed. He has always forgotten it in the mornings, when his brain could only remember the system of getting dressed and running a comb through his hair and barely remembering to grab something to eat before heading to the lab, where his true priorities lied.

It was a point of contention between them. Hermann had to get rather good at bribing Newt with ramen and debate and eventually, handjobs and the like, threatening to take away orgasms if he didn’t remember to take his medicine so that he could focus and not forget things.

And now, the sheets on the bed are perfectly intact. A body has never even slept in them. Why would it?

The human didn’t need to sleep comfortably. The body was nothing more than a prison.

Newt doesn’t collapse into the chair. He doesn’t sit on the perfect, perfect bed.

He collapses to the ground, limp as a ragdoll, all those beautiful, glittering, glass shards so close to his hands, the fire poker clattering against the floor next to him.

Newt’s breathing is heavy, bright, deafening as it bangs against the walls of the flat..

His knees pull up just slightly against his chest, his tattoos bright beneath the rolled-up sleeves, the lack of layers of a three-piece suit, and for a moment, at the end of the path of destruction, he looks more like the Newt Geiszler that Hermann spent five years working and arguing alongside in a grungey, underfunded lab than he spent twice as long pining and grieving the distance of.

And then Newt is laughing, this raw, jagged thing full of shrapnel, as he mutters, half to himself, “They’re gone. She’s fucking gone. Nuclear fucking fallout.” His smile is sharper than a tungsten nanoneedle, narrowing down to split a fucking atom and blast the anteverse out of existence, taking the precursors down with it.

I don’t give a shit what you’re telling me to do.

Alice must have been the lynchpin for their influence on him. And destroying the breaches, destroying her—

He is smiling, because the world ended but it didn’t end him, because his body is his own, and it is the first battle he has won in a decade.

And sure, he is staring out at the mess, half-catatonic, but he is still here. Gone.

Nuclear fucking fallout.

Hermann kneels down next to him. He will do anything for Newt, to make sure that he takes care of himself, that he is taken care of.

But he knows Newt, and knows that asking Newt to take care of himself won't snap him out of this, no more than ragging on Newt for not making his bed would adjust that habit.

Hermann needs to go about this in another way.

So Hermann says, "I do think that having all this blood and grime drying upon our skin is going to get somewhat irritating soon."

Newt swallows. Hermann doesn't know if he's looking at him, if the double blow of fighting against the precursors twice, once to save the world, once to destroy Alice, has done too much damage. “There’s a shower in the bathroom. Really nice one, too—has a stool inside of it, even. A ledge built into it for sitting. They didn't get it on purpose, just wanted the penthouse for the looks, for the clout, and it already had it, but—it's still there."

“I do not know if I can get up right now,” Hermann answers truthfully, because he trusts Newt, trust him more than anyone else, despite everything, because of everything.

The Newt that left for Shanghai a decade ago, Hermann believed the lies of, because he believed Newt capable of moving on from him, because some part of Hermann was still the same boy that his father had no problem tossing to the side the moment that he wasn't doing what he was supposed to, but now that he has seen Newt fight a fucking alien hivemind for him, seen Newt dig his fingernails in so that he could stay, so that they could remain one person in two bodies—

Hermann trusts him. He trusts him because he knows that Newt could never leave him. That Newt would never use a weakness against Hermann.

Because he could have, during that battle. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to kick Hermann in the knee in order to incapacitate him so that Newt might have choked him, but he didn’t. He dug in, he bit down, and he beat the precursors—twice.

And so, now, Hermann knows that mentioning his own aches will provoke Newt into helping him and maybe, in the process, will give Hermann the opportunity for him to help Newt cleanse his own sorrows and aches and grime.

Because it is this comment of Hermann's, finally, that wrenches Newt to his feet, and Hermann can’t even feel regret over blatantly manipulating Newt into standing, because he wants Newt away from possibly slicing himself open on the glass.

And the trick to understanding Newton Geiszler is knowing that he is a biologist to his core.

He has studied several other fields, even carrying a doctorate in astrophysics to match Hermann’s own degree in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, but at the end of the day, he is a biologist in the most traditional sense. He studies life, because he is the most alive person that Hermann has ever met. The very definition of the pound of blood in the veins, the shudder of breath in the lungs, the drag of nails across skin, the river-rush of words across the tongue.

And seeing him so still among the glass—

That’s not Newton Geiszler. Geiszler is beauty in movement, the closest thing to perpetual motion that Hermann has ever met. He is always moving, always speaking, always fidgeting, always making the very air around him vibrate its atoms even faster, Hermann is sure. He certainly has a habit of making people move even faster around him, whether that be to stop him or respond to him or whatever the answer to him might be.

So it is no surprise when Newt springs to his feet to help, to help Hermann stand, to take him to the shower where they can both finally wash this day and the remnants of the precursors away.

---

The host screams.

The hivemind screams, burning itself out in a flash of nuclear light, iron burning, alkali hitting the surface of the water and exploding upon contact.

There is no ocean left to reach the shore. No tides to come in and out.

An asteroid took out the dinosaurs, leaving nothing but a crater in its place.

The ocean has been sucked dry, nothing but a dry hollow in its place.

One drop, two drop, three drop—

No drops.

---

Newt grabs pajamas for Hermann to change into—the single set in the flat, as far as Hermann can see.

From what Hermann can tell, the pajamas were bought for appearances and nothing else. They seem as crisp at the seams as they would have been when bought from the store.

And it's not as if the precursors were likely letting Newt sleep in his boxers, as he prefers to how hot he can run at night when sharing a bed with someone else.

Ten years of not even getting the dignity of comfort in sleep, chained to that chair, forced to sleep in suits when he wasn’t drifting—

Hermann has yet another reason on top of the millions he already did to hate the precursors, but he knows that the productive way to use that is to channel that into helping Newt. Into making sure that he has as many pajamas and ripped jeans and worn-in combat boots to wear as he wants for the rest of his life, because that’s what makes Newt comfortable.

(At least he still has Newt’s patched leather jacket sitting in the back of his closet after all these years to give him to wear as he wishes. That’s something.)

They both strip down and step into the shower together, and Hermann's heart strikes flint in his chest when he sees the slight concave of Newt's stomach beneath his tattoos. He is going to do whatever it takes to make sure that Newt eats well, that he eats whatever he wishes, that he gets to feel human in every way that matters.

Hermann's leg is starting to give way, so he sits down on the shower ledge, but he takes it upon him to grab the soap and get to work helping Newt relax, cleaning the grime out of hair and off of limbs, scrubbing as gently but firmly as he can, suds between his fingers. 

Newt relaxes beneath Hermann’s touch, eyelids fluttering shut, shoulders slumping as the weight of Atlas’ sky finally slips off of them, as the water pours down on him, sluicing over the vibrant lines of tattoos that have lasted a decade and a half, as Hermann washes away the hair gel and wipes away the blood from under Newt’s nose, from his mouth, because he can always nibble Newt’s mouth later, can always make red rise in his lips and cheeks, but he wants the evidence of the precursors gone. He wants Newt to not have to feel the grime and stain against his skin, but rather to know that he is loved. Adored. Every inch of his skin cherished—

“It’s been so lonely without you,” Newt admits, confesses, this brutal ache, this wretched admission, barely able to be heard beneath the thrum of the water falling down on them.

Despite the humidity of the shower, the back of Hermann’s throat is sandpaper. He doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to ever make it moist again. He doesn’t know if it’s even possible.

But still, he promises, because it’s all he can do: “I’m not going to leave you again. You hear that? That’s a vow, Newton Geiszler.”

Newt’s eyes snap open, and they are bloodshot, they are wild, they are feral, wounded things. “Say that again.”

“I’m not going to leave you—"

“My name,” Newt says, reaching out to dig his fingernails into Hermann’s skin once again, because once upon a time, they were one person, they were one mind, one set of arteries flowing into each other, one set of bones growing spurs into each other’s beings, and they’ve never stopped being the pebble in each other’s shoes, the shard of porcelain poking into each other’s skin, all that blood, all that bone, because they understand each other's aches as no one else ever could. “They only let me call myself Dr. Geiszler for a fucking decade. All that smarmy bullshit, like some posh fucking asshole. That’s what my mother called me, because that’s all she wanted from me. Call me by my fucking name.”

It could cut like a knife, the dig at calling himself a doctor like some posh fucking asshole, could be a dig at Hermann himself, but Hermann Gottlieb knows a thing or two about not wanting to refer to yourself as your terrible parent refers to you. He knows far too much about that.

“Newt,” Hermann says, “My Newton. My favorite Isaac—"

Newt leans forward and yanks him into a kiss, their teeth clacking against each other, and the kiss is slippery and wet and not, in any technical sense, good—

But Newt kisses like a hurricane. He tastes like the end of the world, consuming, aching, devouring, everything that wasted and rotted away for so long.

It would be so easy to repeat what they did in that closet here, in the water, with things already slippery, and Hermann is tempted to do just that, water and soap as lubricant, to lose himself in the dizzying drag of Newt’s mouth, the sort of tabula rasa that makes a man feel wiped clean, for just one moment—

But rather, Newt eventually pulls back so that they can both breathe, and reaches out to grab the soap. "Now it is my turn to help you clean and relax," Newt says, eyes bright, and this is just as great an experience, Hermann has to think; the intimacy of getting to stand beneath the warm water and trust the other to take care of you, to clean you, to see your naked body and treat it as gently as you would your own.

---

After they finish showering, Hermann stops to change into the pajamas that Newt had given him, softer than anything else that the precursors had let Newt wear, all of those structured suits with heavy, stiff fabrics—the exact opposite of what Newt preferred to wear.

It's not that much of a surprise that Newt doesn't immediately put on clothes. That when Newt steps out of the shower, he pads across the room, past the glass on the ground, wearing nothing more than a towel.

It leaves every inch of his damp skin on display. There are still tattoos, vibrant across his skin, scars already beginning to form, thin white lines across the colorful creations, but the tattoos in the first place coincided with his top scars, the lines of Ceramander and Huo Da stretched across pectorals and shoulder blades.

Newt stares out at the view of Shanghai, the glittering skyline, the light pollution preventing him from seeing any of the stars, and he breathes. He just breathes.

To many, it would be gorgeous. To many, it shines brighter than the stars, all of those lights, all of that neon and orange and chrome.

But all Hermann can think about is kaiju blue burning its way through the atmosphere, ripping its way through people's lungs, the neon green of Alice’s tank, the chrome of the chain collar around Newt’s neck, a shining noose that kept him imprisoned.

As Hermann picks up his cane, as he shuffles out to join Newt, Newt speaks. “They rewarded me, sometimes, by letting me look out at the world that they were one day going to destroy,” Newt says, “It was the nicest that they ever were, giving me just a few minutes off of the constant shredding open of my brain to take a look at the view—but I could never be truly happy looking out at the view, and they knew it, because you were across the country. Because as beautiful as Shanghai is as a city, I would never be happy anywhere I couldn’t be with you." Newt swallows. "It was so lonely, here.” He lets out a small, blistering laugh. “Just me and the voices in my head, dying slow with the hottest view in China outside of my window, wishing nothing more to be in that cramped Shatterdome with you, a burnt bagel crammed down my throat." He looks to Hermann. “They promised to stay away from you, but you were there, in Shanghai, and they hated you so much—" Newt grins, this jagged thing. “And they were right to.”

"Because I love you?" Hermann says, simple and easy as anything, "And that was enough of a problem?"

Newt's expression finally goes soft. Open. Almost boyish, younger than the years that were stolen from him. Unfurling in the sort of way that Hermann has ached for for years. "Yeah," Newt says, and there is something fragile yet impossibly hopeful in his voice. "Because you love me. And I- I've always loved you."

Hermann smiles, this small, tucked away thing, because it's impossible not to smile after a decade of ache and agonizing over wondering when the truth is laid out so plain and simple between them.

Newt steps back from the window, turning fully to Hermann. “Wanna order some food? Might as well burn through Shao’s credit cards before I quit tomorrow.”

Hermann cannot help the giddiness that rises in his chest. “You’re quitting?” he asks, despite the fact that he knew that this was going to happen, that even if Newt had enjoyed his work here, he wouldn’t wish to remain for the fact that the reminder of the precursors stains every single aspect of the job at hand.

Newt rolls his eyes. “Of course I am. I would never fucking be there if it weren’t for them yanking at mind. And Shao—I know I snuck some shit behind her, of course the precursors Trojan-horsed the end of the world into her systems, but I was there, being a douche, tormenting the employees, being a pompous asshole, swanning about like I owned the place, and no one said a word about it all because having a rockstar’s name attached to place meant that they were willing to let said rockstar get away with fucking murder—" He swallows, hard, gaze flicking out to skyline, to the harbor, to the memories of the murders that the precursors carried out using his hands, his mind, his mouth, and Hermann has to step forward to take Newt’s hand in his own and squeeze because that was not Newt’s fault, Hermann needs him to know that.

But then Newt looks back to Hermann, a small smile rising to his lips. “And I’m fucking done with that place. I want to be back in that stupid lab with you—even if you redecorated when I was gone.”

Hermann swallows. “Not that much. I am sure you saw the kaiju figurines in that lab. A bit of you lodged itself beneath my ribs before you left—I have long known that you are to blame for the mess.”

“I haven’t worked with you in a decade,” Newt protests, but there is something fond and delighted rising in his eyes, and Hermann understands it, understands the fact that there is something reassuring to know that some small part of you beat out a pulse beneath the heart of the person you love most even when you were screaming so loud that no one could hear you.

“Something that shall be readily fixed, I assume?” Hermann asks.

“If you think that I’m going literally anywhere but where you are for the rest of our lives,” Newt says, “Then maybe you are the one with the brain damage.”

Newt says the words flippantly, casually, nothing more than a joke, but Hermann needs him to know the truth—

Hermann’s free hand rises to the back of Newt’s neck, fingers curling into the base of his hair, soft without that fucking hair gel, and leans forward to kiss Newt's forehead.

“Whatever those things did to your brain,” Hermann says, “I need you to know that it is still the most beautiful one in the world to me. And I will be spending the rest of our lives with that beautiful brain."

Newt leans into the touch. He has been starving for it as long as Hermann has, but it's alright; Hermann is more than ready to provide an answer to his craving. "And there's just one more thing to do before we do so." Newt grins. "Wanna burn the suits?"

---

Before the food arrives, Newt puts on boxers but not much else. He doesn't seem to want any reminders of the structure of suits against his skin, and Hermann doesn't blame him.

Nor does Hermann blame Newt when he burns up the suit. He burns it up, all the blood, all the silk threads, all that high threadcount and perfect seams and embroidery and those fucking logos.

He burns up not just the one suit, but multiple ones throughout the flat, and he doesn’t give a shit that shoving them one at a time into the fireplace makes the place start to smell like burnt silk.

What Newt does is he eats the order of dumplings—chicken, not pork— and watches the suits burn and char—proof that the precursors weren’t swindled by companies that mixed in synthetic fabrics, which would melt from all that plastic, and it's a small thing to think about, in the grand scheme of watching the debris of a life that was never his burn up, but Newt rambles about it as he watches, commenting on the fact that for all of the toxins that burned through his body for so long, this is one that the precursors didn’t add to his system, and Hermann listens. Of course he listens as Newt stays there, for hours, until his knees give out, until his knees pass the point of ache into numbness, and he stumbles upward.

Hermann, who has been sitting on the sofa, a witness, because Newt deserves to be witnessed, deserves someone to see him in every state, to have someone see him burning up the parts of him that were warped for so long, stands to catch Newt, to help him toward the bed.

And they actually use the bed. Not the chair, still sitting surrounded by glass that they’ll clean up tomorrow, the blood-and-ammonia-stained remnants of another life, but the bed, which for all its lack of use and clear purpose as nothing more than a prop in case of a visitor looking through the glass panels, is still a queen-sized bed with sheets of a higher thread-count than Hermann has ever experienced in his life.

But the softness and quality of the sheets is not Hermann's priority. His priority is the fact that Newt gets up, and he comes to bed, and in some ways, it was a bit of waste to take a shower, considering how much he currently smells of smoke, but from the way that his body is loose, with exhaustion, with satisfaction, Hermann can't bring himself to give a shit about the scent.

Newt ends the night curled up in Hermann’s arms, head nestled in the crook of Hermann’s shoulder and neck, limbs starfished across Hermann, near-bare body still a perpetual oven against Hermann’s, Hermann’s own personal heating pad, if that heating pad instinctively knew the perfect way to curl around his body without aggravating his bad leg.

And Newt doesn’t feel the same. His body isn’t the same. It is all muscle and sinew, made for exercise and not cuddling, lighter in many parts and yet heavier in others, from the muscle that the precursors seem to have put on.

Hermann is fucking determined to give Newt a chance to eat, to feast, to soften, to know that he does not need to follow a single dietary rule for the rest of his life and he will still be just as loved, but that's for tomorrow.

That's for tomorrow, where he'll realize that he’ll have held on so tight to Hermann that he left bruises, but that Hermann did the same to him, marked him up in the sort of way that led them both to feeling loose and relaxed for the first time in a decade.

And this is the sort of breaking, sort of broken blood vessels that he can get behind.

For now, though, his head is still the same weight against Hermann’s stomach, and Hermann is careful not to jostle Newt as he plugs in his phone just in time to see the news chime through, an update to the head of K-Science, who had been mostly MIA during the fight: the jaegers intercepted the one kaiju that got through outside of Tokyo. The deaths were as minimal as could be expected. One cadet was injured, likely paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life, but he did survive.

He survived, and if Hermann could live a long life with his own disabilities, then so can this kid—

Newt snuggles in close, his breath hot against Hermann’s chest, even through his borrowed shirt, and the fate of the PPDC has never been further away from Hermann’s priorities.

Hermann turns off his phone, and he just breathes in Newt's hair, soft and full of smoke and here, in his arms, unable to be touched by the Precursors again.

---

So, Dr. Newton Geiszler quits Shao Industries the next day, in a blaze of glory—

Or, rather, he shows up to Liwen Shao’s office after waking up that morning in the bed he hasn’t gotten to sleep in for ten years to Hermann Gottlieb’s long-craved kisses, to the soft nibble of Hermann’s teeth against his mouth, to the way that it felt to finally, after ten years, to be able to open his eyes to the golden glow of the sunrise and not have to dwell in the fact that he’d rather wake up to a thousand mornings of the deep red glow of an alarm clock against Hermann’s hatchet features than another golden morning watching the beauty of the Shanghai skyline, a thousand screaming precursors dragging him out of bed.

But here, this morning, he got to wake up to the sight of gold falling across Hermann’s face, illuminating every laughter line and gray hair and proof that Hermann Gottlieb was alive and here in Shanghai and his, a hickey on his neck to prove that Newt left just as much of a mark on him last night as Hermann did him.

That Newt was free, because all he could here within his own head was the sound of his own voice and the whisper of some of Hermann’s favorite jazz standards through the remnants of the ghost drift, which is slowly, slowly recovering itself between them, one slow thread at a time.

(Yes, Hermann Gottlieb loves jazz music. Everyone else was shocked by that, by the fact that Hermann loves improvisation, loves several musicians at the height of their field combining their talent together in unexpected ways, but Newt was never shocked by that fact because, well, Hermann loves him, doesn’t he? For as much as he likes to posit himself the punk rockstar, Newton Geiszler has always been the definition of jazz, of movement, of improvisation, constantly experimenting, constantly trying new things.

And it makes sense in the reverse, really—if one of them is punk, it is Hermann, who told off his father for the Wall of Life, disowning Lars before he could disown him, who stood up to an entire alien race for the sake of grabbing his boyfriend back and told them to eat shit, and Newt loves Hermann as much as he loves his favorite genre.)

Before Newt left the apartment, he left out painkillers for Hermann—something that the precursors kept around not for the sake of Newt, but because they learned the hard way that the human body would not respond well if you tried to force it past the limits of human pain tolerance—and a note (Because Newt could write what he wanted, now, could write not in the perfect print that the precursors insisted on him having, but in his own doctorate-earned chickenscratch).

Newt, though not one for the most rom-com of offerings, has always been far more romantic than people give him credit for.

But where he feels romantic feelings with a capitol R for Hermann (yes, he knows a thing or two about Romanticism, his fifth doctorate was in Art History because he’d set down a bet with Tendo about getting a Fine Arts degree and he couldn't help himself but rise to any challenge, but he’d refused to get one in music as a final fuck you to his mother) and is finally getting to express them, he strides into Shao's office to find her dealing with a PR nightmare that he could help to resolve if she wanted, sure, why not, but she watched him swan about wrecking the place, wrecking himself, for a fucking decade, and he wants to blow this popsicle stand to kingdom come.

Newt’s memories of being beneath the weight of the precursors are nasty, gritty things, swallowing up by the grain of a film canister, hard to pick apart the specifics of beneath lines of neon green code and the laser skimming his eyes crystal clear and the sink of tendrils into his mind and the way that he’d bit down on the taste of blood and iron more often than not even if it meant the precursors chasing his throat with alcohol, running ethanol-levels of alcohol over the vomit-etched inside of his throat.

Newt became their pet. Their dog. More than just a puppet; an obedient creature, kneeling at their feet, biting down on his own mouth, his own voice, because he didn’t know the difference between his own words being strangled away and choosing to choke them out himself, because he would do it, if it meant that he was keeping them away from Hermann, and the world could blow itself to gehenna, everything being devoured beneath the starving, consumptive maw of the precursors if it meant that Hermann Gottlieb could be safe.

What Newt does remember is the way that when he saw Hermann on the tarmac outside of the Shatterdome, his entire world narrowed down to those piercing eyes, that blistering smile, and he knew it would be his downfall, just as it was all of those years ago.

He just hadn’t realized that it would be the precursors’, too, until he was there, behind the dashboard in Shao Industries, and Hermann saw what he was, what he’d become, and he refused to cower. Refused to do anything but bite and fight back.

Hermann wanted a fight? He wanted numbers and physics?

Newt would summon up the very building blocks of the universe. 

In that moment, he split himself open, down to the very atom, and let himself be devoured not by the precursors, but by the monster that was concealed within. By the nucleus. By the wall of light and heat and impossible radiation.

It was Hermann or nothing. And so Newt I am become Death-ed himself, gone fucking atomic, willing to burn himself up in a fucking instant if the alternative was living in a world without Hermann Gottlieb.

And it had worked. 

Newt had woken up this morning, and he’d gotten up, and he’d sliced his socked foot just slightly on the glass on the ground, but before he could even yell in pain Herman was already up, the cut slicing through the ghost drift.

Hermann had helped clean him up, bandaging up the foot just as much as he bandaged up their hands, and they matched, in some small way, their bandaged hands, their scars, the bits of themselves lodged beneath each other’s ribs thanks to the drift.

“You can go to work,” Hermann had said, “Quit that fucking job. Then come home, and I’ll have the glass cleaned up, and we can leave this place."

Newt had argued, of course—he should have to clean up the mess that he made, not leaving it all for Hermann to deal with—but Hermann had shaken his head. "Let me do this for you, Newton."

And Newt had listened, because he’s good at listening, now, because he knows when to fight and when to not, and he's so tired of fighting, has been for so long, and to have someone take care of him was a foreign thing, but he can learn to accept it, he thinks, if he tries, if Hermann is the one using his chosen name to do it.

So he strides into Shao Industries, an hour late to work, as opposed to the precursors, which always got him to the door ten minutes before his shift was set to begin, swanning in the door with a coffee and an insult to an intern ready to be slung about as if he owned the place.

Today, Newt doesn't have the sort of easy arrogance that the precursors played up since they were willing to treat interns with as much humanity as CEOs do. His hands are trembling. 

The receptionist doesn’t even recognize Newt in his wrinkled button up and a pair of combat boots he’d picked up at a thrift store on the way over here and his cracked glasses (he doesn’t need his glasses to see anymore, and it doesn’t quite feel the same, to wear glasses that aren’t prescription, but there’s still the frames that he left behind) and Hermann’s long cardigan slung over his shoulders, not Newt’s style, but a hug, of sorts, far more his than the suits that the precursors made him wear ever were, the smell of chalk dust and Hermann's stubborn old-man detergent settling into his nostrils in a sense of home like Alice's ammonia never did.

When he gets home to Hong Kong, to Hermann’s room at the Shatterdome, he knows that he’ll find a leather jacket with a stitch in the shoulder because Hermann kept it all, all of these years, even when Newt disappeared on him, because he knew that the two of them were going to find their way back together one way or another, even if he didn’t know how.

(Because he will go home to Hong Kong. There is nothing in Shanghai for him. Not anymore.)

It would be so easy to let love and shame stay rooted within each other as they have for the past decade, but Hermann's devotion burns so bright through it all that it's impossible, and that's what Newt has to keep in his mind as he walks through Shao Industries. He might not have the precursors in his head, able to navigate this place and its social hierarchy in the sort of way that Newt never could, but he is going home to Hermann because Hermann cared enough to help Newt fight, and that's all that matters.

The receptionist won’t even let Newt in at first until Newt flashes his security badge—something he hasn’t worn in years, because his presence was enough to fill a room, but was smart enough to grab this morning, just in case—and her eyes go wide.

Newt knows he looks insane, but he doesn't care. “I’ve got a meeting with Liwen,” he says, trying to summon up some measure of the confidence, the recklessness, he used to wear like a second skin.

Because he doesn’t have an appointment. Of course he doesn’t.

And Liwen will, of course, be pissed about that.

But to be perfectly frank, well, Newt doesn’t give a single shit anymore.

There is a hickey beneath his collar instead of a chain around his neck. There is a chance to be whatever he wants, to say whatever he wants. And he is going to take that.

---

Newt barges into Liwen’s office where she is currently in the middle of some large conference with several men in suits, but Newt can’t bring himself to give a shit about any of the mess that she is having to deal with.

He did his job. The world has stopped ending.

He doesn’t owe this company fucking anything else. Never has, never will.

Liwen’s eyes go wide when she sees him. “What the hell are you wearing, Dr. Geiszler?” she demands in Mandarin, and then adds: "You were supposed to be on leave, right now, I shall have you escorted from the premises—"

And he knows that he’s not dressed up to dress code in any way, but to be completely honest, the Shatterdome itself showed that it doesn’t really matter what you’re wearing when you’re saving the world, that aesthetics don’t matter as much as taking care of the problem at hand.

And if this was good enough for saving the world the first time around—though Newt does really miss his leather jacket, and he can’t wait to get his fingers on it again—then it is definitely good enough to save the world this time around.

And Liwen Shao and her gleaming company with all its hypercapitalist, exploitative expectations of good pr and aesthetics, can get fucked.

“You can keep your fucking leave," Newt says, "I’m giving my two weeks right now and you can fucking shove your fascist, hypercapitalist bullshit where the sun don't shine—

But wait a minute. Some petty part of him wants to make his leaving hurt for this company. For this place that took so many years from him, so many parts of his life and heart and soul.

Yes, far more of the problem was the precursors, but so much of it was the sort of blind eye that the board turned to the exploitation that was needed to achieve their ends.

And more than just revenge—he wants to take that money away from the company and reinvest it into charities where he just might be able to undo some small part of the damage that he did. Depollution of kaiju blue in the seas, reconstruction efforts around the Shatterdomes, all of the people that the kaiju the precursors unleashed could have killed.

"Actually, no, fuck that—I wanna cash in my leave. Is that something I’m allowed to do? Fuck it, I put in over nine years at this company, I’m sure that I’m entitled to some sort of severance when I go—"

“We are in the middle of the biggest crisis in the entire history of this company’s history and you want to quit?" Liwen demands.

“And I can make that far worse if you want,” Newt says, smiling beatifically at her. “I know all the bullshit that your company overlooked in favor of making Big Number Go Bigger. Mixing j-tech with hypercapitalist exploitative bullshit, all the rest—"

Liwen’s nostrils flare, and for a moment, he almost feels sorry for her. She might be an asshole, but she didn’t sign up to have an alien hivemind latch itself onto her company and try to end the world.

But then again, she did create the sort of company environment where plenty of smaller-scale human-rights violations were overlooked in favor of the bottom line, so eh. Fuck it, especially when she says, “You are fired, Dr. Geiszler, and I should have done it long ago, for all of your insubordination and disrespect for the company and myself, and most importantly, for the fact that you are possibly the most annoying person that I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with—"

Newt grins. “Sounds perfect to me. Send me whatever money’s in my contract to the Hong Kong Shatterdome. I’m moving in with the boyfriend.”

He doesn’t know the actual title that he and Hermann are going to use from now on, what they are together, and boyfriend likely doesn’t cover everything that they are together, but it’s the term that he knows will piss off the precursors and Lars Gottlieb and likely Liwen Shao.

And that’s all that matters to him.

---

Newt steps out of Shao Industries, absolutely jobless, no idea if the Precursors thought to save any money for the future or if they just wasted every cent on the penthouse and the wardrobe and all the like.

But Newt can’t quite bring himself to worry about that. 

Because even if he’s only got five dollars in his pocket, all of his designer wardrobe incinerated, he has five dollars and Hermann Gottlieb, and that’s what he had in the best parts of his life. That’s all that matters.

Newt has himself, has his freedom, has Hermann, and that’s all a man could ever ask for when looking to restart his life.

It starts to rain. To sprinkle.

The humidity in Shanghai is always strong, thick and heavy and muggy, and Newt won’t miss that that much—

But Newt can’t help but smile right now as he looks up into the sky as the rain begins to fall against skin that can finally react. Skin that can finally feel.

There is no gel in his hair. No suit that he has to worry about ruining. No fucking voices in his head thinking about making a good impression.

Fuck a good impression. The only person that matters is Hermann Gottlieb, and Newt already knows what Hermann thinks about him. He knows that Hermann loves him, wants him, wants nothing more than him for the rest of their lives, and that the same holds true for Newt about Hermann.

Rather, Newt can hold up a hand to the sky and feel it.

One drop.

Two drop.

Three drop.

It splatters across his glasses, obscuring his vision.

For a moment, he cannot see. 

And yet he grins, grins through the healing cut on his lip, on his hands, on his foot, through the blood, through the bone, through every single scar that the precursors have left on him.

He must look like he’s losing his mind to the people around him as he spins around, as he lets the water fall down upon him and his glasses, no umbrella, no jacket beyond Hermann's cardigan—which he will get cleaned, he's not a dick, but still—no worries about smog or work or anything related to the chrone-shined company building behind him.

But as he breathes in the air through lungs that are his own, no one else’s, no one else’s to demand of him, to take from him, to steal from him, he can't bring himself to give a single shit about what anyone around him thinks.

It’s impossible to hit true tabula rasa. It’s impossible to entirely wipe clean a slate that has been carved into so many times over the years. He will forever wear the faces of his prison wardens, his commanders, his monsters, on his arms.

But he will have the chance to carve his own shapes into his own body. To gain laughter lines and gray hairs, to prove to himself that the monsters are nothing more than scars, that he can still be his own person after so long being the hivemind's dog.

To let the water flow over him. To wash away the past and allow a place for new things to grow.

The mega-kaiju never happened. The Rippers have been destroyed. The Breaches are closed. Alice is dead and gone, deader than a fucking doorknob.

No one else other than Hermann will ever have to know how close Newt came to ending the world. No one else has to know the role that he played in everything.

There is nothing stopping Newt from doing this. From starting again.

From deciding where he’s going to go next.

But the answer to that question is rather expected, at the end of the day. It wouldn’t even take a theoretical physicist to predict.

Because Newt goes home. He goes home, to Hermann, to the idea of reworking the Rippers for human skin, smaller, better, healing instead of destroying, allowing for medicine, allowing for healing. He goes to Hong Kong, eventually, goes back to the PPDC, gets to see Mako in the hospital, gets to work through his aches and his dreams with Hermann.

But for right now, he goes home to the flat, where he finds that Hermann has woken up and cleaned the glass up off of the floor, and there isn’t much that you can do to make a prison into something that a person can live in, isn’t much that Newt would want to do to make that flat into somewhere that could be lived in-

But Hermann apparently took the effort to go out and buy a small speaker—or maybe he had it ordered to the flat, along with some ramen—one of his and Newt’s favorite foods to eat back in Hong Kong. To find a source of music.

"Honey, I'm home!" Newt shouts, all cheese, as he opens the door to the flat, because it's the sort of thing that the precursors had him saying so often, speaking to his 'girlfriend,' one side of the hivemind connecting to the other, a perversion of a real relationship.

But right now, he's not entering the flat to the smell of ammonia. The glass and the ammonia has been cleaned up, Alice's body disposed of somewhere—maybe in the apartment trash chute, maybe in an incinerator, Newt doesn't know.

What he does know is that there is a mix of jazz and punk rock music playing when Newt enters the flat and the smell of the sort of food that the precursors never would have let him eat—it was all basic nutrition shakes at home and fancy meals at work when he had to attend banquets and parties to seem normal—percolating into his nostrils, a welcome hug home.

And Newt doesn’t even bother to dry off the rain before he’s pulling Hermann in to kiss him.

Hermann rolls his eyes. “Maybe you should dry off, Newton," he says, voice dry, and Newt gets to do whatever he wants, now, so he shakes his head, splattering water everywhere, even getting a drop on Hermann’s sweater, and this time, Hermann's nose is scrunching, but he's smiling, and Newt thinks, well—

It's not blood.

It's just water.

It's just water.

And more than anything—

One drop.

Because that’s all he needs.

The taste of Hermann Gottlieb's smile as Newt leans up on his toes and wraps his arms around Hermann's neck to pull him in for a kiss, and just one drop.

And I will not tell the thoughts of hell

That carried me home from the Holland road

With my heart like a stone and I put up no fight

But I'll still believe though there's cracks you'll see,

When I'm on my knees I'll still believe,

And when I've hit the ground, neither lost nor found,

If you'll believe in me I'll still believe

—Mumford & Sons, Holland Road