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Hermann doesn’t know why it doesn’t occur to him until the Drift is already ripping through his consciousness and even then it is less of a complete and coherent thought than a sense of revelation and clarity, like solving for a missing variable—a sensation of “oh,” like a drop falling into perfectly still water.
Between one moment and the next the calm is annihilated by the typhoon of the Drift with the infant Kaiju, Newton, and Herman, and Newton-and-Hermann and the Kaiju hivemind, suddenly, all at once.
It is not any one thing, and at the same time it’s everything.
Later, after the world is saved, after the future is reinstated and the relief has burnt through everyone, the lingering sparks of euphoria still singing along Hermann’s nerves, but the grief is creeping its way up and in as he lies in the quiet darkness of his bunk.
He’s felt and seen and done so much, been undone and remade, that it takes him a while to realize that the pain in his hip and thigh and his knee are part of what’s keeping his mind racing, thoughts spinning, chasing away sleep despite the way that exhaustion has inscribed itself into Hermann’s bones over the last 24, 36, 48 hours, over the last weeks before the double event, over the eternity of the last twelve years.
But the buzzing, the feeling of being wrenched in too many directions at once reminds him of someone, and in that moment he remembers the realization from the Drift.
When the neural load sharing technology was developed to make piloting the Jaegers a real, sustainable technology to respond to the Kaiju, compatibility was ranked and determined on the physiological level. Jaeger pilots needed to be able to move as one, to anticipate each other on a subconscious, proprioceptual level. “Tandem” was always the word that inevitably came up, reminding Hermann of bicycles, a technology he had been unable to use since his accident.
The bitterness he never allowed himself while they were staving off the end of the world rises now in the back of his throat. Hermann could build the statistical, computational models, could code the complex software required to properly translate neuroelectrical data between human brains, but he was never going to be eligible to even try the technology, the magnificent feat of bioelectrical mechanical engineering he had help bring into the world, the miracle of bringing human beings empirically closer to one another than they had ever been before in the history of the species.
Hermann could not step foot into the Kwoon as anything more than a spectator. His physical handicap meant he was unable to engage in any of the martial arts the Jaeger program had ultimately settled on as the means of assessing compatibility. But even if he’d been fully able-bodied, unhampered by the stiffness and pain, Hermann had never excelled in physical endeavors. His dedication to the study of mathematics and theoretical physics—long hours reading obscure academic publications and algebraic theora, hours spent exploring the equations which described hyperdimensional objects—exacerbated his inherent lack of coordination. Hermann’s natural aptitudes existed almost exclusively in the intellectual realm, with little talent left over for the skills of throwing, catching, jumping, running, and other sporting activities.
Scrawny and asthmatic, Hermann had accepted his lot in life as an academic stereotype and thrown himself into the security of knowing his place in the world, if only in this one, singular aspect of his life.
It wasn’t until his accident, and the months and months of physical therapy to return even a fraction (a number Hermann could never bring himself to calculate) of his previous mobility to him that Hermann began a more intimate relationship with his own body. No longer could he relegate his physical needs to the realm of afterthought. His body demanded he be attentive to its requirements. He needed to stretch and strengthen, he needed to rest and relax, he couldn’t stand at his chalkboards unconsciously for hours anymore, nor could he sit in front of his computer code through the night, immobile but for his fingers and his eyes, checking his math and running tests and simulations as he had before the accident.
He needed to manage his pain levels with the medications he was prescribed and they required their own special care—not to be taken on an empty stomach, nor at too frequent intervals. His cane became an extension of his arm, his balance and stability dependent on his ability to place his cane on the floor with confidence, to trust his wrist and elbow and shoulders to support him in the ways his leg no longer could.
It was a process of errors—inattention, ignorance, stubborn pride, desperation—which taught him the uncircumnavigable territory of his limitations and the importance of being physically aware, the price of failing to do so being debilitation, exhaustion, foul temper, time lost to recuperation and his dignity.
(Having to call for help to get down from his ladder after his leg seized up following too long perched near his calculations left a stain of mortification on Hermann’s mind that he doubts he will ever scrub out. Having to come into the lab late after his overtaxed leg made it difficult to get out of bed and then trapped him in the chair in his shower when it refused to take his weight when he tried to stand up to make the two steps to the sink had caused him to be genuinely cruel in his remarks to Newton on more than one occasion, leaving him feeling guilty and rotten, in addition to the shame and the pain with suffused his leg and sapped his patience and focus.)
Now, he finds himself grateful, accompanied by a new depth of tenderness, for Newton’s stubbornness and for his forgiving heart. Their working relationship and enforced companionship turned friendship (however reluctantly acknowledged) was saved and sustained more than once by Newton’s willingness to overlook the harsher elements of Hermann’s personality, even on such occasions as the sharp edges of Hermann’s pain-drenched poison tongue were turned on him.
Hermann can see clearly now what he simultaneously realizes he had already known: Newton was always aware of when Hermann’s leg and its radiating aches and pains, and cramps and contortions were exceptionally severe and made the conscious choice to let Herman’s cruelties roll off his back, no matter how personal or carefully aimed to cause maximum damage they might have been. Not something that Newton was particularly gifted or well-practiced in doing; he would talk himself down from his own spirals of anxiety and self-loathing by making room for Hermann’s limitations, hanging on until the next time they would be together in the lab, when Hermann’s body was not in mutiny against his mind, to remind himself that his lab partner did not, actually, hate him, despite how true that might feel in the moment.
Suddenly, Hermann sees himself as if from outside: he feels his own presence in the lab like bedrock, unshakeable, immovable, something that Newton can rage against in his most uncontrolled moments, dash himself against in a fury, but not, for once, as a weapon for Newton’s own destruction, but an act of unconditional faith, rooted in the knowledge that Hermann will always be there, will always come back, will stay standing even as the Abyss opens its maw beneath their very feet.
Newt has never been the worst thing that happened to Hermann Gottlieb. If he can believe nothing greater about himself than that, this is something he knows as an absolute certainty. If Hermann can get up every morning and get out of bed to try and save the world (one which has heaped no insignificant amount of cruelty upon him) then the least Newt can do is be there with him.
Hermann’s been an aspiration, a pipedream, even a fantasy, once or twice. He’s been a disappointment, a disaster, and a dead weight. He doesn’t think he’s ever been someone’s lodestar, their guiding light, before. Hermann’s faith has never been the hallmark by which he is known and judged, but to Newton he has been a raison d’être when all else failed him and he could feel himself standing on the edge of nihilistic oblivion. To Newton he is the only forgivable kind of optimist: the one who fights on, not out of some deluded egotism of righteousness or expectation of victory, but the one who believes that the only way to say with absolute honesty and dignity that one has done everything they could, was to fight like hell to the last man, no matter what. Through Hermann, Newton could believe that salvation was possible only through the doing, without any demands for more.
Hermann sees that Newton’s shock—“You would do that for me?”—and his immediate overcorrection—“With me?”—is the apotheosis of his lab partner’s delusions of grandeur and non-existent self-esteem. Newton has always chased the opportunity to be a falling star—a streak of blinding brilliance—because he didn’t believe there was anyone who would strive to catch him as he fell to Earth. Only at Hermann’s insistence on sharing the Drift did he begin to remember that Hermann’s second love, after mathematics, were the stars themselves. Hermann the astronomer, the would-be astrophysicist forced to turn his gaze into the midnight zone of the Earth’s deepest ocean, has always plotted the locations of the stars in his life and Newton’s brilliance—irritating and obnoxious as it could sometimes be—had long since earned him a place on Hermann’s starmap.
Newton’s habits have on many occasions genuinely made Hermann’s life difficult: Kaiju dissections spilling over into the carefully delineated order on which Hermann relies for his personal equilibrium, the Sex Pistols on repeat for a week while Newton struggles to put his research down in words that will make sense to the Marshal and the pilots and the rest of the J-techs, the sound of Newton tap-tap-tapping his pen, his scalpel, his spare drumstick, his fingers, for an hour while he wrestles with everything they need to understand about the Kaiju if they’re ever going to get everyone out of this alive…
Hermann has always known that Newton is, at any moment, ready to fly apart, the nervous energy that makes everything that Newton is—in all his extraordinary multiplicity—possible can ignite into an inferno that would burn him out, into a hollow empty shell.
Hermann has seen it as his responsibility during this impossible war to keep Newton from coming apart at the seams when he can see him fraying. When Newton stayed up for days on end, running and re-running his samples, desperate to find and to prove something, anything, about the enemy they could never hope to understand in time, Herman would limp his way into the lab with an extra clatter and say something snide to pull Newton’s focus. Just as the J-techs have a responsibility to look after their crew members in the Jaeger bays to avoid industrial accident (or worse), so too, was it Hermann’s responsibility to ensure that the K-Sci department was able to operate at optimal performance. If it was beyond him to coax Newton into food or sleep through kindness, that was between himself and his creator (whether he means Lars or the Divine in that this context, he is never entirely sure), and his experience has shown that getter Newton to cuss him out and rip apart Hermann’s latest theory regarding the Breach was an efficient and effective method for getting Newton to follow him out of the lab to the canteen and then to the living quarters of the ‘Dome where exhaustion would eventually run its course.
Hermann can see now that their lives have been in sync for years.
The Jaeger pilots speak of the terrifying, sublime experience of being made one with another person. The unclassifiable emotion of being known so completely by someone else, the bond which blossoms between two people who have cracked themselves open to one another in a way previously imagined only possible to share with G-d.
Hermann looks back through time, their years together in the lab at the HK Shatterdome, the years before that of reading each other’s papers, despite their unspoken, though mutual, agreement not to contact one another again, their terrible first meeting in Stokholm, before that to their letters, to the very first time Newton ever imagined writing to Hermann, and the perplexed pleasure Hermann felt in opening that first letter, a moment of recognition by someone who seemed to notice and see him for the first time. Hermann learned very little about Newton in the Drift, he thinks. Because Hermann has known Newton, bad habits, brilliance, bleeding heart, reckless enthusiasm, low self-esteem, anxious-desperate-open, insatiable passion for life, for over a decade. Stepping across a bridge from the confines of his mind into Newton’s was like visiting the familiar abode of a close friend. Nothing was where Hermann would have kept it—theories about Kaiju biology freely intermingling with possible song lyrics and melodies, litanies of self-recrimination flowing, uninterrupted, from the list of Newton’s many accomplishments, stills of Newton’s favorite films embedded in his memories of the Marshal, Mako, LOCCENT, MIT, Hermann, his father, Hermann, the Kaidonovskys, Hermann, Hermann, the absence of his mother, Hermann, his uncle Illia, Hermann, Hermann, Hermann—but none of it was a surprise. Newton’s greatest intellectual strength has always been one of lateral thinking, finding patterns and connections between data and disciplines that others would overlook. Hermann’s own mind is modeled more on the memory palaces of the Renaissance reimagining of the Ancient World. Not a cathedral, perhaps, but with the minimum orderliness of Hilbert’s Grand Hotel.
There is a knock at the door to his room, and it shakes off the veil of his thoughts, he expects he knows who it is, and despite the ache in his leg which is starting to radiate throughout his entire body, he is not disappointed when he manages to open the door.
“Hi,” says Newton, face nearly grey with exhaustion, deep shadows under his eyes from bruises both literal and metaphorical, nevertheless, still bouncing restlessly on his toes.
“Hello, Newton,” Hermann replies. He can feel the smile his face wants to settle into, but he suspects he is too tired for it to actually make itself visible.
Newton stares at Hermann, still bouncing, and Hermann almost starts to wonder if his lab partner, his friend, has somehow fallen asleep upright, his eyes open, his body still in motion.
“Would you like to come in?” he suggests, shuffling to the side, not exceptionally successfully, and accompanied by a pronounced wince.
Instead, Newt pushes forward into the doorway and presses himself up against Hermann, letting him lean on the door, but putting his arms around his waist and pressing his forehead into Hermann’s shoulder. Hermann keeps one hand on the edge of the door to help him keep his balance, though Newt has been incredibly careful not to put any of his weight on Hermann’s fragile stability, the other he brings around Newton’s shoulders and pulls him tight, his hand gripping hard at the strong slope where Newton’s neck meets his shoulder. He presses his face into the side of Newton’s head, despite the grime and the sweat and the fear that still cakes his hair.
Another quiet drop into Hermann’s well of revelations, with another quiet, echoing “oh,” because Newton needs the hug, the physical proximity, the reminder that he is real and that he exists and he is here and now and that amazingly, impossibly, everything else is also here with them, but, Hermann realizes, he needs this hug as well. The future has been reinstated, and with it so has the conventional disaster of uncertainty, and Hermann has been suddenly set adrift in the current of time and possibility, and without the promise of inevitable resolution, be it through failure or success, there is no gravity against which to orient himself.
“What we did was super fucked up, dude,” Newt mumble shouts into Hermann’s shoulder. “We just opened a fucking door between our brains and the Kaiju and it was never going to be anything like sharing the neural load of piloting a Jaeger because the Kaiju aren’t inert machines, what the fuck.”
Hermann can feel something almost like a laugh building in him.
“Newton, Newt,” he says. “We saved the world. We took a desperate bet, with incalculable odds, and as a direct result of our recklessness and dangerously unscientific commitment to your ‘hunch,’ we figured it out. We are, to coin a phrase, rockstars.”
And then Newton is laughing, huge gusts of breath, shoulders shaking and then Hermann can feel the cloth over his shoulder getting damp, and the sounds coming from Newt are sobs—enormous, heaving, devastating.
“You’re a sick bastard, Dr. Gottlieb,” Newton chokes out, wet and ragged.
“Please, call me Herms,” he replies. “Let’s go to bed.”
And the door shuts on Newton’s laugh, high pitched, mildly hysterical, but free and unburdened for what feels like the first time.