Chapter Text
0. Trespasser
Newton isn't present when it happens, not in person, but he's blinking at his iPhone, seated at the bar in The Friendly Toast, when the BBC World News Twitter feed goes batshit. His mobile vibrates against the liquor-slicked counter every five seconds, black screen flaring to life with confused, urgent news bites that both freeze and electrify his rational mind. He'd disregarded the one about initial reports of a seven-point-one earthquake in San Francisco—nothing new there, plate tectonics plain and simple—but then all of the rest to follow in quick succession are also about San Francisco, immediate ongoing destruction of, by a vicious and unidentifiable sea-dwelling leviathan. He wonders if it's a prank.
By the tenth or eleventh update, he's scrolling on auto-pilot and too stunned to even think about finishing his drink, much less touch his cheese fries. He mutters an apology to the server (Cute dude, he thinks, but I don't have time for this), leaves twenty-five dollars on the counter, and stalks out as fast as his Doc Martens can carry him. He ought to go back to campus, because he's already got half a dozen panicked text messages from the few other junior faculty members with whom he's even a faint resemblance of close, but what he really wants to do is tell MIT to fuck off, go straight home, fire up his laptop, and figure out what in God's name (not that he believes, not that he ever could) is going on.
Newton spends a tense, jittery bus ride to Harvard Square with his headphones on, emailing himself every relevant link he can find. What little footage has hit YouTube is patchy and erratic, and the few photographs he can find on major news outlets look too impressive to be true. If it's a prank, it's been so cleverly executed on so grand a scale that he's going to have to tell his students to pack up their hacks and go the hell home. They'll never beat the likes of this, never even come close.
He gets off the bus and bears a sharp left to head to his apartment, but he smacks straight into a pretty Harvard undergrad with tears streaming down her cheeks as she sobs into her phone in a language that only resolves itself into Japanese when Newton, in a fit of frustration, rips off his headphones and can't even bring himself to hiss, Hey! Watch where you're going! One look at this girl's overflowing dark eyes is all it takes: the situation's gone to shit, it's no prank, this is happening.
He stumbles away, mutters another apology, and backtracks blindly till he's standing at the intersection of the criss-crossing walkways in Winthrop Square, perfectly poised between Grendel's Den and Peet's. He looks around at the people on park benches and at the students clogging the sidewalk and sees this for what it is: 9/11 Redux, a London 2005 flashback, the Marathon Bombings 2.0, real fucking deal.
Instead of going home, Newton puts his headphones back on with shaking hands, spins on his heel, keeps tapping feverishly through screens on his phone, and doesn't stop till he's down the stairs and in the Den and asking the bartender to bring him a whole bottle of whiskey. That doesn't fly, but he at least gets two shots to start him off.
When he leaves four hours later, he's drunk and pretty sure this will get his ass fired (he's got thirty-two texts, some pertaining to a lecture he had been meant to give forty-five minutes ago, and he hasn't answered a single one). Not only that, but he knows most of the story now, knows it as much from the hysterical sobbing and frantic conversations around him as from what's now all over the web, and he knows what this fucker looks like. It's got a mean streak as wide as it is tall, and he wants to cut it up and analyze it so badly he can't even find reasons or words for why.
Newton sleeps for a total of three hours that night, ignores another fifteen text messages, and, when he wakes up with the worst hangover of his life, staggers into his clothes and out his front door until he's struggling to open the front entrance to the Garage Mall and somebody has to hold the door for him. He almost trips on the escalator, boots unlaced, and marches right up to the girl at the front counter in Chameleon and slaps down a marker-riddled napkin in front of her.
"This," he says, tapping it, and he can see her recoil a little from his breath, which probably still reeks of booze. "Here," he added, reaching around to tap the space between his shoulder blades. "With whoever you've got free at this hour. I don't care."
The girl recovers and peers at Newton's drawing. "What the—is that—?"
"Fuck yes," Newton says. "So I don't forget. So I do something."
The first thing he does when he gets to his office, smarting from the needle and high on endorphins, is email the eccentric mathematician in Cambridge, the other Cambridge a non-creature-infested ocean away, with whom he'd been corresponding for a while and whom his colleagues have begun to call Newt's Internet Boyfriend.
Hermann, Newton types, tell me you've crawled out from under your rock for long enough to realize your disdain for monster movies is now scientifically invalid.
Please don't call me that, Gottlieb writes back. I'm already working on it.
1. Otachi
"You have to admit this one's fitting," Newton insists, dropping a few more of Hermann's books in an archival storage box. "I was there," he goes on, collapsing a desk lamp on top of the volumes, "literally, in the flesh, and the bastard got so close I was almost not there a few seconds later. She—she, like—scanned me with her tongue. She was looking for me. I wanted to see a living kaiju, and she came."
Hermann sets Newton's colorful drawing back down on the bare desk and fixes Newton with the hardest, most baleful stare he's earned since the drift, the first one, with Suckerbrain (why should the guys at the top have all the kaiju-naming fun?)
"Be that as it may," he sighs, "I'm very glad your acid-mangled remains did not leave with her. Regarding your designation system for which of these abominations you choose to memorialize on your person, and, ah, where, I should like to point out that you're running short on space."
"How would you know, Hermann?" Newton shoots back, and he just barely manages to prevent an addendum: You've never seen me naked.
Hermann taps the floor with his cane, leaning harder against the vacated desk even as Newton works on clearing Hermann's. "Your dress sense being as regrettable as it is, you often flash enough collarbone and midsection to make it clear that your arms aren't the only real estate occupied."
Real estate, thinks Newton, vaguely turned on by the notion of non-drift-induced scrutiny from Hermann, until his brain makes a hop, skip, and a jump over to Monty Python and the Holy Grail's huge tracts of land joke, at which point he's just giggling.
"I fail to see the humor in this," Hermann snaps, his tone bringing Newton back down, forcing him to focus. "It'll only cost you your last month's salary, what with the city in shambles and tattoo establishments being at a premium. Where will you put it?"
Somewhere you can't see it unless you strip me, Newton thinks, but what he says instead is, "Over my left hip, let it bleed down onto my thigh."
Now Hermann's the one who looks like his brain might short-circuit, and, from the sound of things, Monty Python isn't coming to his rescue.
Newton thinks of how, at an ill-concealed shoulder nudge from Tendo, Hermann had offered that sly little grin and edged closer, closer, closer as the War Clock struck nil.
"Wanna watch?" he asks, trying to sound casual. "Come with me."
Hermann turns and hobbles to the blackboard, less precise than usual.
"Maybe next time," he says, taking an eraser to his precious equations.
2. Leatherback
"They feel kind of like a matched set, you know?" Newton tells Tendo as they move through the refectory line; the lunch offerings today look grim, considering they've reduced supply deliveries in the lead-up to closing down eighty percent of mainline operations. Newton slides along with both his tray and Hermann's, and continues, "I was thinking of putting him just below Otachi. Not the brightest crayon in the box."
"Brains before beauty, is that it?" Tendo remarks, studying his tin mess plate as it's handed back to him. The stuff in it is supposed to be sam bo fan, but it's not actually fooling anyone, so Newton puts his plate and Hermann's up on the ledge and asks Ling, the server, to put spaghetti in both. "You have to admit, though, he fucked Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon—hell, he hardly even lifted a talon. That takes some smarts, adapting so goddamn quickly to what you're up against."
Newton takes back the plates and glances over his shoulder to the long table that's already occupied by Mako, Raleigh, Herc, and miscellaneous clean-up crew. At the end of it, Hermann sits impatiently rapping his cane as he catches Newton's bloodshot eye with his own. His lips quirk, mostly good-humored, but he taps his wrist impatiently.
"About that," says Tendo, now that they're clear of the line, preventing Newton from marching straight back to the table like the most cock-whipped lovesick puppy in the history of ever. "Are you guys . . . making any progress down there in the lab?"
"Yeah, dude. Getting there. I think?" says Newton, cringing a bit at Hermann's increasing expression of displeasure from across the considerable distance. "Maybe? Kind of? We had a, a . . . a moment yesterday. Not a we-drifted-together kind of moment, not exactly, but a . . . Christ, I can't talk about this right now, he's a holy terror when he's hungry." He starts for the table, and, sighing, Tendo trails after him.
"What's so vitally important that you felt the need to stand there yammering like a nitwit, I'd like to know?" Hermann asks, grabbing his plate out of Newton's hand as Newton and Tendo settle across from him. "Some matter of international security?"
"No, as a matter of fact," Tendo cuts in before Newton can speak. "We were discussing the placement of Newt's fine new piece of ink. Have you seen the drawing? He could have a future in this if it turns out science has no further use for either of you."
"Yes," says Hermann, quietly, intent upon winding spaghetti around his fork.
"Yes what?" Newton asks. "I didn't show you the drawing. It's folded up in my—"
"Yes," Hermann repeats sharply. "Now, for God's sake, shut it, and let's eat."
"Jeee—sus," remarks Tendo, with a shake of his head, and digs into his lunch.
3. Scunner
"That's all of the detail I remember," says Mako, her voice tinged with regret. "The visibility down there was poor. You might want to ask Raleigh."
"Nah, I know he's busy today," says Newton, sketching in quick, confident strokes born of all those years spent reading comic books and graphic novels. "You've given me more than I need. I've dissected enough of these suckers to fill in the details."
Mako leans over him and, in a rare moment of shattered reserve, places both hands on his shoulders. "I really should go now. I can see that I'm breaking your concentration. But I was wondering if things were any better—"
Newton lets out a short, manic laugh, and pauses from his sketching to run the pencil absently through his bed-head and pat Mako's delicate fingers. "Oh, you know. Not really. He's gone all stiff-upper-lip again, and I swear to you, he must keep his spare cane up his ass, because—"
"I'm very sorry," says Mako, squeezing his hand. "Genji still likes you. A lot," she adds, but he can tell her heart isn't really in it. "We don't know how much longer we'll be here, or who will go and who will stay. Maybe you should ask him . . . "
Newton remembers San Francisco, remembers Boston and the attractive server (But I don't have time for this). He lets go of Mako's hand and sets his pencil back to the paper, finishing the preliminary sketch in a dozen angry strokes. The thought of leaving Hong Kong—this bright, bewildering, beautiful city—fills him with dread. He's been here long enough that it feels like home, rusty bunker or not.
Fucking kaiju, fucking Hermann Gottlieb, what is his fucking life?
"Hey," he says, too brightly, swiveling around in his chair to face her. His quarters are a mess, and she seems incongruous standing in the midst of it all: haunting features and elegant posture and, yeah, even though he's not that way inclined, it's clear that Raleigh's one lucky son of a bitch. "Give me a couple of hours to ink and color this, maybe grab a shower, and then you can come with me to get this bad boy situated in his final resting place, and then we'll grab some real food. Deal?"
Mako's grave, dark eyes light up; fleetingly, he remembers the tearful undergrad.
"I would like that very much," she says, and, with a nod, leaves him to his work.
4. Raiju
"I fail to understand how your own impressionistic doodling is sufficient to satisfy you in these last few instances," Hermann grouses, lowering his book to peer sidelong at what Newton is doing. "You're usually a stickler for firsthand evidence, for your own observations. That is to say, Newton, what if you've got them wrong?"
"Science can't solve everything, okay, Hermann?" Newton snaps, just about at the end of his tether. "There. I said it. Curiously liberating; you should try it sometime. Unless you can think of a way to—to—math these last few drawings to perfection, I'm working with what I've got. And what I've got is the word of people I trust, plus a damn fine imagination. Can you offer me either of those things?"
Hermann sits back, momentarily shocked into silence, and, after a few seconds of uncomfortably running his tongue over the backs of his teeth (it's biology, musculature, motion: a tic so easy to discern that it isn't funny), lets out a breath that isn't quite a sigh. He's caught off-guard, which is where Newton wants him.
"The former, I should hope," he finally replies. "That above all else."
Newton feels like he's been kicked in the chest, but he continues to draw.
"So, are you gonna come with me this time?" he asks, letting his desperation rise, caught in the memory of Mako squeezing his hand while Scunner bled to life just above his left knee. He has so much healing ink on that side now, hipbone to kneecap, that he has to be careful how hard he presses down on his drafting board. He would have preferred their desks for this task, but Hermann had picked up his book and tapped his way over to the two chairs they'd situated on either side of a battered side table with an unreliably wired lamp. It chooses that moment to flicker.
Are you getting any of this, Newton wonders, how much I want you to be there?
"Alas," says Hermann, heavily, "I have promised our dear Tendo a day of my time."
"Fine," Newton mutters, breaking off the point of his pencil right in Raiju's eye.
5. Slattern
"Above all, she was gigantic," Raleigh says. "Looked kind of like a hammerhead; Mako will agree with me on that, but don't you dare go making any shark jokes about her name unless you'd like a death-glare. She had cold, cold blue eyes. That made it pretty easy to see her coming when she'd swing back around for another pass."
Newton nods, sketching intently. "Can you remind me how she finally died?"
"We fired the nuclear turbine straight into her vitals," Raleigh replies, and when Newton looks up to see how he's faring, he notices that Raleigh's eyes are motionless, unblinking, fixed on Newton's desk. He's drifting, but with whom is anyone's guess.
Newton picks up one of the two bottles of Blue Girl that have been sitting open and untouched in front of them for about half an hour. He clinks it against Raleigh's bottle to remind him it's there, and then takes a long swig. It beats Budweiser, anyhow.
Raleigh inclines his head in thankful acknowledgement, picks up his bottle, and takes a hesitant sip. Jaeger pilots—the disciplined ones, at least—didn't tend to drink much.
Well, buddy, Newton thinks, now you're making up for lost opportunities. Cheers.
"I don't mean to intrude," says Raleigh, abruptly, "but Mako says you've been having a hard time. Is there anything I can do to help? I feel guilty even just asking, but we're so indebted to the risks you took. I can't even begin—"
"Man, don't talk like that," Newton sighs. "You don't owe me anything, and, in any case, Hermann took one of those risks right along with me. And it's not like you can stop him being the massive freaking—" he fished for a suitably British insult, which would sound suitably lame coming out of his German-by-birth-American-by-choice mouth "—twat he always has been and always will be. That's a universal constant."
"He took that risk for you," Raleigh corrects him. "You should've seen how terrified he was when he found you. I mean, you were conscious for that, but you were also hysterical and kind of dazed and probably didn't have your whole brain back yet."
Either he's drifted so much that he's now psychic, or he had a heart-to-heart with Hermann and he's not telling me, Newton thinks.
"You can start by telling Mako that what's discussed in my quarters, stays in my quarters," he says. "That goes for you, too, Rock Star."
6. Drifter
"All right, you cantankerous old tea-swilling bitch," Newton spits, marching brashly up to Hermann's desk, but the truth of the matter is that he's scared shitless. "You're coming with me this time even if I have to tie you to one of those dollies from down in Shipping and cart your recalcitrant ass myself." He slaps the flawless, finished drawing down on top of Hermann's latest recreational calculations.
Hermann stares at it for at least half a minute, as if none of Newton's carefully prepared tirade has even managed to breach his thick skull, and just as it looks as if one of his still, poised hands might move from the edge of the desk to trace lines burned so deeply into both of their cerebral cortices that they'll never ever forget, he glances up at Newton with that inscrutable, infuriating half-grin of doom.
"Need I remind you," he says evenly, rising, "that I'm only a year your senior? Heaven knows the whole world believes otherwise, though, as well they should. One can hardly blame them, nor have the heart to shatter said delusion."
Newton folds his arms across his chest, determined not to back down. "Maybe you just remember your past lives better than I do," he counters. "Who were you—Rudyard Kipling, J. R. R. Tolkien? Is that why you hate poetry so much? The suspicion of all those elaborate fabrications dripping from your pen? It might explain why you're, oh, how did you put it when you copied my tag-line? German by birth, English by choice?"
For a moment, Newton thinks Hermann might backhand him, but what happens instead is that one of Hermann's steady, deliberate hands does, indeed, move to trace the shape of the kaiju on the paper. The arcing, twisting, stylized entirety, right down to the name that Newton has written boldly in the lower corner of the piece.
"Drifter," Hermann says, the word half-breathed as if he'd only just noticed it; otherwise, he'd be retaliating for the reincarnation bullshit. "I see."
"It didn't seem fair that her mom got a name and she didn't, you know?" admits Newton, his furious resolve ebbing down to nothing. "She didn't really get the chance to have any fun here, not that anyone wanted her to; if any part of her was still aware enough to know she'd been a drift-conduit, then I suppose . . . " He clears his throat. "Well, she did get to eat Hannibal Chau. Maybe that's all the fun a newborn kaiju needs. Anyway, you . . . you don't have to come with me, not if you don't want to. I've been pretty selfish about all of this, the more I think about it. It's just that we share everything else, and as much as you roll your eyes over my ink, I don't think you hate it; you ask me to draw stuff for you when you need a diagram that's too complicated for you to draw yourself, which is fine, not everybody can, some say it's even harder than writing, and—"
"Dear Newton, you utter imbecile," Hermann grits out. "I was waiting."
For at least three seconds, Newton can't process what Hermann has said.
"Waiting for what—like, I don't know, one of the drawings to be based off my actual firsthand observations? This one's based off yours, too, actually; I got some great additional visual data during the drift that could only have been yours."
"Waiting for what's mine, too," Hermann says, smiling. "I'll get my coat."
He returns bundled up in the stupid, predictable parka, and he hands Newton's inexpertly cleaned and repaired leather jacket off to him in a gesture that's neither careless, nor condescending. He holds out the opposite arm while Newton struggles into it, so thoroughly disoriented that he wonders if it's the drift-residue flaring up again as badly as he'd seen it in Raleigh.
Hermann adjusts the coat, fondly straightening Newton's lapels, and kisses him.
Collapse, utter fucking meltdown. Newton sputters against Hermann's mouth, which admittedly seems to know very, very much what it's doing, and it takes him a second to realize that the best response isn't trying to shout at Hermann; rather, it's flinging both arms around Hermann's neck and holding on for dear life, because he's so fucking grounded with his feet and his cane planted that his arm around Newton's waist is, in fact, the only stable thing in their swiftly self-dismantling universe.
Worse yet, Newton knows he's making horrible, needy, desperate noises, and he doesn't even care. Hermann finishes with an unexpected catch of teeth at Newton's lower lip, and, rather than letting Newton fall over, he spins him with shocking, wiry strength so that he's trapped between Hermann's desk at the front of his thighs and Hermann at his back. He's got one arm still wrapped around Newton's waist.
"I fear you're quite wrong in your assessment of the situation," Hermann murmurs against Newton's ear, and all he can do is nod and be thankful they at least haven't zipped their coats, because Hermann's hand is now sliding from where it's splayed against Newton's belly and down to the fastenings of his jeans. "You see, I'm the one who's been selfish, holding out like a stubborn child because I hadn't got my way, hadn't felt included in any of these stories you so insistently engrave upon your flesh." It's on those words his breath hitches, his thumb stilling over the brass button he finds beneath the fold of Newton's fly. "I've second-guessed, speculated, wanted for so long, but I haven't been brave enough to give. Or even to ask. You permit the touch of a stranger so easily, Newton, a stranger with gloves and needles and no reverence for what a precious anthology your skin has become. Will you permit mine?"
"If you don't do something about this right now," Newton says, "I'll pass out."
"We mustn't have that," Hermann murmurs, and his tone is composed of strands so complex that Newton's sure he's never heard it before: apology, embarrassment, regret, love. "Especially not after last time," continues Hermann, and, pressing something between a gasp and a kiss against the prickly, overheated side of Newton's neck, undoes the brass button with one flick of his thumb and works in the rest of his sure, steady fingers to force Newton's taut zipper down.
"Oh God," Newton says. "I'm going to miss my appointment and lose my deposit and I swear Lu Zhen is the only one left who can do shading."
"I'll pay your bloody deposit," replies Hermann, voice turning rough as his hand slips inside Newton's boxer briefs and gently draws out his cock.
Newton feels his knees attempt to give out on him, and, Christ, he doesn't even know how they're still standing. He can feel the strain in Hermann's body pressed up against his back, can tell how much effort it must be taking, but he knows that in a pinch Hermann has more long-haul endurance than two Jaeger pilots put together. "Don't," he says, voice pitching to the brink of high, thin hysteria. "Don't stop."
Hermann kisses Newton's neck again—yeah, definitely a kiss, complete with some of that manic fervor at which he'd hinted—and says in a low, conspiratorial tone that Newton knows all too well, "Tell me what you want, Newton. Tell me everything."
The rhythm of Hermann's strokes is perfect; the brush of his thumb just there, God, does he use math to figure that out, too? Or is it the drift?
Newton takes a ragged gasp and says, "I want to stay here. In Hong Kong. With you. I want them to tell us we're the skeleton crew, I don't know; leave us here to monitor the Breach and all that boring shit. I want a lab that's not in this rusty, glorified tin can, and I want a proper flat or a condominium or something that has heating and air conditioning and proper hot water and a huge ridiculous bed where you can boss me around all you like, okay?" He can feel his control slipping away; Hermann isn't quiet, no, Hermann's breath is forced and harsh and he keeps lavishing those ridiculous kisses against Newton's neck and his ear and sometimes he whispers Yes, good and Oh, Newton and I'll have a word with the Marshall straightaway, just see if I won't—
Newton comes in Hermann's palm, silent and shaking so hard that they finally fall.
"Shit," he moans, "oh, shit, if you've broken a bone you're going to hate me again, and then I'll never get to return the favo—mmmf."
It's nice like this, with Hermann clearly unharmed and crawling on top of him for another one of those skilled, possessive kisses. Newton fumbles between them and undoes Hermann's trousers with considerably less ease, because what the hell is going on with all those layers, anyway, and then there's the parka, but that's okay, because it's covering them and the desk is also blocking and the lab door is shut, so whatever.
Newton decides he's got time for this now: a row of zeroes, all the time in the world.