Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time Newton Geiszler sees Hermann Gottlieb naked he's very drunk and he can't quite breathe right and he wants nothing in the world so much as he wants to study him, touch him everywhere to see how his muscles move, find out exactly what the redhead on her knees in front of him is doing that makes his deltoids shift the way they are, that makes the dimples above his ass deepen, that lends that slight growl to his clipped tone—

But we're not there yet.

It's not that Newt doesn't have any friends.

Okay, so it's kind of like he doesn't have any friends—any real friends, anyway, because real friends would be perfectly happy to listen to him detail, for three hours straight, how incredibly complex and perfectly planned the alien kaiju society is and how it clearly couldn't have been thought up by any one man, no, there had to be something else behind it. Real friends wouldn't have rolled their eyes at hour one point zero three and pointed out in their oh-so-kind way that the kaiju are fictional, Newt, and that that's all there is to it, and anyway there are some pretty big plot holes in Atlantic Edge, it was good for an action film but that's that, you know? and Newt wouldn't have to tell his real friends that action movies can have just as much cultural significance as the stupid romantic comedies that you like, Raleigh, thank you very much. At least Mako had backed him up, albeit laughingly. She was closer to a real friend, although she probably liked it for the fight choreography over the (frankly astounding) biological possibilities, and even she was tired of hearing Newt talk about those around hour two.

So, he kind of has no friends, and that wouldn't be a problem except that the first Atlantic Edge convention is being held in a month and Newt would rather scoop out his left eye with a dull spoon than not attend, and even if he sold his left eye on the black market he wouldn't have enough money to pay full-price for a hotel room himself. It's a pretty nice eye. Not perfect, a little nearsighted. Slightly bloodshot, sometimes, but coffee calms him down and sleep is, he's pretty sure, way more fictional than the aliens he has fanart of tacked up all over his dorm room at MIT.

Which is why he ends up making a not-at-all pathetic post on the main fan forums for Atlantic Edge: 'Male biology student seeks similar to split hotel costs'. The body paragraph reads, 'haha just kidding about the 'similar' part I will literally take anyone oh god please'

'Non-smoking only.'

Whatever. He thinks he's funny.

Apparently no one else does, though, because he doesn't get a message until ten days before the convention. He's literally sixty seconds from offering Mako his kidney to skip her father's birthday and come with him, a largely meaningless gesture considering that if Stacker Pentecost found out that he was the reason she didn't show he wouldn't have much use for either kidney for long, or the aforementioned eye (he really has to come up with some other incentive than various bits of his body), because he would be all kinds of dead, and Mr. Pentecost probably wouldn't even have gotten a drop on his perfect suit.

(Newt had once had a long, coffee-fueled wet dream/waking nightmare about peeling him slowly and erotically out of that suit. He will never tell anyone, especially because once Stacker was naked Newt just put the suit on himself and fixed his cuffs and saluted him. It should have been triumphant, but everything was so huge, not just the suit but his own clothes underneath it, and Stacker himself, and the great red glaring sun behind him, and Newt was so very small.)

When someone finally contacts him he clicks on the message with shaking hands. He reads it, and then reads it again, and then bursts out laughing.

"I don't believe it," Raleigh says, eyes sparkling like Newt's just told him it's Christmas three months early. "This is like a movie, you're in a movie."

They're sitting outside of Mako’s coffee shop, enjoying the glorious autumn. Mako's all in red today, red streaks in her hair and bright red rain boots and a red leather jacket that Newt's half in love with the way he's half in love with everything about her.

"Is he hot?" she asks, ever practical, looking at Newt curiously over the rim of her mug.

"Christ," says Newt, "I don't know, does it matter? I'm only going to be his fake fiancee, not his actual one."

The message went like this:

Dear Mr. Geiszler,

I just came across your post looking for a roommate to share costs for the duration of Driftcon. I'm writing to say that I would be happy to do so, in fact I would gladly pay the entirety of the fee and the price of tickets, so that your attendance to said event would be pro bono. It comes at the cost of a rather odd favor, however.

I find myself in a difficult situation. The set-up is long and it was boring enough to live, I won't bother relating it here when it could be told much more painlessly in person (should you accept my offer). The short and short of it is this: on Sunday evening, just as the convention winds down, I am required at a dinner party. I am also, for incredibly tedious reasons, required to bring a date. Due to a seriously ill-advised web of lies, said date must be my fiancee.

I do not actually have a fiancee.

You see the problem posed, and, if the erudite nature of your other posts on this forum speaks of the mind behind your keyboard, you see the solution I am proposing. Your help in this would be hugely appreciated and, as I have indicated, repaid through the waiving of hotel and convention fees.

Get back to me as quickly as possible,
Hermann Gottlieb.

"Of course he's going to be hot, Mako," Raleigh says, "this kind of thing only happens to hot people. Besides, if he's not hot how're they going to fall in love?"

"I think you're missing the point," says Newt.

"So, what, love's only for hot people?" Mako says, raising her eyebrow at Raleigh. "What about us poor homely folks—"

"Hey," says Newt, frowning.

Raleigh turns to look at Mako, face serious. He reaches out to take her hand. "Mako Mori," he says, eyes huge in his face, "you are gorgeous, and if anyone ever tells you otherwise I will punch in their teeth."

Newt kicks him under the table. "Me now," he says. "Flirting later. Me now."

Raleigh turns back to face him, but he keeps Mako's hand in his, threading their fingers together. "There will be flirting later," he says without missing a beat, "when you meet your mystery man. How do you not know whether he's hot?"

Mako sips her coffee. "Seriously," she says, "have you not facebook stalked him or anything?"

"He doesn't have a facebook," says Newt, "or a twitter, or any kind of online presence except articles he's written."

"Articles," says Raleigh, intrigued. "Hang on, Gottlieb. That sounds familiar."

"Is he a biologist too?" Mako asks. "Or a historian, he sounds like a historian. Hermann the Historian." She giggles to herself, and Newt can see Raleigh's heart melt. He bites back something acidic, something half-formed and too-angry, and feels small. It's starting to feel like a habit.

"He's a mathematician," he says instead, and it comes out a little sullen and mumbled, weighted down on the way out of his mouth by his own self-pity. "He's really fuckin' smart."

"Good," says Raleigh, not teasing anymore. "You deserve that, smart friends." His voice is gentle, always gentle. "Whatever else this is, let it be a friendship, yeah? Let it be good for you."

Newt wants to say, you don't know what's good for me. He wants to say, this isn't a movie and we're not going to be friends. He doesn't respond well to gentle. It pulls him down and under and dulls all his edges. Wool over his eyes, fog in his skull, a pillow under his head. Open palms where fists should be.

"Whatever," he says, and pushes back from the table. "I should go respond. Don't want to keep the hubby waiting."

No one points out that he could have stayed and answered from his iPhone. No one points out that he spends half his time on those same forums every time they're out for coffee. They know him well enough to gauge when his mood goes sour. He doesn't feel bad about it. They'll be fine without him.

He slams his way into his dorm room and slumps at his computer. The message from Dr. Gottlieb (he's a doctor, the articles had told him that much, how nice, good news, ma, I'm fake-marrying a doctor) is still open in his browser, and he clicks 'reply'.

Sounds good, man, he types, and then erases it.

That is pretty bizarre, no, too off-putting.

I'd be glad to, god no, even worse.

I've heard weirder requests. In second grade this girl Esther asked me to feed her a bug and see if she could guess which bug it was just by the taste.

Perfect.

Your terms are tempting, I have to say. Free attendance to what's gonna be the awesomest convention of the year, and all I gotta do is make nice at some dinner party for a few hours? Sign me up, man.

He takes a breath. Where do you live? Do you want to meet up beforehand to discuss payment and so you can, like, make sure I'm up to snuff or whatever? What a weird fuckin' phrase. Do you know where it comes from? Snuff like the stuff that old british dudes used to snort?

Anyway. Are you anywhere close to MIT? Wanna meet up and find out if I'm good enough to go up some old guy's nose?

Let me know,
Newton Geiszler.

He goes to make himself more coffee, and by the time he gets back Gottlieb's already responded.

No need to work out payment—I've already purchased us a room. And as for snuff, I was under the impression that you were wholly in contempt of tobacco products, whether they be powdered or otherwise. I am neither British nor old, and I find that intelligent company can be just as stimulating as nicotine.

A picture should suffice.

Newt blinks. It takes him a minute to remember his ‘no smoking’ policy, and then. That—that was flirting. Right? Weird flirting, really weird flirting, but. Nonetheless?

A picture. A picture, what the hell, if the dude just had a facebook this wouldn't be a problem, a simple friend request solved all that shit for you, Gottlieb could scroll through his whole ill-advised albums of sleepless, stupid, unkempt photos, newest being the ones he took of his half-finished Yamarashi sleeve, and then there wouldn't be this weird pressure, like, what picture is he supposed to choose? Should he look fun and approachable? Respectable? Smart? Hot (those are few and far between)? It's like a job application, but worse, because no one's told him what the job description is beyond "show up".

Finally he picks one where his glasses aren't too obviously broken and his hair looks kind of combed for once and you can't see most of his tattoos. Respectable is probably best, somewhere between respectable and smart. He sends it off with a beating heart.

Ten minutes later, he receives a simple, Acceptable, and that's it. He tries not to feel it like a kick to the gut.

They don’t talk much more before the convention itself. Newt’s too busy obsessing over the con schedule and wondering whether Gottlieb would pay for signed concept art if he promised to be very convincing at the dinner party, and then wondering whether that counted as prostitution, and then deciding that he would absolutely sell himself for an original Otachi print. Raleigh keeps giving him these weird pep-talks that he mostly ignores, and when he finally leaves to catch his train (something, he notices, Gottlieb did not offer to pay for) both he and Mako come with, standing on the platform under Mako’s umbrella (blue, she’s blue today, electric blue, and Newt wonders if it’s encouragement, a subtle version of Raleigh’s puppy-dog smile. It's the blue of Rift and kaiju blood, and he knows she likes the movie more than she’d ever admit).

He waves to them out the window and settles into the rattling silence of the train. Of all public transport, he probably hates trains the most. On planes you're at least in the sky, and the whole world seems open to you. And buses are like cars, you can see the driver, you can watch him makes choices to turn or not. No two bus rides are exactly the same. But trains are implacable. Trains do nothing but what they should. They follow their tracks, and Newt is a born derailer.

He sits, knees up, headphones jammed into his ears, and pictures stick- up men, murderers, whole train cars filled with dynamite.

By the time he gets in to the city, he's gotten to murder mysteries. They pass through the darkness of a tunnel, and suddenly the girl sitting three rows up wouldn't be a girl anymore, just a pale thing with a crimson throat. He'd be the first on the scene, of course, not a doctor but close enough, able to describe the blade used and the moment her heart stopped. He imagines his hands slick with her blood like they have been so many times, mouse blood, frog blood, his own blood, imagines the tearful face of her boyfriend, or her mom, or her brother—and then that face turns into Raleigh's, and Newt feels sick and sad and awful.

He wants to be mad, because if there's one thing Raleigh has no business ruining it's his daydreams, for God's sake, but instead he just feels guilty.

He should visit the grave.

He should call Tendo Choi.

The second option would be infinitely more meaningful than the first, but also happens to be infinitely more embarrassing and terrifying. Besides, Choi’s married now, he doesn’t want old ghosts hanging around, especially old ghosts with Newt’s particular cocktail of different flavored baggage.

He doesn’t really even know what he would say, other than I miss you.

It’s not until he steps off the train that it really hits him: he’s here. He made it. He is blocks away from something he’s been dreaming about since it was announced six months ago and there is nothing stopping him walking through those doors and coming home.

He just has to meet up with his “fiancee”. He would have vastly preferred to visit the convention first, spend all day, and then just sort of wave to Dr. Gottlieb on the way to his bed, preferably drunk, definitely too tired for real conversation. They could have breakfast together or something, that’s romantic, and then he could convince Gottlieb to spend more of his apparently infinite money on him, and they’d be golden.

Unfortunately Gottlieb has both the tickets and the keys to the room, so he has to do this sober and impatient and more excited than he’s ever been.

Which probably explains some of the way it goes down, though he is by no means willing to shoulder all the blame. Some of it definitely rests on the good doctor.

Gottlieb answers the door already scowling. It seems, honestly, to be a permanent part of his face. He is not even close to what Raleigh or Mako or Newt himself would call “hot”: he is thin-lipped, incredibly pale, too skinny, and has the worst haircut Newt’s ever seen. His cheekbones are somehow too high to sit right on the rest of his face. He looks like what would happen if someone cross-bred a frog and a Tolkien elf, and he is very good at scowling.

He makes a sort of attempt to smooth it out when he sees Newt, but it’s entirely unconvincing, and when he talks it’s snapping more than anything else. “You’re late,” he says, and then twitches his lips downward. “Come in.”

Newt blinks. “Uh, sorry, right.”

Gottlieb swings the door open and Newt slips past him. Gottlieb looks him up and down. “Your picture did not show your tattoos.”

“Oh,” says Newt, “Yeah, sorry about that, you like them? It’s gonna be a full sleeve, and I’m hoping to get all of them in there, Leatherback and Knifehead and Otachi, I was thinking maybe Otachi would be up my neck?—and, oh, shit, they’re not going to be a problem, are they? For your parents or whatever, whoever I’m playing your fiancee for, no, they wouldn’t be, right, I mean you’re bringing home a dude either way, so why would it matter if it were a tattooed dude—”

Gottlieb sneers. “Knifehead?”

Newt stops short. “The kaiju. The first one in the movie? They save the boat from it? It sets literally everything else in motion? Come on, man, what are you talking about—”

“I generally think of them all as just ‘monsters’,” Gottlieb says, still scowling. “What does it matter? The film is about humanity, Geiszler, the kaiju are only there to provide them something to kill.”

“Something to—” Newt makes an effort to unclench his fists from his sides. “Give me my ticket.”

Gottlieb’s eyebrows are up and down like schizophrenic elevators, like he can’t decide whether he’s being arch or angry. “Pardon?”

“Give me my ticket. And my room key, I’m gonna need to be able to leave and come back on my own because it is obvious we won’t be spending much of this convention together.”

“How will I survive without your charming company,” Gottlieb mutters, and digs around in the pockets of his weird oversized coat that he’s wearing inside for some reason. He hands Newt a room key and a convention pass.

Newt stares at it. “This is Ultimate Access.”

Gottlieb raises one bony shoulder. “Judging from your online presence, you seemed rather unreliable. I wasn’t sure that once you were here you would go through with your end of the deal unless I sweetened the pot.”

Newt stares at him. “Good to know your only motivation was self-interest, I’ll keep that in mind.” He slips the pass over his head, and then, because he’s not a complete dick: “Thank you.”

“Be sure to enjoy yourself with your creatures while the rest of us deal with the intellectual possibilities of a near-future with advanced robotic technologies,” Gottlieb calls after him as he pushes his way out of the room.

Newt pulls the door closed behind him. “Christ. Asshole.”

He swans past security, which does a great deal to siphon off his resentment, and gets access to the Dealer's Room a full half-hour before everyone else, and there's a talk about kaiju breeding and the interplay between cloning, construction, and conception that he really wants to go to. He has the baby kaiju scene memorized. He has entire hard drives of theories about the purpose of the umbilical cord, his favorite being that it doesn't convey biological matter from mother to child but rather information, keeping the baby kaiju, which was created already holding all of the knowledge of its previous minds, up to date with the events that take place while its muscles and flesh finish forming.

Compared to some of that biological theory, the stuff the guy on stage is spouting is the worst kind of pseudoscience, all nanites and "Drift particles" (which are never mentioned in anything remotely canon, like are you serious, this is fucking midichlorians all over again) and gestation periods based on human ovulation cycles, and like if you absolutely have to bring that shit in at least consider elephant/lizard/shark gestation because that at least has some goddamn relevance.

"This guy's not making any sense," The man next to Newt mutters, and Newt spins on him.

"Right?!" he asks. "Thank you."

The man is huge and blond and wearing an eyepatch, and he's dressed like something out of, like, Doctor Who, but somehow he pulls it all off. He spreads his enormous hands. "If you're going to compare kaiju with anything, biologically, it should be—"

"—lizards and sharks, I know!" says Newt enthusiastically.

"And elephants," his new friend says slowly, hissing the s a little and raising his eyebrows.

"Exactly," Newt says, thrilled. If only Gottlieb were like this guy. He sticks out a hand. "Newton Geiszler."

The man grins, huge and with somehow too many teeth. "Hannibal Chau."

Newt blinks at him. "You're Hannibal Chau? No fucking way, dude, no way—oh my god, no wonder you're dressed like you are, you're in fucking costume!"

Hannibal sketches a kind of seated bow. "Author and protagonist of the Kaiju Remedies trilogy. The one and only, at your service."

Newt shakes his head. "Dude, that is like. That's my favorite fanfic—like, I don't read much, I'm kind of a purist, but your stuff—it's not even really fanfic, you don't make people make out or change any of the events, it's totally canon-compliant, you're just—adding to the world. Can you imagine how cool it would be to see some of the stuff you wrote about on the big screen? Kaiju skin parasites and shit? Fuck."

Chau looks at him. "Do you know why I chose elephants?"

"Because they're mammals that have sufficiently long gestation periods and sufficiently large abdominal cavities for—"

"Ivory," Chau interrupts, and the eye not covered by his eyepatch gleams. "Elephants are destructive and wise and huge, and they grow their own treasures." He claps Newt on the back. "We are kindred spirits, you and I."

"Right," says Newt, a little dazed. The man has hands like marble slabs. Also he smells awesome.

"Come drinking with me," Chau says, his fingers still wrapped around Newt's shoulder.

Newt thinks about that. He hasn't eaten anything in seven hours, which isn't exactly unusual, but also isn't exactly pleasant. He's also drained, from travel and anticipation and excitement and disappointment and more excitement, and he kind of feels like he needs to sit down somewhere and like. He won't say sleep because he and sleep have this thing where it only comes when he shows it how much he doesn't need it. It's not really a healthy relationship. But he needs, at the very least, to sit and stare at a wall until his brain slows down, 'til his heartbeat becomes distinguished from the frenzied hum in the back of his head.

"Tomorrow night, man," he says, and slips out from under Chau's arm. The talk is winding down, and it was bullshit anyway. "Let me get your number—"

Chau shakes his head. "I'll find you."

Newt stares at him. "Alright, uh, it was nice meeting you, then."

Chau sticks out a ring-laden hand. "And you. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Newt agrees, a little nervously, and slips away.

He gets back to the hotel room to find all the lights off, Gottlieb nothing but a shape in one of the beds. Newt rolls his eyes and pulls off his shirt, curling into the other bed and squirming around ‘til he’s comfortable.

About two minutes later, he gets back up and uses the light on his phone to see if there’s a coffee maker in the room. There is, one of those weird ones with the little individual cups, and he uses it, feeling vaguely guilty for the hissing and splashing noises it makes as it dispenses gross, too-hot coffee into the styrofoam cup. “Dude has enough money for an Ultimate Pass but he can’t afford a hotel room with real coffee,” he mutters to himself.

“There are no hotel rooms with real coffee,” Gottlieb says, back turned, “nor was it a priority for me, as I don’t drink the stuff.”

Newt picks up his styrofoam cup gingerly. “A,” he says, “you have ears like a fucking hawk, and B, you don’t drink coffee?”

“B,” says Gottlieb, “I drink tea, and A, you are louder than you think you are. Also hawks do not have ears, a fact that you, as a biologist, should probably know.”

Newt makes a noise that he hopes conveys relatively non-hostile dismissal, and sits back down on his bed. “Hey,” he says, “about earlier…”

Gottlieb doesn’t move.

Newt scratches his chin. He’s starting to get kind of stubbly, it would probably be polite to shave sometime before he has to play fiancee on Sunday. “I was gonna apologize,” he says after a minute, “but I don’t actually think I have anything to apologize for. The kaiju are by far the most fascinating part about the whole movie and also the most biologically interesting fictional race described in anything since Philip Pullman’s mulefa and if you can’t see that there’s—there’s no help for you.”

“I just think it’s a pity,” says Gottlieb slowly, “that you are so wrapped up in your made-up monsters that you can’t even see the real world possibilities of something like the Jaeger program. We are already developing—”

“Don’t talk to me about real world possibilities,” Newt interrupts. “You know why humanity made the jaegers? Because they had to. Because their whole world was shattered by this incredible species with unlimited breeding capabilities—”

“Breeding capabilities? My god, man, what on earth do breeding capabilities matter in a species that doesn’t exist?” Gottlieb’s sitting up, now, a shape in the dark with one leg sort of stiffly out in front of him, and something at the back of Newt’s mind that isn’t entirely focused on the argument notes the cane leaned up against the side of his bed. “I’m talking about real technology, already begun—”

“So am I!” Newt insists, waving his hands. “So am I, the whole kaiju system was based on stuff we’re learning right now about stem cells and remote viewing—”

“Remote viewing!” Gottlieb scoffs. “Pseudoscience at best, dangerous fraudery at worst. You cannot tell me you believe that tripe.”

“Right, because a mathematician would be able to tell the difference between cutting edge psychological research and pseudoscience,” Newt scoffs right back.

“I have a doctorate,” Hermann hisses, and Newt can kind of see the glint of his eyes in the dark. There’s a weird satisfaction in that. He likes to think maybe they’re literally glowing a little with rage.

“I have a doctorate,” he mocks, sing-song, and something thuds into the wall by his head. “Hey!” Suddenly there’s a shoe in his bed, a brown boating shoe like old people wear. “Did you throw your shoe at me? What are you, eight?”

“Says the man who just moments ago was resorting to playground taunts during intellectual debate,” Gottlieb snaps, and rolls over so his back is to Newt again. “At least if I were eight I would be asleep right now.”

Newt considers throwing the shoe back, but it’s dark and he has shitty aim at the best of times, and much as Gottlieb’s despicable and a jerk and doesn’t understand anything, he doesn’t want to actually hurt him. So he just drops it into the floor and downs his coffee (slightly too soon, ow) and settles in for a good long session of wall-staring.

Five minutes later Gottlieb shifts a little in bed and Newt blurts, “do you seriously drink tea? And you just said tripe, dude. You’re sure you’re not British?”

“Utterly,” says Gottlieb dryly. “I am German, mostly.”

“I never would have guessed, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb,” Newt mutters.

“Newton,” says Gottlieb, and there’s something weirdly satisfying about that, too, his name in that sharp voice, “shut the hell up.”

Newt closes his eyes.

When he opens them again there’s sunlight filtering in through the curtains and the other bed is empty and he is unbelievably hungry and entirely too rested for his own liking. He considers just ordering room service but he’s not really sure about the protocol for that, like, it feels too much like wantonly spending Gottlieb’s money and he’s not entirely sure how far Gottlieb’s sugar-daddy generosity extends. So he goes out, instead, and gets some actual sunlight and some actual food, and then wanders back into the convention, lazily waving his pass at security and feeling really kind of incredible. Maybe the weekend isn’t going too badly.

He ends up in the dealer’s room again, staring at the same print he was staring at for an hour the day before. It’s about the size of his chest, and it charts the progression of Otachi’s design, from something much more crocodilian through a full-winged creature to the square, blade-headed design that was in the final film, shown in the print with one wing spread and jaws agape, her brilliant blue tongue hung with glittering orbs. It’s gorgeous, all watercolors with ink highlights, and he itches to spend hundreds of dollars he doesn’t have.

After a long conversation with the artist he wanders off again, and finds himself in the game room, where Hannibal Chau is holding court.

It’s really the only word for it. He’s sitting at a round table in the back corner of the room, surrounded by people of various genders dressed like they might be auditioning for the Matrix. There are cards spread across the table, and whatever they’re playing, Chau is definitely winning. Newt debates going over to join him, but his choice is made for him when Chau booms, “Newton!”

His black-clad cronies turn to look at him in disturbing unison, and Newt gives them a little wave and wanders over to pull up a chair. “Hello, everyone,” he says, setting himself down and trying to make sense of the cards. “What are we playing?”

“Hong Kong Black Market,” explains one of the flunkies. “Hannibal made it up, it’s great.”

Great, it appears, means impossibly complicated. The game relies on an economic system unlike anything Newt’s ever seen, involving trades of various kaiju-derived products—bone meal, sperm, skin cells, hair, spit—for money and also for other such products. The goal appears to be the purchase of an entire kaiju brain, which requires one player hold more than half the total money in play. Considering there are more than ten players at the table, it seems to Newt that a single game could be literally endless.

He’s not far off. He sits there for four, five hours, making small deals and figuring out what all the cards actually do, and by hour five and a half he feels kind of like he might know most of the rules. He also feels like he might be dying, but there’s something about Chau and his inner circle of pseudo-vampires that is keeping him here. He can’t just bow out. Newton Geiszler does not back down from a challenge, unless the challenge is really stupid. Or, really, even then.

He can, however, try desperately to distract himself. “What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on one of those in real life, huh,” he jokes, nodding to the kaiju brain card, which sits at the center of the table, unattainable.

“Indeed, what wouldn’t you give?” says a quiet voice at his side, and he turns to find Gottlieb peering over his shoulder, examining the table with curious eyes. He’s leaning on a cane. “I know it can’t be your dignity, you were remarkably quick to part with that, if you ever had any at all.”

Newt rolls his eyes at him and concentrates on the board. “So you are actually here to go to the convention,” he mutters back, “I was wondering, since you seem to have missed every pertinent point of the movie the convention’s about.”

“You’re losing,” Gottlieb says, looking at his cards, “quite badly, and for no reason but your own incompetence.”

Newt frowns. “Shut up.”

Gottlieb leans in closer. “I can win this for you,” he says, almost against Newt’s ear, “but you have to admit that you want me to.”

“Fuck off,” Newt hisses.

Chau wins another huge trade, and Gottlieb says, “are you sure?”

Newt bites his lip. On the one hand, fuck this guy. On the other, winning this game would be awesome, and would free him from this eternal death trap of a table, and would show the rest of these weird neo-goths what’s up, and if there’s one thing Newton Geiszler wants to do in life it’s show weird neo-goths what’s up. Weird neo-goths are the worst.

On the third hand, Crimson Typhoon style, fuck this guy.

But.

“Fine,” he mutters. “Help me. Please.”

Gottlieb plucks a card from his hand and lays it on the table. “500,000 yen,” he announces to the table at large, “and I shall be joining poor Newton’s team, if no one objects. Gentlemen?”

No one objects, to Newt’s despair. Hannibal Chau gives Gottlieb a once-over that Newt both appreciates and dislikes. He appreciates it because it feels kind of like Chau’s his bodyguard, which is pretty awesome, and he dislikes it because… he’s not entirely sure, but it feels kind of unfair, like Chau’s judging something that isn’t his to judge.

“400,000 yen,” Chau says at last.

Gottlieb smirks. “400,000 and your stock of kaiju blood.”

Chau stares at him for a minute, and then barks a laugh and slams a hand down on the table. Several of his younger lackeys jump. “500,000 it is,” he says, and tosses Gottlieb a salute. Newt feels his insides twist with jealousy. Gottlieb’s not supposed to get along with these people. He objected to Chau’s once-over when he thought it would come up negative. Now that it’s come up positive he hates it even more.

His mood doesn’t last long, though. Gottlieb makes every move that Newt thinks is stupid and dangerous and will lose them literally all of their money, and he tells him so at length, to no avail, and the suddenly they’re winning, suddenly they’re winning a lot. Newt starts to understand what Hermann's doing, and once in a while puts down a card defiantly before Hermann tells him to, only to look over and see Hermann nod, just a little, and follow it up with another, announcing the terms of the deal in a cool, detached voice. Newt starts laughing, startled and disbelieving. “Holy shit, dude,” he says as they come within 100 yen of actually buying the fucking kaiju brain. “We’re actually going to win. You’re brilliant.”

He doesn’t even mean to say it, but once it’s out he can’t exactly take it back. Gottlieb looks surprised for a second, and then he smiles at Newt. It’s not a bitter smirk or a fake stretch of lips over teeth, but a real smile, and suddenly his entire face makes sense. His eyes warm and he has stupidly perfect teeth and his cheekbones fit and there are tiny crow’s feet by his eyes. It’s like fucking daybreak, and it knocks all the breath out of Newt’s lungs.

Gottlieb doesn’t seem to notice, just turns back to the board and, still smiling, lays down the winning card. Newt tears his eyes away from his profile and leaps to his feet. “Yes!” he crows, half in triumph and half to cover his rising panic re: suddenly beautiful doctors. “That baby is all mine.”

Chau laughs, booming and huge. “What a goddamn game,” he says, shaking his head. “What a goddamn game.” He plucks the card off the table and hands it to Newt. “Keep it,” he says, “and tell your boyfriend that was the best game of Black Market I’ve ever played.”

Newt blinks and looks around. Gottlieb is already halfway across the room, moving in quick staccato.

"Celebratory drinks, my friend?" Chau offers, and Newt looks back at him.

"I, um." He jerks his thumb over his shoulder. "I should probably go to talk to—uh, my boyfriend."

Chau nods thoughtfully. "Tomorrow, then."

"Definitely," Newt says, because he does want to, it's just there's some shit he needs to sort out first.

Newt follows him, jogging to catch up. Once he does he finds he has nothing to say, so he just keeps pace at Gottlieb’s side. The doctor glances at him a few times, but says nothing until they reach the hotel room. Gottlieb lets them in, and then turns on his heel, cocking his head at Newt. “You’re silent. Is this my reward for winning the game for you?”

Newt shrugs a little, and then taps the kaiju brain card against his palm. “Do you think it’s possible for a human to drift with a kaiju?”

Gottlieb sighs. “I’ll take that as a no.” He tosses his keys onto the table. “A single human? No. Perhaps two, if they were drift compatible and understood its brain chemistry. But why on earth would you want to?”

Newt shakes his head. “See, this is what I don’t get about you. You’ve got no sense of inquiry.”

Hermann regards him sideways. “Do tell.”

Newt crosses his arms. “You’re so fucking smart, but you’re not using it for anything. I looked you up, you know. The last article you published was in 2009. But here you are, rich as hell, just. Wasting your mind on, on what?”

“Card games, today, and arguing with imbeciles,” Gottlieb says, irritable.

Newt spreads his hands. “What, are you independently wealthy?”

Gottlieb sighs, a tension suddenly back in his shoulders that Newt hasn't noticed was gone. “Something like that,” he says dismissively, and it makes Newt itch to keep talking to him, bother him until they’re fighting again because at least then he wouldn’t be ignored.

The problem is, he doesn’t know what to say.

Gottlieb putters around his bed, folding his clothes neatly and tidying his books (he brought books, what the hell). "Geez, Doc, you act like you're in the military."

"Not exactly," Gottlieb says. "And please don't call me Doc. If you must call me anything, call me Hermann."

"Noted," says Newt. He sits down on his bed, and then leans over to steal one of Gottlieb—Hermann’s books. It seems pretty awesome, actually, about recent breakthroughs in the German aeronautics program, but he's not about to admit that.

He could go spend time at the convention, he's almost certain there's a totally fascinating panel going on right now.

"Hey," he says finally, "you want to watch it?"

Gottlieb regards him wearily. "Watch what?"

Newt digs around in his backpack for a minute, and then flips a DVD case onto the table. "Atlantic Edge," he says, and kindly leaves off the obviously.

Hermann looks at the DVD, then at him, then back at the DVD. "Why not," he says at length, and Newt grins at him.

They end up on Newt's bed watching it on Newt's baby, his huge, custom-built laptop, because the DVD player under the hotel TV seems to be fake, or at the very least so broken it shows no signs of life at all. Plus, Newt's screen is HD and his speakers are awesome and this way they can always pause and talk about scenes. Or whatever.

Maybe it's the arguing or the exhaustion, but somehow he doesn't feel as inclined to stop it and rant as much as he usually does, and they watch in relative silence, Hermann occasionally muttering a dry comment or Newt pointing out something that is so overwhelmingly cool that he can't help himself. He finds himself paying attention to stuff he hasn't before, actually watching the human to human scenes without fucking around on his phone.

The Marshall shares a particularly long and intense look with Achilles Hansen, and finally Newt speaks up. "Dude," he says, "this movie's pretty gay."

The corner of Hermann's mouth turns up. "Indeed," he says, "so much so that it may have in fact been the initial draw for some people."

Newt looks at him curiously. "Really? You know, I was wondering. You don't really seem..."

"I don't really seem the type to like movies about giant robots battling monsters?"

"You don't really seem the type to like fun, honestly," Newt admits, because fuck it. "So. Judging by the whole male fiancée thing. You're gay?"

Hermann blinks at him, slow. "Not entirely."

Newt rolls his eyes. "Jesus, are you entirely anything?"

Hermann scowls at him. "What on earth is that supposed to mean?"

Newt throws up his hands. "You're not entirely gay, you're mostly German, you’re something like independently wealthy, you're not exactly in the military—can't you just be something, be whole—"

"Oh, that's sensitive, considering my circumstances," Hermann snarls, but Newton shouts right over him.

"Bullshit," he snaps. "What fucking circumstances? Your leg not working the way mine does doesn't make you less whole, just like my fucked up brain chemicals don't make me less whole." He plants a hand on Hermann's chest, over his heart. "What makes you a freak is in here, asshole."

Hermann licks his lips like he's about to roar back, but doesn't. He drops his eyes to Newt's hand and then back to his face, silently staring him down until Newt takes his hand away. He swallows his apology. He’s not certain, yet, that it's warranted.

He runs his hand through his hair instead and nearly misses it when Hermann says quietly, "what about you, then, are you wholly straight?"

Newt's startled into a laugh. "Dude, what? I'm not even a little straight."

Hermann's face goes blank. "But your Facebook profile said you liked girls—"

"My Facebook profile also says I worship the fucking Flying Spaghetti Monster, because I haven't updated that shit since I was seventeen," Newt says. "Besides, I do like girls, and guys, and everyone else. Just 'cause I love the ladies doesn't make me straight. I'm queer as hell, dude."

Hermann rolls off the bed and grabs his cane, going to stand by the window and stare at the street below.

"I mean, shit, I wasn't even sure I identified as male for a while," Newt continues, and for the second time in two days misses Tendo Choi like a missing limb.

His phone buzzes—a call from Mako—but Hermann's silent, still staring out the window, shoulders hunched, and Newt ignores it. He can call her back later.

"What," he says, "it's not like this changes anything."

"I don't like unexpected variables," Hermann says tightly.

"Oh come on, what possible effect could the 'unexpected variable' of my sexuality have on the situation?" Newt asks, doing exaggerated air quotes. He slides to the edge of the bed and stands, pulling a face. "You think just because I like dick I'm going to fall for you? Dude. We've barely been able to go five minutes in the same room without cursing each other out."

Hermann spins. "Yes," he hisses, "and doesn't it get your blood up?" He advances on Newt, crowding right up into his space, shifts the grip on his cane so he can slip the handle of it up under Newt's chin, against his throat. "Isn't it thrilling, to match wits with someone as bitter and brilliant as you are?" He tilts Newt's head up with the cane, a little too hard, smooth, cool wood against the line of his jaw. He bares his teeth, gritting out mocking words. "Doesn't it make your soul sing and your heart pound, Newton, to sharpen your mind against my whetstone?"

There's a split second of perfect silence where they're so close Newt can feel the heat of his skin. Now that he’s seen Hermann’s smile it’s like his face is forever changed, his scowl just a paper mask, a Halloween costume to frighten people away.

He thinks, for one terrifying eternity, that Hermann is actually waiting for him to answer, but then he spins away, leaning heavily on his cane on his way back to the window. "This is the only way I know how to love," he says matter-of-factly, "because this is the only way I know how to be. So forgive me if I am not so quick to dismiss the possibility as you are."

Newt runs a shaking hand through his hair. "Dude," he says weakly, "you think way too highly of yourself."

"Perhaps," Hermann says quietly, "but perhaps not, and therein lies the problem. Like I said, I don't like unexpected variables. The more the world is quantifiable, the happier I am." He turns to look at Newt, a little half-smile curving his lips. It's not the full experience, but it's enough to lend warmth to his eyes. "That is what I am, fully and entirely. I am a mathematician. Numbers, Newton, do not lie. Politics and poetry and promises, these are lies. Numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God."

Newt flops back on the bed, starfish-style. He feels nervous and off-balance. He licks his lips. "Math," he says, "is boring."

When this doesn't get the rise he wants out of Hermann, he frowns and rolls up on one shoulder to look at him. “Hang on,” he says, “if you were on my facebook profile, why did you tell me to send you a picture? And why were you surprised by my tattoos when I showed up?”

Hermann fixes the cuffs on his shirt. “It was a test. I wanted to see what side of yourself you would present.”

“And?” Newt demands.

Hermann lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “You wish to be more respectable than you are, but you don’t have illusions, nor do you hide your enthusiasm for the pieces of yourself that you like, few and far between as they may be.” He looks at Newt. “Also, if anyone were to accuse you of wishing to be respectable, you would immediately deny it, and fling yourself in the opposite direction, announcing in any means possible your love of counter-culture and the rebellious.”

Newt stares at him. “Yeah, well,” he says defensively, “what-whatever, man.” He pulls his laptop to him. "Let's just finish watching the movie.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “If it helps, we can pretend I'm straight."

Hermann rolls his eyes but crosses back to the bed, propping his cane against the bedside table. Newt rolls over to make room for him, and when Hermann's swung his leg up and settled himself against the pillows he starts the movie back up.

As soon as Sayako comes on screen, he says in an admiring tone, "Aw, yeah, god, look at her. What a hottie."

He glances sideways at Hermann, who has his eyes trained on the screen, expression bland.

There's a fleeting shot of the female Russian. Newt announces, too loudly, "What a babe," and Hermann's jaw tightens.

He waits until the fight scene between Sayako and Bailey, and as Sayako executes her winning move Newt pitches his voice so he's barely doing anything but moaning: "Fuck, that's hot."

"Really, very much not helping," Hermann snaps, and Newt smirks at him.

"That one wasn't pretending," he says cheerfully. "This scene was intentionally shot like a love scene, so it's not even my fault if it gets me all hot and bothered."

"Keep it up and I shall go to sleep and leave you to your...." his lip curls up. "Pleasures."

“How will I survive without your charming company,” Newt responds in his best approximation of Hermann’s accent.

“You are an insufferable, vulgar child,” Hermann says, but he doesn’t move.

“You’re the one fake-engaged to me,” Newt points out, and watches Sayako and Bailey move in perfect tandem, sees the rush of synchronicity in Bailey’s face. “What does that say about you?”

“That I am bad at judging real-life character from online presence,” Hermann mutters.

“Considering you told me my online presence struck you as unreliable, I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Newt counters, and Hermann curls his lip but doesn’t deny it.

He’s not entirely sure when they stop bickering and start dozing off, but he has vague memories of waking up enough to shove his laptop onto the floor and toss his glasses somewhere, and vaguer memories of Hermann curling into his side, shoving his forehead hard against Newt’s collarbone like he’s trying to break through it to what’s beyond. He’s all bones and scowling, even in his sleep.

Newt dreams of huge, metal structures, creaking and groaning as they move, of hissing steam and a face he recognizes but can’t quite place. He wakes to Hermann shaking against him, his breath coming quick through his nose, and he keeps clutching and clutching at Newt’s chest. Newt blinks himself fully awake, sees the flicker of Hermann’s eyes behind his eyelids, and tries to gently disengage. “Hermann,” he says, and it’s a little clumsy on his tongue, too intimate but fitting for the too-intimate situation, tangled in bed in the pre-dawn light. “Hermann, wake up, you’re dreaming—”

Hermann’s hands find his face and then his eyes snap open, unfocused, and he shoves Newt away, breathing hard. He half-falls out of bed, sweat standing out on his forehead, and careens from bed to chair to doorway and into the bathroom, where Newt can hear him retching.

He goes to stand in the doorway, feeling like he should somehow be helping.

“Nightmares, huh,” he says stupidly.

Hermann glares at him, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “There was never a genius without a tincture of madness,” he says, his voice coming out raw.

Newt blinks at him. “From vomiting to quoting Aristotle in thirty seconds flat. I admit, I’m impressed.”

Hermann sneers at him and pushes himself to his feet. He uses the sink for support, turning on the water and staring at himself in the mirror. When he sees Newt hasn't moved, he snarls, "this isn't a spectator sport, Geiszler," and slams the door in Newt's face.

Newt stares at it for a minute, and then finds his glasses and wanders over to the shitty coffee pot. He rocks back and forth on his heels as the stream of coffee hisses into his cup. When Hermann hasn’t come out of the bathroom by the time the coffee is cool enough to drink, he spends a minute longer staring at the bathroom door and then shrugs and he sets off for the convention.

That is, after all, the reason he’s here.

It’s early for much to be happening yet, but he comes across a stage where some stunt men are doing a stage-combat demonstration. They move smoothly from stance to stance, and it really is like dancing, a thrust-riposte with a satisfying rhythm that has as much to do with empathy as it does aggression. One of the stunt men slides a foot under the other, and the other throws himself over backwards in a graceful fall. Trust and response. The “victor” levels his staff at the “loser”, nudging it up under his chin like he’s holding him at swordpoint. They’re both breathing hard and grinning at each other, and the audience erupts into applause, Newt with them.

He remembers smooth, cold wood at his throat, shakes his head, and moves on.

The Otachi print is gone from the dealer’s room. He feels a pang of loss, despite the fact that he’d never be able to afford it anyway. He drifts from room to room, feeling kind of useless. A week ago he would have given up his firstborn child to be here, but right now he doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

He goes back to the hotel room. Hermann’s not there, and he can’t decide if he’s glad or upset. It gives him the chance to shower, at least, and shave, and pull on clothes that are maybe slightly less rumpled by fitful sleep and Hermann’s hands.

The shower helps. He runs his hands over his chest and arms under the heat of the spray, tracing the line of his incomplete tattoos, and embarks on a really very fruitful line of thought involving what would happen if two humans were to drift with a kaiju brain. He resolves to hunt down Hannibal Chau when he gets back to the convention floor, and washes the last of his discontent down the drain with a satisfied smile.

Chau’s not in the game room or anywhere else on the main floor, so he checks the panel schedule. Neural Handshakes: The Science of the Drift sounds very cool, but not really up Chau’s alley. The Kaiju Wall; Cancelling the Apocalypse: The Character of the Marshall; We Created Monsters: The Real-World Applicability of the Jaeger Program.

He frowns at the last one, and flips to the more complete description: robotics and Japanese-American relations, blah blah blah, only a step into the future, okay, presented by: James Mallory and H. Gottlieb.

Newt blinks, and checks his watch. He’s forty minutes late.

He slips into the back of the room, quiet but once again apparently not quiet enough, because Gottlieb’s eyes find him immediately. His lips thin. The other guy, Mallory, is talking; something about chassis design and the logic of the placement of pilots in the jaegers’ chest: “All models after Mk I have a standardized cockpit, so that in times of emergency other pilots can use a jaeger left abandoned by its original team—except, obviously, for Crimson Typhoon, which was built specifically for the triplets and would be nearly impossible to pilot for anyone else.”

He’s a slight, dark man, all nervous energy, and next to him on stage Gottlieb seems carved of ice.

Mallory shoves his hands in his pockets. “Of course, the mechanical standardization is only one aspect of being able to pilot a jaeger, but it's the one we are able to grasp, not yet having discovered Drift science." He chuckles a little to himself, and a few weirdos in the audience chuckle along with him. “I am of the opinion, in fact, that the mechanical technology and the jaegar program in general is the most impressive and exciting aspect of Atlantic Edge. I know my colleague here agrees.” He indicates Hermann, who gives a stiff nod. New snorts, and thinks, boy, does he ever.

“I do,” says Hermann, stepping forward, “and for good reason. I have actually been involved—”

“Hey,” says Hannibal Chau, about three inches away from Newt’s left ear, and Newt kicks the chair in front of him in an attempt to not shriek like a little girl. The clang! of his foot hitting metal rings through the room, and seven or eight separate people turn around to shush him. He doesn’t dare check if Hermann noticed.

“Your boyfriend’s a smart guy,” Hannibal says, still very, very close.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Newt says absently, because he really, really wants to hear this, and Chau’s huge head right alongside his is not helping. He chances a glance at the stage. Hermann’s started talking again, and he catches, “classified experiments in—” and then Chau interrupts again.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “It sounds like your night last night went as badly as mine went well.”

Newt blinks, because what, and then mutters, “no, listen, we didn’t break up, he was never my boyfriend in the first place. We’re not dating. Never were, never will, etc, etc.”

Hermann’s wrapping up whatever he’s saying on stage, and Newt kind of wants to punch Chau in the face except for how that would definitely end up hurting him way more than it would Chau, and possibly lead to, like, assassination. He applauds dutifully and watches as Hermann steps down from the stage. A pretty redhead intercepts him, and he leans down to hear her over the crowd.

"Ah," says Chau. "Odd. I'm not often wrong about people."

Newt shrugs, his eyes still on Hermann, until Hermann meets them. He hurriedly looks away, shooting to his feet. "Hannibal," he says.

Chau looks at him from where he's leaning over the back of two chairs at once. He’s still in his costume, and Newt admires yet again how well he manages to wear such a ridiculous outfit. He raises his eyebrows.

Newt grins at him. "Let's go get drunk."

Which is how he ends up in the hotel bar, talking very seriously to three weird neo-goths who, it turns out, are actually pretty cool, and Hannibal keeps buying him shots. He has one heavy arm slung over Newt’s shoulder, the other wrapped around an endless beer.

“Okay, so,” Newt says, “new theory: Atlantic Edge is real, kaiju exist, and I’m right about everything I’ve ever speculated about, and he’s just here to—to keep me down, man, to head me off before I stumble onto the dangerous shit.”

He’s 80% sure it’s not his fault they’re talking about Hermann Gottlieb. He’s pretty sure they had been talking about the implications that the kaiju had destroyed or possibly been the dinosaurs, and he’d been all about that conversation, and then. Well, okay, he’s 70% sure it’s not his fault they’re talking about Hermann Gottlieb.

“Maybe he’s a robot,” one of the neo-goths says, the platinum blonde one with the star tattoo on her cheek.

“We already ruled that out,” says another, the nonbinary one with the nose piercing and the pretty eyes. “Keep up.”

“Yeah, he’s too…” Newt says, and then makes a gesture even he doesn’t understand. He reaches over and steals a sip of Hannibal’s beer.

He’s 60% sure it’s not his fault they’re talking about Hermann Gottlieb.

“Newt,” Hannibal says, “I have a proposal for you.”

“Sorry, man,” Newt says indulgently, “I’m already fake engaged.”

“You’re a smart man,” Hannibal says, ignoring him. He has this habit of talking very close into Newt’s face, and it makes his face kind of distracting. “I have a feeling you could help my little business be quite profitable.”

“Business?”

Hannibal lays an actual finger alongside his nose, like a picturebook Santa, and winks. The fact that he’s still wearing his eyepatch reduces the effect a little. “Kaiju may not be real, but much of my writing does draw from experience, if you know what I mean.”

Newt blinks at him, and then cracks up, slipping a finger under the edge of his eyepatch and flipping it up. “I’m a biologist, not a chemist. You’re not Jesse Pinkman and I’m no Walter Whoooly shit you’re actually missing the eye.”

He slips slowly backwards off his barstool in shock, landing half in the lap of the nose-ringed neo-goth, who very graciously helps him to his feet.

Hannibal fixes his eyepatch, apparently unfazed. “Truth is stranger than fiction, little guy.”

“I think,” says Newt, feeling suddenly very full, of booze and ideas and talking, “I’m going to go home now.”

Hannibal regards him from the height of his bar stool, his beer still hanging from his one huge hand. “Keep my offer in mind.”

Newt nods and shoves his glasses up his nose. “Yes,” he says, “um, will do, man. Sir. Hannibal.”

Hannibal nods. “Good.”

“Let me walk you home,” Nose Ring murmurs in his ear, and, like, why the fuck not, so they take the elevator together from the con floor to the fifteenth. Newt’s humming the bassline to Metallica’s Battery, tapping the drumline against the elevator handrail.

He has always been, against all odds, a very happy drunk. Nose Ring is watching him, amused, and he taps them on the nose. “You have very pretty eyes.”

“Thank you,” they say, hands settling on Newt’s hips, and then the elevator dings and Newt pulls them through the door. Newt wonders whether Hermann will be in the room, and figures he’ll give Nose Ring a fond goodnight kiss at the door.

He slides his key into the lock.

Which is, of course, how we get here:

Newt standing in the doorway, drunk and suddenly struggling for breath, his eyes glued to the shift of pale muscle that is Hermann Gottlieb’s back, to the nails digging into his hips. He can hear Hermann’s harsh breaths, and as he stands frozen he hears him murmur, voice pulled low and warm, “fuck.”

Nose Ring pulls Newt away and closes the door behind him.

He doesn’t really even have it in him to be embarrassed. He just sinks down right there on the floor, his back to the hallway wall, and closes his eyes.

It occurs to him that for all their shouting at one another, that’s the first time he’s ever heard Hermann curse.

He feels Nose Ring settle beside him. “Sorry,” he says softly, reaching out blindly to pat whatever part of them he can find. “Give-give me a minute.”

They just slip an arm over his shoulder. “We can go back to mine, if you want,” they offer, voice gentle, and Newt can’t decide if he wants to cry or punch someone.

“Yeah,” he says after a minute, because it’s not like he can just sit in the hall all night. “Thank you. Yes.”

It takes him another minute to open his eyes, and then Nose Ring pulls him to his feet and leads him back into the elevator. They don’t talk until they get six floors higher and into their room. Newt sinks down on the bed with a shaky sigh. This, this is not a good feeling. He’s not thinking about anything. He’s not sad, or jealous, or upset, he’s just. Not. And he doesn’t know what to do with it. He is nothing without his brain, and someone has fucking stolen it out of his head, leaving him with a vast echoing space made blank with shock.

“Coffee?” Nose Ring asks, holding out the same fucking styrofoam cups that Newt’s room has, and Newt takes it, staring up at them.

“You’re a goddamn angel,” he says, and then winces. “I’m sorry, I am, I’m usually better company—well, no, usually I’m worse company, usually I’m the kind of company that fucks up your living room and makes your neighbors call the cops because of the noise complaints.” He chances a smile, and it doesn’t feel too much like a grimace. “But.”

They nod at him. “Well,” they say, “I guess we really can rule out robot.”

Newt chuckles, and maybe it’s the coffee or maybe it's the company but his brain seems to be thawing out a little. Any time he tries to think back to, like, five minutes ago, though, it’s like there’s—a patch of quicksand, and in the middle is just a bunch of blank shock, to be sorted through when he has time, and not when there’s someone with bow lips and pretty eyes and freckles sitting knee-to-knee with him, looking all concerned and cute.

“Hi,” he says, and smiles.

“Hi,” they say, and kiss him. It’s a very nice kiss, from a very nice mouth, and a very nice person attached. Newt is immediately bored.

He manages to have a perfectly nice night anyway. They talk about MIT and NYU and Nose Ring’s ex-girlfriend, who they’re totally still head-over-heels for, and then take a left turn into the cloning possibilities of stem cell research. They exchange kisses between sips of coffee, and by morning Newt’s feeling pretty close to (his version) of normal. As dawn starts filtering through the curtains Nose Ring says, from where they’re curled against Newt’s chest, “It’s alright, babe, we don’t have to do anything but talk.” Their voice is mocking and dry, and Newt rubs a hand across his face.

“Fuck,” he says sincerely, “I promise I didn’t mean to be that kind of girl.”

They chuckle and kiss him again. “Do you even know my name?” They ask, without malice.

He scrunches up his face guiltily. “Um. Kade. Casey?”

They giggle into his neck. “Newton Geiszler, you are one hundred percent that kind of girl.”

“Not usually,” he protests, not that this is usual, not that a single moment of this weekend had been usual.

”Hit me up some time when you’re less preoccupied and we’ll test that theory.” They push themself to their feet and stretch, and he admires the curve of their back. They’d lost their shirt somewhere between the flaws of Clone Wars and the reproductive capabilities of the Ditto species of Pokemon, and he’s starting to regret the onset of dawn.

He pushes himself up on his elbows. “Kennedy,” he says, and they turn, surprised, all picked out in cold grey light, a smile blooming across their face.

“See?” he asks. “Not so awful.” He taps his temple. “I’ve got whole textbooks in here, so I only make room for the important stuff.”

They look amused, if unimpressed. “Glad I made the cut,” they say dryly, and leans down to kiss his cheek. “Go sort out your shit. I’ve got to get on a train.”

"Right," Newt says, and stands, staggering a little until his legs remember what legs are supposed to do.

Kennedy walks him out, and as he turns to say goodbye says, "Wait, hang on, one thing—" and leans up to latch their teeth into the skin under his jaw.

Their hands are in his hair and they're sucking hard on his neck and he gasps, eyes flying wide in shock and, shit, this will definitely leave a bruise.

They lean back, smile wicked. "There. Now you have ammunition, should you need it."

He takes a shaky breath. "Um," he says. "Thank you. For that, but also. The rest of it."

They smile. "Go on."

He stumbles into the elevator, half-hard and hungover, and thinks, yeah, this is more like how I thought this convention would go.

He slips as quietly as he can into the room to find the shower on and Hermann's redhead sitting in his bed, mostly-dressed and brushing her hair. Newt stops just inside the door and searches desperately for something to say.

He finally settles on, “oh, hey.” Newton Geiszler everyone, soon to be two-time graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She looks up and blushes a little. It’s pretty. He has a second or two of hating her, and then hates himself for it. It’s much more comfortable.

“Hey,” she says, and makes a face, somewhere between embarrassed and self-deprecating. “I’ll, uh. I’ll head out soon.”

“No problem,” Newt says vaguely, and drops onto his bed, still wearing his shoes.

Hermann comes out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist. His hair is slicked back from his face, and Newt has a mad moment of seeing what he might have been at eighteen, open and young and eager, eyes not yet narrowed against the world.

He feels like he should laugh, but he’s doing badly enough at the breathing thing.

Hermann doesn’t say anything to him, just looks away and crosses to the girl, smiling a little. She smiles back, looking up at him through the curtain of her wet hair.

“Thank you,” says Hermann, “for a truly splendid evening.”

She smiles wider and accepts the hand he offers her. “Anytime.” She leans in to kiss him on the cheek, and Newt flips over onto his stomach, pulling out his phone just to be doing something, anything.

When she’s gone he looks up, lets himself stare again at Hermann’s back, at the crooked line of his spine. Relaxed, he’s got almost no muscle at all, just strange angles and bones and miles of pale skin. It doesn’t really help.

“Fun night?” he asks, and it comes out bitter.

Hermann sniffs and turns around. “Very, though I’m not sure why you think it’s any of your business.” His lip curls. “You look terrible.”

Newt flips back onto his back, staring holes in the dark screen of his iPhone. “You know, if you could just pick up a date any time you wanted, why even bother buying me? I’m sure it was much cheaper getting her in bed, all you needed was a few drinks and a lobotomy.”

Hermann leans down to gather up his clothes. “We spent much of the evening discussing her own research in the field of manned robotics,” he says. “She found my talk quite fascinating. I’m sure I’d be interested to hear what you thought as well, if you hadn’t shown up forty-five minutes late and barged in like a rampaging elephant.” He stands up straight, and the towel slips a little down his nonexistant hips. “Tell me, Newton,” he says acidly, “do you enjoy making an ass of yourself at every turn?”

Newt wants to kiss him more than he’s wanted to kiss anyone in his life.

He must stay silent too long, because the disdain in Hermann’s face flickers with something like concern, and he takes a step towards him. “Newt—”

“Just give me some fucking space, man, okay?” Newt snaps, which in retrospect might come off a little harsh, considering there’s still upwards of four feet between them. “I, uh, I gotta make a phone call,” he mutters, and rolls out of bed and onto his feet. He lets himself out of the room without looking back.

He doesn’t stop until he gets outside. It’s a beautiful morning, the streets washed pale gold in early sun.

He’d claimed the phone call as excuse to get out of the room, but he’s dialing before he lets himself think about it, his fingers finding the buttons by memory. He waits while it rings, gnawing his lip.

The voice on the other end of the line is puzzled but awake. “Hello?”

He closes his eyes, remembering other suns and other lips he longed to kiss. “Happy sunrise,” he says.

There’s a short pause, and then Tendo Choi says softly, “Happy sunrise, Newt.”

Newt’s lips twitch. “How, how are you, man, how have you been?”

“I’ve been good,” Tendo says with a sigh. “Really good. Surprisingly enough marriage agrees with me.”

“Nobody’s surprised,” Newt says. “We all knew Alison would shape you up.”

“Yeah,” Tendo says happily, and it doesn’t hurt even a little bit.

“That’s kind of what I called about, actually,” Newt says.

Tendo snorts. “You called me for the first time in eight months to talk about my wife?”

Newt shakes his head and then realizes Tendo can’t actually see him. “No,” he says. “About—marriage, I guess. Marital problems.”

Tendo laughs so hard he has to put the phone down, Newt hears it hit the table.

"I don't have anyone else to turn to, man," he whines, when he’s pretty sure Tendo’s picked up the phone again. "You're the only married dude I know!"

"Not for long," says Tendo, still kind of chuckling.

"What do you mean?"

Tendo makes a startled noise, swallowing the tail end of his laughter. "You haven't heard? Shit, I thought you'd be the first to know. Mako and Raleigh, man. They're getting hitched."

Newt feels like someone set a bomb off in his gut, the rush of joy and the rush of hurt colliding into something sick and excited. "What? When? How do you know?"

"They haven't set a date, but judging by how long they've been basically married anyway it'll be pretty soon. Raleigh called this morning, I figured Mako'd already given you the good news."

Newt remembers with a start the missed call that he never bothered to return. “She probably tried,” he allows, “I’ve been kinda unreachable.”

“Due to your marital problems,” Tendo says.

“No! Well, I guess, yes.” Newt scuffs his foot against the pavement and stares up at the sky. “You always said I fall for people too fast.”

“I think you actually just start out halfway in love,” Tendo says, “and then, like, work your way one way or the other from there. It’s one of the best things about being your friend, and probably one of the worst ones about being you.”

Newt squeezes his eyes closed. “That’s not the point, though, that’s not even—I can deal with that, you know? Like you said, it happens all the time, and even if this, this feels different, I’m. I can handle it.”

Tendo just waits, and Newt loves him for it. He takes a breath. “What do you do if like. You and Alison are fighting, but you have to go to a party, or a dinner or something, and you really want to just, just throttle her for being so infuriating but you have to make nice in front of the family and pretend you’re over-the-moon happy, because it’s important to her, it’s important to her that these people think you’re happy together, and that matters to you, even if right now you’re mad?”

There’s a pause, and then Tendo says drily, “I rarely feel the urge to throttle my wife.”

“That’s because you have a fuckin' fairytale romance, and Mako and Raleigh have a fairytale romance, and I’ve got. I’ve got an asshole of a fake fiancee who I met literally three days ago, and last night I walked in on him getting a blowjob from some girl and it shouldn’t matter but it really, really does.” He sinks down to sit on the curb. “It matters a lot and I don’t know what to do about it except pretend it doesn’t, you know? Because there’s no, there’s no reason it should.”

“Hey,” says Tendo. “You told me once to stop feeling guilty about shit I couldn’t change. Although I think you phrased it something like it’s all fuckin' biology and psychology, man, so what’s choice anyway in all of that?”

“Sounds like me,” Newt mutters. “Man, I’m a dick.”

Tendo chuckles. “Maybe, but you have your moments.” There’s a beat of silence, and then: “I think you answered your own question, also.”

“Really? When?”

“You said it’s important to this guy that whoever you’re showing off for think you’re all golden and happy and lovey-dovey, right? And it matters to you that it go well, because you care about him.”

“Yeah,” says Newt, “though don’t ask me when the fuck that happened.”

“So that’s how you do it. You make nice, because it’s important to someone you care about. It’s worth it, to lay aside your jealousy and your anger and everything, because it’ll make him happy.”

Newt blinks, and sees Hermann’s smile.

“Hell,” Tendo continues, “you’re not even in love with me and I’m pretty sure you’d take a bullet for me. Putting aside some negative feelings for this guy should be easy.”

Newt squints into the sky. The wind is picking up, making leaves dance around the corners of the buildings. “I’d take a bullet in like. The arm, maybe.”

Tendo laughs. “Liar.”

Newt licks his lips, grinning. “Yeah, yeah.” He sighs. “This is gonna suck.”

“Probably,” Tendo replies. “Who’s the lucky man? Anyone I know?”

“I doubt it,” Newt says. “Hermann Gottlieb, he’s a mathema—”

“A mathematician, and a physicist, and one of the smartest men in the world, if he’d ever do anything with it,” Tendo interrupts. “Newt, he was at Anchorage.”

Newt feels like someone’s punched him in the side of the head. “What?”

“He was one of the developers of the program Yancy and I were working on,” Tendo continues, all trace of laughter gone from his voice. “You never asked what happened to his leg, huh.”

“Shit,” says Newt. “Shit, you’re serious?”

“He disappeared once he was out of the hospital. I tried to track him down, but the guy knows how to stay off the map. How the hell did you two meet?”

Newt blinks, trying to process Hermann not as some alien outsider but as another hub of his social life, his family, someone tangled up with all the people he loves. It makes everything make sense, and also makes everything much, much harder. “He really, really likes Atlantic Edge,” he says absently, and then the second wave of realization hits, and he nearly drops his phone. “Fuck. Shit. Tendo, I have to go.”

“Yeah,” says Tendo, “alright, good luck. Be careful with him.”

Newt pauses mid-hangup. “What do you mean?”

“He was… changed, by what happened at Anchorage,” Tendo says. “We all were, but his injury…” Tendo sighs. “If you let him, he’ll melt away from you as easily as he melted away two years ago, and I don’t think that’d be good for either of you.”

Newt swallows. “Yeah,” he says.

“You’ve got good taste, at least,” Tendo says, and Newt chuckles weakly at him and hangs up.

Hermann doesn’t get back to the hotel room until nearly five. Newt’s sitting on his bed, staring at the kaiju brain card, and when Hermann opens the door he says immediately, “I know what you have nightmares about.”

Hermann closes the door behind him slowly, like he’s not sure he won’t want to walk right out of it again. “Pardon?”

“I know what you have nightmares about,” Newt says again, “because I have nightmares about it too.”

Hermann’s lips twitch downward. “I highly doubt—”

“Yancy Becket,” Newt says.

Hermann somehow goes even paler than normal. His hand tightens on his cane. “How on earth—”

“His little brother Raleigh’s one of my best friends,” Newt says quietly, watching Hermann as he limps over to his bed and sits down heavily. “You were on my facebook, you must have seen him.”

Hermann shakes his head. “I thought I was imagining the resemblance,” he says blankly. “I see him everywhere, you know. I thought that was just a, a cliche, but there it is.”

Newt nods, and swallows hard. “I wasn’t—I only met him once, I went up to Anchorage to visit Tendo Choi. He’s—also a friend.”

Gottlieb raises an eyebrow at the pronoun, but says nothing.

“You must’ve been there then, I guess, too,” Newt continues, and this isn’t something he talks about, not ever, because everyone around him has so much more pain than he does and it always feels cheap, somehow, to mention his little waves in the face of Tendo’s lake and Raleigh’s roaring ocean of sorrow. But here, he thinks maybe Hermann needs to hear this. “The work you were doing…Obviously I don’t know much about the specifics, but. That was incredible stuff, man, I’ve never seen anything like it, and Yancy was—he was a hero, as much as any astronaut or soldier.”

“Yes,” says Hermann. “And I killed him.”

“No,” Newt says, and the force of it pushes him to his feet. “No, fuck that, stop it.”

Hermann looks up at him, his lips curved in nothing at all like a smile. “Why should I? It’s what happened.”

Newt shakes his head. “It’s not,” he says. “I was there for the funeral, I fucking—I went with Raleigh to identify the body, and I may not have a doctorate but I know the human body, I know what it looks like when someone drowns. There was nothing you could have done. It was—it was chance, an accident, an act of God, and that’s all there is to it.”

Hermann avoids his gaze. “Gott oder Gottlieb,” he murmurs mockingly, and Newt wants to shake him.

“I’m serious,” he starts, but then Hermann turns to look at him, and he stops, his words caught in his throat. There are tears in Hermann’s eyes, and when he speaks his voice is tight.

“My equipment failed,” he says, eyes bright and boring into Newt’s. “My designs. It was my experiment that went wrong and threw him into the water in the first place. The medical cause of death is incidental, I am the reason he is gone.”

Newt steps forward, reaching out to him, but Hermann pulls back into himself, shaking his head. “Don’t touch me,” he snaps.

Newt stops, arms hanging uselessly at his sides, and for once in his life has nothing to say. Hermann is staring resolutely away from him, blinking furiously, both hands wrapped tight around his cane.

Finally Newt clears his throat, and says, “I didn’t bring it up to upset you or blame you. I was just. I was trying to—”

“You were trying to what? Say we have some common ground? Prove to me you understand me?” Hermann asks, his voice steadier now. “We don’t. You don’t. Seeing his body is not the same thing as seeing him die, Newton.”

“No,” says Newt, “but I was there when Raleigh tried to drown himself, and I think that comes pretty close.”

Hermann turns to stare at him, and Newt sits back down, looking at his shoes. “Do you know why I believe in all that remote viewing tripe? Do you know why the concept of drift compatibility makes so much sense to me, why I’m fascinated with psychic possibilities?” He licks his lips and doesn’t close his eyes, because he knows what he’ll see. “It’s because I know two people can be that close. I know that there are some things the mind does share with other minds. I know that Raleigh felt Yancy die, and I know what it did to him.”

Hermann, to his credit, doesn’t tell him that it’s impossible. If he had, Newt’s pretty sure he would have walked away and never looked back. Instead, he’s able to look Hermann in the eye and smile, just a little, even if it makes him want to cry. “Sometimes I think if it weren’t for Mako he might never have recovered.”

“I am glad to know he’s alright,” Hermann says, a little unsteadily, and there’s a long moment where they’re just looking at each other, eye to eye, and Newt sees Hermann’s grief and guilt and knows Hermann sees his, and his anger, and his jealousy, and recognizes them for what they are. He feels stretched, almost, pulled outside of himself. It’s not entirely unpleasant, but it is entirely new.

“They’re getting married,” he says, when the moment has lasted too long. “Mako and Raleigh.”

Hermann nods, sharply, and passes a hand across his face, breaking whatever weird trance they’d fallen into. “Speaking of which, we had better get ready.”

Newt swallows. “Right,” he says, and stands, wandering over to his luggage to dig out his suit. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says, shuffling through his clothes. “Like, why didn’t you just bring the girl from last night? Seemed like you were getting along pretty well.”

“I have had time to vet you,” Hermann says absently, and Newt tries very hard not to stare as he slips his shirt from his shoulders. “Besides, it has to be a man.”

Newt fumbles with his pants. “Why? Like, actually, you’ve told me very little about what’s happening today, y’wanna maybe do that?”

“We’re going to an engagement party.” Hermann drops his pants, and Newt turns away hurriedly. “For my former fiancee, Vanessa.”

Realization dawns. “Ah,” Newt says. “You told her you were gay to get out of your engagement.”

“No,” says Hermann calmly. “I loved her. I still do. But we were engaged before—before Anchorage, and in the aftermath, I was not myself. I had to go away for a while. And when I came back, she’d, ah. Found someone else.”

“Shit,” says Newt. “I’m sorry.” And he is. Hearing Hermann confess to being in love with someone makes his chest hurt like a motherfucker, but not in a way he’s unused to. Like he told Tendo, this part he can handle.

“I told her I was gay because I thought it would be the best way to hurt her.” Hermann sighs. “After all, it implies that I never loved her at all.”

Newt turns to stare at him. “Okay, A, that doesn’t necessarily follow, romantic and sexual attraction are different things. B, you did. You do, you just told me you do, and C, that is majorly fucked up.”

Hermann turns to look at him, half-naked and serious and somehow such a different creature than the man who’d answered the door three days ago, uptight and scowling. He is a nautilus, and every chamber opened reveals more cold beauty, not in spite of his asymmetry but because of it. “B,” he says, “of course I do. I was going to marry her. And A, do you really think that would occur to her in the moment?”

“And C?” Newt asks quietly.

Hermann pulls his arms into his shirt. “It is the cruelest thing I have ever done.”

New pulls on his suit slowly, feeling heavy and awful with memories he’s done a lot to leave behind him. The sleeves of his suit coat are a little bit too short, and he remembers with a shock when he last wore it, standing edgy and uneasy at Yancy’s grave. It’s fitting, he supposes.

He’ll probably have to wear it again at Raleigh’s wedding, and that will be more fitting still.

He turns to find Hermann scrutinizing him. He spreads his arms. “Well?”

Hermann makes a show of looking him up and down. It makes Newt’s skin prickle.

“Hm,” says Hermann, more a breath than a word. He steps forward into Newt’s space and fixes his tie, his knuckles brushing against the bruise forming on the underside of Newt’s jaw, left there by Kennedy’s lips. Newt makes a little involuntary noise in the back of his throat, but Hermann doesn’t seem to notice. He takes one of Newt’s arms and pushes the sleeve further up, folding the cuff of his dress shirt up to his elbow and twitching it into place with careful, competent hands. He does the same to the other arm, and then stands back. “There,” he says, “now we can see your tattoos.”

Newt grins despite himself. “You do like them,” he says, and it comes out too pleased. He rolls his shoulders, and then freezes. “Hang on, do you even like men?”

Hermann raises an eyebrow at him. “What bearing does my sexuality have on whether or not I find your tattoos artistically pleasing?” He asks, and then seems to remember something, turning to rustle through his luggage.

“No, I just mean. If you only said it to get back at Vanessa, was it a complete lie? I know you’re into chicks, obviously, but.”

Hermann crosses back over to him, gesturing for Newt to hold out a hand, and when he does Hermann drops a simple silver ring into his palm. Newt stares at it for a second, and watches as Hermann slips a matching ring onto his own finger, not looking at Newt’s face. “It was a lie at the time,” he says shortly, and steps back and away, retrieving his cane from its place by the bed. “Shall we, darling?”

There’s just enough acid in his tone to distract from the nervousness that came before it, and Newt barely has time to slip the ring onto his finger before they’re out the door and into a cab, and Hermann’s enumerating all of the thousand things Newt’s not allowed to mention at this party. He begins with Anchorage and passes through ‘anything at all related to Atlantic Edge’ and ending with the still-nameless redhead of last night, at which point Newt rolls his eyes and says, “Jesus Christ, are you my fiancee or my mom?” and Hermann subsides into silence, rhythmically dropping his cane against the floor in a particularly irritating version of tapping his foot.

They get out of the cab in front of the restaurant and Hermann takes a breath. Newt looks sideways at him. “Ready?”

Hermann turns to look at him, silent and unblinking, but he links his arm with Newt’s when he offers it.

It turns out to be a very small engagement party, just the two of them, Vanessa and her new fiancee, her sister, and three friends. Which is fine. Newt can handle small groups. Probably better than he can handle large groups, honestly. The problem is, Vanessa’s gorgeous.

The problem is, Vanessa’s gorgeous and the sight of her makes Hermann go pale and silent. The problem is, Vanessa’s gorgeous and Hermann’s pale and silent and her new fiancee is square-jawed and manly and a solid, supportive presence on Vanessa’s arm but not actually, like, a conversationalist, which means it’s mostly him and Vanessa talking with Vanessa’s three friends staring back and forth between them as if they’re waiting for someone to catch fire, and Hermann’s told him all of the stuff he can’t talk about but nothing about who Vanessa is or what her occupation is or what her interests are or literally anything that he could use as, like, conversation material.

He has, however, apparently told Vanessa about Newt.

“So,” she says, smiling with red, red lips, the kind of lips Newt would want if he were a girl (and the kind of lips he could never really get right when he was trying that shit out). “Hermann tells me you’re a biologist.”

Newt smiles back. It feels weird. Politeness is not really a state of being he’s familiar with. He’s good at excited. He’s good at dejected, and self-pitying, and he’s been getting really good at angry over the last couple days. He’s great at mocking, and superior, and even quiet, humming contentment, so long as he’s entirely full of coffee and has some hypothetical creature to think really hard about. But polite feels like a suit he’s never worn. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “I’m doing grad school at MIT currently, but it’s for my second degree, I finished my first last year.”

Vanessa sips her water. She’s very concise in her movements, very neat. Newt wonders if, like Hermann, she’s not exactly in the military. Although if she were, she’d probably know about Anchorage. “Very impressive,” she says, sounding quite genuine, and Newt’s pretty sure he’s supposed to hate her, in this situation, but she keeps shooting little worried glances at Hermann and he can’t figure out how. “Remind me how you two met?”

Newt panics. They hadn’t rehearsed this. Hell, they hadn’t rehearsed anything, fuck fuck fuck. Hermann’s no help, he’s frozen at Newt’s side, so he just swallows against his mental screaming and says as easily as he can manage, “At a technological conference in Munich,” because he has family there, he can fake it, and Hermann’s German, ahahaha, Hermann the German, oh god he’s slipping into panic mode, “how long ago now—two years?”

He turns to Hermann in desperation, and to his relief Hermann smiles at him, small but genuine. He holds out a hand. “Sparks flew,” he says wryly.

Newt doesn’t quite manage to get a lid on his hysterical giggle, but maybe it sounds more adoring than insane to everyone else because everyone just sighs in that stupid way they do when the insufferable couple is talking about how insufferable they are, and Newt threads his fingers into Hermann’s with a sense of triumph.

Hermann’s hands are soft and dry, and he gives Newt’s hand a little squeeze, though whether in thanks or in warning he’s not sure.

Vanessa is staring at their joined hands when he looks up, and her fiancee is staring at her. He shifts, maybe touches her back or her leg, because she blinks and pastes on her smile again, perfect curved lips.

“Those are some wicked tattoos,” says Fiancee, transparently changing the subject, “where’d you get them done?”

Newt blinks and immediately relaxes out of Polite and into Excited. “Dude. There’s this amazing place up by MIT, it’s run by this Russian couple, Sasha and Alexis, and it took me like six months of getting work done there to figure out which one of them was which.” Back on safe ground, he describes the process of working out his sleeve design, and Fiancee tells him about his (really pretty awesome) plan for a back piece. One of Vanessa’s friends chimes in about piercings, and New carefully doesn’t mention how much he wants a Prince Albert (he’s pretty certain that if Hermann had known about that particular urge it would definitely be on the “don’t talk about” list). He doesn’t pull his hand out of Hermann’s, and Hermann doesn’t let go, until their food arrives.

Somehow they spend a relatively pleasant dinner. He manages, rather impressively, to never actually learn Fiancee’s name (it helps that Vanessa only ever calls him dear between sips of wine) and even Hermann cheers up a little as they progress on into coffee (or in his and Vanessa’s case, tea). He keeps staring at Vanessa, though, and Vanessa herself gets quieter and quieter. If Hermann’s a nautilus, Vanessa is a turtle, pulling her head back into her shell and letting everything glance off her back. They mirror each other across the table. Hermann’s face is more lined with worry, but Vanessa has a coldness and a sadness to her that is a match for his, and Newt feels pushed and pulled and guilty and jealous and heavy with secrets.

He’s so bad at secrets. Not his own—he’s good at those, at keeping wants and needs and thoughts and feelings all bottled up inside until they explode. But other people’s secrets gnaw and gnaw and gnaw at him until he can’t help but let them out. He doesn’t really understand why people would tell anyone a secret unless they wanted everyone to know. A secret’s yours, and then it isn’t. There is no in-between.

Hermann actually laughs at something one of Vanessa’s friends says, just a short, barked chuckle, and Newt manages to tear his eyes from the way it lights up his face to see Vanessa pass a hand across her eyes. She takes a breath. “Excuse me,” she says, “I’m going to have a smoke. It’s disgusting, I know, but a girl has her vices.”

Newt stands, too, in a rush. “Mind if I join you, actually?” he asks, and Hermann’s gaze snaps to his, and he knows, he knows this is a bad idea, but he can’t just sit here with them wallowing in miserable tandem, he won’t.

Vanessa looks like she minds quite a lot, actually, but if Politeness is a new suit Newt never wears it is her uniform. She nods shortly, not looking him in the eye, and he follows her outside. “Newton,” Hermann hisses after him, but Newt ignores him.

By the time he gets outside she’s already lit up, standing in the pool of a streetlight like something out of an ad for perfume or shoes or something classy and classic and feminine, the perfect lines of her dress marred just a little, one hand pushing her hair back from her face so it doesn’t fall quite right. You start out halfway in love, Tendo told him, and he’s not far off.

“Need one?” she asks, offering him her pack.

He shakes his head. “I, um, I quit, actually.” He rocks back on his heels, arms folded behind him. “Three years ago.”

She raises an eyebrow, and he almost laughs at how perfectly Hermann a face it is.

“He loves you,” he says finally, and it feels easy.

She removes the cigarette from her lips carefully. “What?” she asks.

“He doesn’t love me. He loves you, he told me so today.” Newt takes a breath. “We didn’t meet two years ago. We met last Thursday, at a convention for a stupid movie we both love, and we’re not engaged, and he’s not gay. He told you he was because.” He stops. “He told me it was to hurt you, but really I think it was to protect himself. He’s an asshole, but it’s just how he deals with pain. I-I guess you probably know that.”

Vanessa stares at him, her eyes huge and dark in her face. “Why are you telling me this?”

Newt swallows. “Because I think you deserve to know, and because you’re both miserable and unless you talk to each other about this you’re going to stay miserable.” He smirks, though it feels shaky on his face. “And a little bit because he doesn’t want me to.” He wraps his arms around himself. “He’s going to hate me for this.”

Vanessa ducks her head, and when she looks up again she’s smiling, not a perfect polite smile but something real and sad and a little laughing. “I don’t believe you,” she says.

Newt blinks at her. “But—”

She waves the hand with the cigarette. “Oh, I believe you about him lying to me, and about you not being engaged, there was something fishy about this whole dinner and he fucking would, you know?” She takes a drag. “But I don’t believe he’ll hate you, and I don’t believe you only met him three days ago. He’s too comfortable around you.”

Newt shrugs, a little embarrassed. “I’m just a comfortable guy, I guess.” He wonders what Vanessa would think of Hermann burrowing into his side in his sleep, insistent. He wonders what he would think of it, if he let himself think about it at any length.

She stares him down, reminding him somehow of Mako. Smoke drifts between them, ghostly in the night air. “Do you know what happened? In Alaska?”

He shoves his hands in his pockets. “Yes,” he says simply.

Her smile widens, and she finished her cigarette. “I see.” She grinds it under her heel, and lays a hand on his shoulder as she passes. “You’re a good friend to him, Newton Geiszler. Thank you.”

Newt stares up at the sky for a long time after she’s gone. He takes the bus back to the hotel without saying goodbye.

By the time he gets back to their room he’s shaking, barely able to get his key into the lock. He strips off his tie and his suit jacket and sinks down on the bed. Fuck. Fuck. He takes a hissing breath through his teeth. “Okay,” he says to himself. “Okay, so you’ve ruined his night and possibly his life. When he gets back he is going to literally murder you. Options: One. Run. Run very fast and very far away. Pros: you get to live. Cons: running sucks. Also he knows you know Tendo and Raleigh and Mako so you can never go home again, and you’ll never get your second degree, and your mother will never be proud of you. Also he is very, very smart, so you will almost certainly end up dead anyway.”

He pushes his glasses up his nose, staring off into the darkness of the hotel room. He hasn’t bothered with lights. Lights, he figures, are for people with life expectancy. “Two: stay and get murdered. Pros: It’s easier. There’s probably coffee. Cons: Death.”

He stares at the wall for another minute, and then says, “fuck it,” and stays.

He finally calls Mako back. When she picks up, he says immediately, “if I die I want you to have my body cryogenically frozen until such point as someone can remotely access my brain to extract my incredibly important theories. My body itself doesn’t matter, I’m donating my mind to science. Also, hello. Also, congratulations.”

“Hi, Newt,” Mako says, amused. “How’s your weekend been?”

Newt almost says something flippant, and then actually thinks about it. “Um,” he says. “Unsettling.” He stares at his hand, at the ring on his finger. “Surreal.” He closes his eyes and remembers Hermann’s smile. “Pretty beautiful. Yours?”

“That about sums it up,” Mako says quietly. “Raleigh showed up at Father’s birthday to ask for my hand in marriage.”

Newt snorts a laugh, throwing his arm over his face. “Of course he did.”

“It went rather well, I think,” Mako says in her Optimist Voice, “although he made the mistake of touching Father’s arm when thanking him for saying yes.”

“Shit,” Newt says, trying to imagine it. It’s impossible. Stacker Pentecost only comes in two flavors: Untouchable, and Hugging Mako. “Raleigh’s gotta be the bravest man I ever met in my life.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Mako says fondly, and Newt feels a surge of happiness for her, pure, real happiness, unadulterated by jealousy or longing or anything at all. It’s incredible. He swallows against it, against the wave of relief that comes after it, and when Mako goes, “Oh!” he’s able to make an inquiring noise without sounding like a dying cow.

“Raleigh remembered where he knew Gottlieb’s name from,” Mako says, her voice gone serious, and Newt can’t deal with that, doesn’t want her worried and sad. He cuts her off.

“I know,” he says. “I know, he was at Anchorage, I, um, I talked to Tendo. Let’s not think about it, Mako, not today.”

There’s a pause, and then Mako says, “Okay.”

“Good,” says Newt. “I’m really happy for you, favorite girl.”

“I am happy for me too,” Mako says, and Newt can see her face, scrunched-up nose and all, against his eyelids.

“Is Raleigh there?” He asks, though he knows the answer. “Let me talk to him.”

“Sure,” says Mako, and kisses the receiver before handing the phone over.

“Newton,” says Raleigh in a silly voice, because he’s Raleigh and he’s happy and that drains a tension out of Newt that he hadn’t even realized he was carrying. He takes a breath and lets now-Raleigh, smiling Raleigh, newly-engaged Raleigh, replace pale, bloodless Raleigh in his head, the Raleigh that coughs up river water into Newt’s dreams.

“Raleigh, my man,” he says. “So fuckin' proud of you, bro, you finally did it.”

“I finally did it,” says Raleigh, all childish pride, and Newt loves him, he really does.

“Still got both arms?” he asks. “Pentecost didn’t take one as tribute?”

“Not yet,” Raleigh says, sounding a little nervous. “I have a feeling I haven’t passed his thousand trials by fire yet, though.”

“You are going to have to duel at least three master warriors,” Newt agrees. He has good friends. He’s glad he got to make these friends, before his untimely death. “When’s the wedding?”

“A month and a half,” says Raleigh. “We wanted it sooner, just a little ceremony, but y’know. Pentecost has to have everything perfect for his baby girl.”

“Dude,” says Newt disbelievingly, “you are the last person who can throw stones when it comes to making things perfect for Mako.”

Raleigh sighs in happy agreement. “I just want it to be what she wants, you know?”

“Raleigh, man, you’re what she wants,” Newt says. “Seriously, I think you could get married naked in the middle of a desert and she’d be just as happy.”

There’s a short pause. “Don’t mention that to her,” Raleigh says, “I think she’d like it.”

Newt laughs. “Probably.” He takes a breath, rolls his shoulders. “I’ll let you two get back to your euphoria. Tell Mako I’ll be back tomorrow, okay? And I miss you, both of you.”

“We miss you too, man,” Raleigh says with easy affection. “And I expect to hear all about your romcom weekend when you get back.”

Newt makes a noise that he’s pretty sure he meant to be a laugh, and not a warbling half-scream. “Yes,” he manages. “Goodbye.”

He hangs up and opens his eyes.

Hermann’s sitting on the edge of the opposite bed, watching him.

“Jesus shit,” he spits, jolting back against his pillows. “When, um. How—hello.”

“Hello, Newton,” says Hermann. He’s spinning his cane between his palms.

“If you’re gonna do the Bond villain thing can we at least turn on some lights?” Newt asks, a little unsteadily. He fixes his glasses, and then fixes them again.

Hermann doesn’t move. “Are you quite finished meddling in my life?” he asks, but there’s no fire to it, and that’s. That feels wrong, that makes Newt feel even more like he’s fucked up, not less.

“You’re the one who invited me in,” he retorts, trying to find his balance.

Hermann makes a noise that might be a laugh. “You’re right,” he says, “I should have known wouldn’t do as you were told.”

New swallows hard. This isn’t what he’d expected. He hates this, this weird almost-fight, too bitter to be civil but too listless to be real. “Are you okay?” he asks, instead of responding in kind.

Hermann takes a sharp breath, like sympathy was the last thing he expected, like it hurts. “I don’t know,” he says, a little wetly. “I don’t know what you’ve done.”

“I told the truth,” says Newt softly. “Isn’t that always better?”

Hermann doesn’t answer, and neither of them turn on the light.

In the morning, they maintain the silence, packing up their stuff in disturbing unison, if by entirely different means. When Newt’s finally shoved the last of his stuff into his backpack, he crosses his arms over his chest. “So,” he says. “What now?”

Hermann doesn’t look at him, doesn’t even pause in his meticulous folding.

“I’m going back to school, back to my friends. What about you? What are you going to do with yourself, without card games and imbeciles to occupy you?”

“Much as it may pain you to hear,” Hermann says dryly, “you are not the only imbecile this world has to offer me.”

“So what, you’re just going to toss me over for some other idiot?” Newt demands, feeling himself slipping into patterns that shouldn’t feel this familiar. He’s going to have to come up with a piece of metaphorical clothing he can label, secretly and forever only for his mind to know, Bickering With Hermann. A favorite wool sweater, maybe. Comfortable and comforting and itchy and annoying all at once. “I thought we had something, man.”

Be careful with him.

Of course, if he never sees Hermann again he won’t need that label at all.

“We did,” Hermann says shortly, and it stops Newt in his tracks. Hermann meets his eyes, and then raises one perfect arch of an eyebrow. “We were engaged, if only briefly, and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting last night for a long time.”

Newt chuckles, a little weakly. “No, I don’t—I don’t expect you will.”

Hermann zips up his suitcase and swings it a little clumsily up onto his shoulder. “Well,” he says.

He’ll melt away from you like he melted away two years ago.

“Well,” Newt says back.

Hermann slips his keys into his pocket and tucks his coat under his arm. He’s dressed in the same clothes he was when Newt first saw him, a tidy intellectual with a bad haircut and too-high cheekbones and a permanent scowl, but now. Now, somehow, he takes Newt’s breath away.

“Hey,” Newt says, “Vanessa, last night.”

Something in Hermann’s gaze wavers. “Yes?”

“She said to remind her how we met, and I just. I bullshitted it, man, but she didn’t seem to notice. What did you tell her before?”

Hermann looks at him for a long moment, eyes narrowed a little. “I told her we met at a technical conference in Munich,” he says, “two years ago.” He picks up his cane and makes his way out the door, leaving it open behind him.

Newt blinks, and then blinks again. The odds of that are—he almost laughs, because he’s certain Hermann would know the odds of that, down to the decimal, but it doesn’t matter, does it, what matters is that this is astronomical, this chance, this connection, and it’s the most confusing, fucked up, angry connection he’s had to anyone in his life but they both know it’s there, and it’s special, it’s Mako-and-Raleigh special, it’s Tendo-and-Alison special, it’s fucking drift compatible special. And there is no way in hell he’s letting it walk out of his life.

“Hermann!” He shouts, and swings himself around the doorway. Hermann pauses in the hall, his back still to Newt, and Newt takes a breath, composes himself. “I have a wedding to attend in a month and a half,” he says, “and I need a plus one.”

Hermann doesn’t say anything, but he also doesn’t move.

Newt shifts from foot to foot. “So, like. An eye for an eye, right. I fucked up your life. It’s only fair I give you the chance to fuck up mine.”

Hermann turns his head just enough that Newt can see the corner of his smile, nautilus curl of lips, and then walks on down the hall, the noise of his shoes and cane muffled by the carpet to a dull th-thump, th-thump.

Newt watches him go.

“Ooh,” says Mako, her sparkling eyes framed today by emerald streaks, “enigmatic.”

Newt shoves a hand under his glasses to rub his eyes. “Shut up.”

It’s been three weeks since the convention, and this isn’t the first time he’s told her what happened there (some of it, anyway), but it’s the first time they’ve talked about it when Raleigh’s not around, and it’s the first time he’s mentioned that he invited Hermann to the wedding. They’re sitting outside the coffee shop, just the two of them. Fall is just beginning to edge into winter, and Mako’s perched on the edge of her chair, head-cocked, sparrow-like in her curiousity.

“I just,” says Newt, “I didn’t think about it. If it would be a good idea. I don’t even know if he’s coming, but I can—I can take it back, if you think I should.”

Mako watches him for a minute. “What harm do you think it will do?”

From anyone else it would be dismissive, a don’t worry about it, but from her it’s a legitimate question. He leans back in his chair and thinks about it.

It’s stupid, really, to be afraid of reminding Raleigh that Yancy’s gone. It’s his wedding. Tendo is best man, and Raleigh and Tendo love each other with a kind of steel-forged love Newt’s lightning-strike, butterfly heart will never understand, but Tendo isn’t Yancy and could never be, and the wedding that’s happening is not the same wedding Raleigh dreamed of before Anchorage.

There’s no part of Raleigh’s life that is the same as it would have been before Anchorage.

“I’m worried he might ruin it for me,” he says honestly. “That’s what I invited him to do, and what if he does it? He hates me, at least a little, at least as much as I hate him, probably more, definitely more.” He thinks of Hermann’s voice in the dark. I don’t know what you’ve done.

Mako props her chin on her hand. “So what if he doesn’t come? What harm will that do?”

Newt pushes his glasses up his nose. “He’ll leave. I won’t see him again.”

“And that would not be good,” Mako says, half-questioning.

Newt closes his eyes. “No,” he says, “that would not be good.”

Hermann Gottlieb is ruining his life. Worse, Hermann Gottlieb is ruining his concentration. He forgot the answer to a test question, last week. He remembered it by the time he’d gotten to the end of the next page, but he had to go back and fill it in.

Hermann fucking Gottlieb is ruining his concentration, and it’s not even his fault. He’s not even here. It’s like he set off a chemical reaction in Newt’s head just by existing, irritation and attraction exchanging ions to create, fucking, Unease Nitrate. It’s not fair.

He’s usually pretty good at this, at keeping his balance. Like, fuck, he spent two years head over heels for Tendo Choi and never had days like this, and this isn’t head over heels, this isn’t even love at all the way he’s loved before. It’s math, it’s biology, it’s a Punnet’s Square that doesn’t make sense. He accused Hermann of not being whole because he can’t manage to sum him up. He can’t see the rest of the pattern. He can add up all the information he has as many times as he wants and it still doesn’t equal the person that Hermann is, and that’s. That’s fascinating, and it’s infuriating, and he either wants to bury himself in thinking about it for the next six months or he wants to stop thinking about it entirely, forever.

The first is impractical, considering that he kind of has to focus on graduating from MIT and not on creepy, obsessive profiling of someone who, when it comes down to it, he barely even knows.

The second involves cutting Hermann out completely. Sending him a message or calling him or whatever and rescinding his invitation, denying whatever the hell kind of connection they have, and returning to his perfectly happy life where he can rely on his brain to do what he tells it. Kind of. With enough caffeine and a deep understanding that he has to talk to it in its own language in order to get the message across.

He’s tried to tell it that it’s a good idea to let Hermann go, but every time he gets lost halfway into why and there’s nothing in his head but that tiny curled corner of a smile.

He groans and buries his head in his hands. “Mako,” he whines. “Mako. What do I do.”

Mako chuckles at him. “Drink your coffee and go to class, Newt, and then make sure he’s coming to the wedding.”

Newt blinks at her. “You’re sure?” She nods, and he feels himself relax. “Thank you."

She smiles. “It’s for Raleigh, too,” she says. “The more people who knew his brother there are, the more he is with us.”

Newt’s smile falters. “Hermann’s really fucked up over Anchorage, Mako. He’s trying to shoulder all the responsibility.”

Mako wraps her fingers around her coffee cup, staring away across campus. “It is a way to deal with grief,” she says. “We cannot comprehend why something terrible would happen to us, so we assign the blame to ourselves in order to have something to hate.”

Newt laughs a little. “I am, um, pretty familiar with that hypothesis, yeah.”

Mako looks at him. “Raleigh tried to blame himself, too,” she says, “at first. He should have been there, or he should have convinced Yancy that the whole thing was too dangerous. Should have, should have, should have.” She shakes her head. “I don’t like that phrase.” She wrinkles her nose at Newt. “Do or do not, there is no should have.”

He laughs. “Yoda for the guilty heart.” He leans back in his chair. “Raleigh’s lucky to have you,” he says. “That’s what Hermann needs, you know, someone like you. A Mako Mori of his very own.”

“He’s got one, now,” Mako says, and for a minute Newt doesn’t know what she means. “Less cute, but better tattoos,” she continues, and he gets it.

He shakes his head rapidly. "No," he says, "no, no, I am the worst possible person to be anyone's emotional center, are you kidding? Besides, we fight constantly, we’re not exactly stable.”

Mako shrugs. “So maybe he doesn’t need stable. Or maybe I am wrong about you.” Her eyes are challenging.

“I have to go,” Newt says, partially because he does and partially because all of a sudden her gaze is too much to bear, life is too much to bear, the idea that he could be responsible for anyone’s happiness is so much to bear it’s squeezing his heart into pulp.

He manages to lose himself in his classes and his work until late that night. Sitting in boxers and socks in his dorm room, staring at a screen containing some of the most advanced biological theories the world has ever seen, he comes to a conclusion:

If Hermann and he are going to continue to be—whatever the hell they are now, he needs to keep his distance. Unlikely though it may be, it’s possible Hermann could start to rely on him, as someone who was, after all, already aware of the details of the Anchorage incident. That cannot happen under any circumstances. Newt knows himself: hand him a real heart and his hands are surgeon-steady. Hell, he can probably dissect it quicker than most surgeons could. Hand him a metaphorical heart, however, and he fumbles.

The wedding, then, will be a—a kind of a goodbye, not a complete signing-off but a distancing, a reminder that this is something to relegate to a professional, acquaintance-level. They’ll talk online, maybe get coffee if they’re ever in the same place, fight remotely about each others’ stupid ideas, and nothing else.

He spends a lot of time at the coffee shop, just sort of hanging out. It helps, to immerse himself in the social life he had before the con, as long ago as that seems, and certainly Mako and Raleigh seem to be grateful for his presence. The wedding is fast approaching and no one ever seems to know what’s actually going on, and him being there means that one of them can pull him aside to panic where the other one won’t see them.

It also means he sees Stacker Pentecost a lot more than he ever has, as in his retirement he appears to have nothing better to do than hang around in his adopted daughter’s coffee shop looking severe and stressing her out even further.

Newt’s behind the counter, making himself a latte because he really wants a latte and he’s pretty sure Mako’s the only one working today and he doesn’t really want to bother her about it, when Pentecost sweeps through the door, silent and imposing. Newt turns, spoon in his mouth, which promptly drops out of his mouth and onto the floor.

Pentecost doesn’t seem to notice the clatter of the spoon, though; he is staring fixedly at Newton’s hand where it’s wrapped around his little metal mug of steamed milk. Newt blinks at him.

“Mr. Geiszler,” Pentecost says, his eyes flicking up to Newt’s face, “are congratulations in order?”

Newt stares at him. “Um,” he says, and then offers, “no?”

Pentecost raises a single eyebrow with more purpose than Newt’s ever had in his entire life. “It means something, when you wear a ring on that finger,” he says, and then strides away, letting himself into the back room.

Newt blinks, and then sets the cup of milk carefully down on the counter and stares at his hands.

The thing is, he hadn’t even realized he’d kept wearing it. Not after the first week, when he kept idly playing with it, and then reminding himself to take it off—some time when he could put it away, where he could keep it safe until he returned it to Hermann at the wedding. And then it just stopped feeling weird, he stopped noticing it at all, and now there’s a little groove in his finger where it fits, a place where the skin is just a little shinier, just a little paler.

He’s reminded of scars, and of tattoos, and he doesn’t take it off.

The next day he receives a package. Or, actually, the next day he receives an email that his campus mailbox is full, and when he sorts through all the bullshit from the administration, including a couple awards letters he probably shouldn’t have ignored, he comes up with a slip telling him he’s received a package and that he should pick it up from shipping and receiving.

It’s a big cardboard envelope, and inside, pristine, is the print of Otachi he’d been fucking salivating over for the duration of the convention.

He stares at it for a long time, heart in his mouth. “What the fuck,” he says, and checks for a note.

There is one, just a single slip of paper that says, in handwriting he’s never seen before but immediately recognizes as Hermann’s: Vanessa wants me back.

He’s dialing a lot of phones without thinking about it, lately.

“What is this?” he asks, and it comes out angry, so angry, he knows he has no right to be this angry but he is. His hands are shaking. “Is this a thank you or a—a fucking consolation prize?”

“Newton,” Hermann says, voice cool, and it only serves to make him more angry. “I should have known giving you my number was a mistake.”

“Fuck you,” Newt says, “just—”

“What did you think would happen?” Hermann asks, interrupting. “That night, at dinner. Is this not what you wanted?”

Newt clenches his jaw. “I wanted you to stop lying,” he grits out. “I wanted—I wanted everything out on the table, no fucking secrets but people expressing themselves like adults.”

“Oh, yes,” Hermann says, “you are a paragon of adulthood.”

“Prove you’re better,” Newt snaps. “Be honest with me, right now, no fucking ‘kind ofs’ or ‘not exactlys’, I want a yes or a no.” He takes a breath. “Is this what you want?”

There’s a long silence, the kind of silence that crawls down Newt’s throat and into his lungs, the kind of silence he spends his life blocking out with heavy metal and the buzz of tattoo needles. It’s suffocating and expectant and insufferable and it makes him want to scream.

“Fine,” he says at last. “Fine. But if you want your ring back you’re going to have to come and fucking get it.”

He hangs up, and throws his phone across the room as hard as he can. It lands, thankfully, in one of the dozens piles of laundry that adorn every surface in his dorm room. He’s pretty sure it’s clean laundry, even. So. That’s.

He stares at the ceiling. Two or three hours later, he sits up and lifts the Otachi print with reverential hands, setting it against the wall above his computer, and then he lies back down.

In some ways, it’s not as bad as it was the night with the redhead. He can still think, it just comes at the rate of about one thought per half-hour, struggling against the constant river of self-pity and frustration that fills his mind like white noise.

At four he thinks about calling Vanessa and congratulating her, but he doesn’t exactly have her number, and the idea of getting it from Hermann makes him clench his fists so hard his nails dig into his palms. At 4:30 he wonders what happened to poor Fiancee. At 5:00 he’s pretty sure he wants to strangle Hermann. At 5:30 he comes closer to crying than he has in years. At 6:00 he might doze off a little, and at 6:30 he stumbles into the shower, throws his laptop and keys in a bag, and heads to the coffee shop.

He smiles at Raleigh, who’s sitting outside with a notepad, staring hard at the page. “Hey,” he says as easily as he can.

Raleigh glances at him. “Hey,” he says, and then does a double-take. “Hey, Newt, are you okay?”

Newt feels his smile twitching. “Um,” he says, “I have been...better.”

Raleigh stands, shoving the notebook into the pocket of his coat and tucking his pen adorably behind his ear. “Come on,” he says. “We’re going for a walk.”

“Okay,” says Newt, and then Raleigh slings an arm over his shoulders and leads him away. He settles an arm around Raleigh’s waist and lets himself be led.

It’s pretty cold out, most of the trees lining the campus roads bare-branched and creaking in the wind, but a few are still holding on to the last shreds of their leaves, all green and red and brown. "You sure picked a beautiful time of year for a wedding,” Newt jokes, still curled into Raleigh’s side. It’s a little awkward, walking like this, but he’s not about to let go.

Raleigh chuckles and looks at the ground. “I know, I know, we should have waited ‘til spring, but.” He sighs. “I couldn’t stand not having asked, and once I asked I couldn’t stand waiting, you know?”

Newt doesn’t know, at all, has never encountered anyone he would willingly marry. Love is one thing. Friendship is one thing. Partnership, in terms of career and even life, is another, but marriage has a finality and a respectability and a tradition to it that makes Newt want to burn it to the ground. He nods anyway.

“I used to dream about working with Yancy,” Raleigh says, and Newt reaches up with his free hand to hold the one slung over his shoulders. Raleigh tangles their fingers together gladly. “How cool it would be, to be his copilot, to be working with him right on the edge of the humanly possible. You know that even though Pentecost and his guys wanted the robotics they were developing for military purposes, the original designs—Gottlieb’s designs, actually—were for worker-bots? They were supposed to do physical work that’s too dangerous for humans, like mining and logging. They would have saved thousands of lives.” He shakes his head. “I wanted to badly to be part of that, to save the world, even in such a small way.”

Newt swallows, because that he understands.

Raleigh takes a breath and turns his face to the sky. “But after Anchorage, all of that was shut down, and then. What was I supposed to dream about? If I’m not for that—something I spent ten years of my life training for, studying for—then what? What’s the point of me? What am I here for?”

It’s so strange, to hear happy, present Raleigh so clearly echoing a Raleigh Newt hoped to never see again, a Raleigh soaked to the skin and numb-lipped, eyes empty. Looking at him now he sees a man reborn, lit with joy and comfortable in a skin he once professed to hate for how much it reminded him of his loss.

“But then I figured it out,” Raleigh says, “I’m here for her.” He stops walking, turning to face Newt, holding both of his hands. “I’m here to be hers, her husband and her best friend and everything and anything she needs me to be. She’s my purpose, now. I wasn’t there with Yancy that day because if I had been, I never would have married Mako Mori.”

Newt stares at him for a minute. “Dude, that is the sappiest thing you have ever said in your life, and I have been keeping track. I think, I actually think that was sappier than the time you told me Mako didn’t want sugar in her coffee by saying that she was sweet enough already.”

Raleigh laughs at him, embarrassed, and Newt can’t help but grin back. “Seriously, man, you are a fucking sap machine, and that’s still the worst of it.”

Raleigh kicks the ground, still smiling. “I know,” he says, “I know, I just. I wish I could say it to her. I’m trying to write my vows and it’s coming out, like, preachy, all you saved my life and you’re beautiful and those aren’t even the things that matter.”

“I would argue that her saving your life matters,” Newt says dryly. “Also, dude, literally write down what you told me just now. It’ll go over well, I promise.”

Raleigh looks worried. He’s very good at it, he’s got the eyebrows. “Yeah? You’re sure?”

Newt nods. "Positive."

Raleigh narrows his eyes at him like he's thinking, and then shakes his head. "Anyway. The point of telling you that is like. I know you have big dreams, you're a genius. And you're gonna achieve those dreams. But. Small dreams matter too, you know?" He cocks his head in a move so Mako it makes Newt laugh. "Don't ignore your small dreams."

"I'm not ignoring them," Newt mutters, "they're just not cooperating." He sighs and sits down on the steps of the library. "He's getting back together with his fiancée."

Raleigh sits down next to him, and Newt leans against his side. "He told you?" Raleigh asks.

Newt nods.

"How'd he say it?"

Newt frowns. "What do you mean?"

"Like, did he call you?" Raleigh asks, "or was it like a side note in some intellectual discussion, blah blah thermodynamics, also hey guess what I'm engaged again and it's not to you this time?"

Newt pushes his glasses up his nose and jams his hands as deep in his pockets as he can. “He sent me a $250 print of Otachi and a one-sentence note saying that she wants him back.”

Raleigh makes a face at him. “That’s it?”

Newt scowls. “What do you mean, that’s it?”

“Dude,” Raleigh says, “That’s doesn’t mean he’s getting back together with her. That just means she wants him back. And the fact that that’s the only thing he said means he wants to know what you think of that before he decides what he’s gonna do.”

Newt looks sideways at him. “Listen to you, heterosexual soldier guy giving me advice about boys.”

Raleigh rolls his eyes fondly. “Just because I’ve never dated a boy doesn’t mean I don’t know how they work,” he says, and then tries (and fails) to look shifty. “Besides, who says I’m heterosexual?”

Newt stares at him in disbelief. “Uh, empirical evidence? Everything I have ever known about you for the last twelve years? The fact that in two weeks you’re marrying a woman?”

“Fine,” Raleigh says, “but just so you know, in middle school there was a boy that I thought maybe I wanted to kiss.”

“Okay, Macklemore,” says Newt, rolling his eyes. “Nothing ever happened, I presume.”

Raleigh grins. “We got in a lot of fistfights,” he offers.

“Of course you did,” says Newt, pulling his knees up to his chest.

“His name was Chuck,” Raleigh says, in the voice of a man remembering far-off things.

“Of course it was,” Newt says.

“I’m serious about your doctor,” Raleigh says, turning to look at him again. “Nothing’s settled, man, not with a message like that. And the fact that he wants to know what you think means that what you think must have some effect on the decision he’ll make.”

Newt thinks about that, and then swallows. “Oh,” he says.

“Yeah,” says Raleigh, “oh.”

“But I called him,” Newt says vaguely, “and when I asked him what he wanted he didn’t say anything.”

Raleigh thinks about that. “You said he was the kind of guy who wants all the information, right?”

“He doesn’t like unknown variables,” Newt says mockingly. “Asshole.”

“So this is just more of that,” Raleigh says. “He doesn’t know what he wants because he doesn’t know what you want, so he doesn’t know what equations to write down to figure out what to do.” He frowns a little. “You’re absolutely sure he’s not a robot.”

“Yeah, Kennedy and I ruled it out,” Newt says absently. “Oh, fuck, I said I’d call them today.”

He’s been talking to Kennedy a lot—never actually about Hermann, but always kind of around Hermann, and a lot about their ex-girlfriend Stephanie, who is hopefully maybe soon to be their current girlfriend Stephanie again. Newt’s hopeful, anyway. Kennedy’s panicked to the point of despair. They had their first maybe-date the day before, and Newt had promised to call Kennedy after in case it went badly. Or in case it went well, he’s not really sure.

He leaves Raleigh sitting on the steps writing out his vows and goes back to the coffee shop, picks up his free morning so-black-it-burns cup of coffee, and walks to class. He takes notes, writes half a theory of real-life drift compatibility in his margins, and calls Kennedy on the way back to his room.

Their date went well, which he’s very glad about. Except for the part where it means he probably won’t ever get to kiss Kennedy again, which is a damn shame. Also the part where, if things fall through with Hermann, he can’t beg Kennedy to be his date for the wedding. Probably.

Which is fine, he has no problem at all with showing up to Mako and Raleigh’s wedding alone, theoretically. It’s not like they’d judge him. It’s just he’d kind of been looking forward to, y’know, not. Doing that.

He sits down on his bed with a sigh. The thing is, Raleigh’s right. He’s been assuming that Vanessa wanting Hermann back meant Vanessa having Hermann back, and those things don’t actually necessarily follow.

But they could, and that’s a problem, because in some ways Hermann’s right, too: on some level this is what he wanted. The part of his brain that picks up on patterns, that identifies matches, had put Vanessa and Hermann next to each other and thought, yeah, this is right.

It’s just the rest of his brain, and his entire body, that’s getting in the way.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair, because despite how very good he is at dodging responsibility, this is all down to him anyway. It’s not fair because his instincts tell him that his desires shouldn't matter in this, and the world isn’t letting him take that out. It’s not fair, because even running away is a decision, and it’s a decision with the potential to hurt not only himself but someone else—someone who, for reasons involving brain chemistry and pseudoscientific tripe and the mysteries of the human heart, has become very, very important to him in a very, very short time.

“I just wanted to go to a convention,” he says wearily to the print of Otachi. “How was I supposed to know?”

He’s almost zen by the same time the next day.

Okay, maybe “zen” is overstating it a little, but he’s managed to forge his constant panic/despair/helplessness into a kind of armor, and he’s using it to ward off all lesser concerns, like class, and friends, and food, and sleep. Sure, he might look a little mad, and it quite possible he had more coffee in his bloodstream than oxygen, but he’ll adapt. Humans are good at that.

Besides, this is hardly the longest he’s gone without sleeping. He hasn’t even reached hallucination stage yet, and won’t for another five or so hours.

Although, when he opens the door to Hermann Gottlieb, standing there with one fist raised, he thinks maybe he’s off a little in that estimation.

It’s apparently been raining outside, because there’re little droplets of water caught in Hermann’s eyelashes.

Hermann look at him for a long minute, and then the corner of his mouth turns up and he steps forward, past Newt and into his dorm room. “Your room suits you,” he says quietly, and Newt closes the door behind him.

“Does it?” he asks inanely.

Hermann makes a sort of humming noise and turns to look at him. “Cluttered, cramped, smells awful, no elegance whatsoever.” His voice harsh but his face—maybe it’s the rain, dissolving his paper-mask scowl, but his face is open and glad, nothing but glad, his eyes warm, his cheeks slightly pink with cold.

Newt, all clad in nervous energy as strong as steel, steps up into his space. He raises a hand, running his thumb down Hermann’s jaw. Hermann’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t step back.

Do or do not, there is no should have.

Newt leans in and kisses him.

For a second Hermann freezes, and then he’s kissing back hard, wrapping one hand around the back of Newt’s neck and pulling him closer. He kisses like he’s desperate. He kisses like he needs it to breathe. He kisses like he’s fighting—this is the only way I know how to love—and Newt gives as good as he gets, his hands going to Hermann’s hips, pulling him in until they’re flush, pressed together all in one line. Hermann makes a little shocked noise low in his throat, and Newt pulls back to breathe, but keeps his eyes closed, just in case.

“There,” he says, and brushes a kiss over each of Hermann’s stupid cheekbones by feel, “there’s your variable. That’s what I want.”

Hermann doesn’t move, and Newt spends a few seconds admiring how perfect his hipbones feel against his palms, and then opens his eyes. Hermann’s staring at him, lips parted, and Newt nearly laughs aloud to think there was a time when he thought he wasn’t hot.

“Well?” he says, because the panic-armor is kind of just turning back into normal panic now. “Make your equations, or whatever.”

Hermann licks his lips, which should probably never be allowed to happen again. “You’re insane,” he says, “certifiable, if you think I would make any decision that didn’t involve more of, of that.”

Newt beams at him. “Yeah?”

“Imbecile,” Hermann whispers against his mouth, and then they’re kissing again, slower now but with no less urgency. Newt’s reminded of Hermann burrowing into him as he slept, single-minded: he kisses like he’s trying to get to the center of you, solve you from the inside out, and Newt—Newt remembers the shift of his naked back, and gets it.

He unzips Hermann’s jacket and slides his hands under it, tracing around his sides and up to those same muscles, just because he can. Hermann drops his head onto Newt’s shoulder and sighs, wrapping his arms around Newt’s waist and letting Newt hold him up.

All the armor's gone, and Newt feels incredible and terrified all at once. "You're such an asshole," he mutters against Hermann's cheek. "That note, what the fuck, I don't need to make your decisions for you. I've got enough on my plate."

Hermann leans back to glare at him. "Yes, it must be hard to decide which kaiju you want most to sleep with, how will you ever handle the responsibility?”

Newt grins. "Sticking with humans lately," he counters, “or at least as human as I can get,” and it's remarkably freeing to be able to lean in and kiss the affront off Hermann's face.

Herman shrugs his jacket the rest of the way off, letting it fall to the floor, and slings both arms around Newt’s neck. Newt compensates instinctually (with instincts it makes no sense for him to have) for his bad leg, moving him backwards until he reaches the bed, and Hermann sits, pulling him down with him. They’re still kissing, little nips and bites, and Hermann keeps smiling against his mouth and Newt’s moving without thinking about it, crowding Hermann backwards until he’s lying flat on his back with Newt on all fours above him. He lifts a hand, tracing little lines down Hermann’s jaw and throat.

Hermann’s got his eyes closed but he opens them at that, staring at Newt. “If I’d known this was the way to get you to shut up,” he says thoughtfully, “I would have proposed it as soon as I laid eyes on you.”

Newt smirks at him. “Would you? I knew it, I’m irresistable.”

“And just like that,” Hermann mutters, “daydream ruined.” He shoves at Newt. “Get your shirt off, I want to see your tattoos.”

Newt sits up enough so that he can, cursing his choice of a shirt with buttons. “You really do like them.”

“Your ego’s large enough, Newton, don’t fish,” Hermann snaps, but he reaches up to trace the lines of ink in Newt’s skin, and Newt shivers.

Hermann presses his thumb into Newt’s bicep. “Yamarashi,” he says, and then flicks long fingers over Newt’s skin to his ribs. “Leatherback,” and up to his shoulder, “Knifehead.”

Newt stares down at him, and Hermann raises an eyebrow and tugs him downward. “And here…” he says against Newt’s throat, “you will get Otachi.” He nips Newt, once, and when Newt gasps he continues, kissing and biting his way up to the corner of Newt’s jaw.

“You learned them,” Newt manages, a little shakily, swallowing against his lips.

Hermann pulls back a little. “I watched Atlantic Edge with Vanessa,” he says, “and I may have taken notes.”

It’s the first time either of them have said her name, and it makes Newt nervous again, even with Hermann so close he can hear his heartbeat. He wonders if she’s okay. He remembers her, standing in the glow of the streetlamp, a woman he respects and might very well like, if given the chance, whose happiness he’s holding in his hands. Hermann sees it, because he smiles a kind of sideways smile. “Don’t worry,” he says, “she hated it.”

Newt snorts, and Hermann cups his face. “I don’t need to do equations to know which decision to make,” he says seriously, “because I made it before I knocked on your door.”

“Oh,” says Newt.

Hermann rolls his eyes. “Although why I have decided to entertain the affections of a monosyllabic dolt over a successful and intelligent woman—”

“And beautiful,” Newt adds helpfully.

Hermann stops and looks at him. “I believe I told you to stop fishing,” he says, and tilts his face up to be kissed.

Newt obliges, and then doesn’t particularly want to stop obliging, maybe ever, because Hermann’s hands are back on his chest and moving lower, tracing little circles against Newt’s stomach, and, yeah, they can talk about Vanessa in the morning. Right now—

Right now everything in the world is Hermann’s mouth and hands and skin under his, is heat and laughter and a tangle of awkward limbs. Newt doesn’t lose himself in sex, ever, sex is nice, sex is great and he likes it a lot and it feels awesome but it’s a task to accomplish, he doesn’t see galaxies swirl when he orgasms—his mindblowing moments have always been with a pencil, not dick, in hand. And it’s not that this is any different, really, he’s still fighting for it, he’s still trying (and by the noises Hermann’s making, succeeding) but he’s more outside of himself and inside of himself at once than he’s ever been, aware of every nerve and, as they fall into a rhythm, hands working quick and twisting in tandem, aware of Hermann’s, too, a double-consciousness flickering at the edge of the darkness behind his eyes and fuck, he goes wide-eyed at the same instant Hermann does and feels his own mouth open as Hermann pants, “What—”

—and then he comes, they both do, slamming back into themselves, trembling with the force of it. Newt collapses (carefully), his face in the crook of Hermann’s neck, and mutters, “Tomorrow, we’re running some tests on whatever the hell that was.”

“Agreed,” Hermann mutters, and presses a kiss into his hair.

Newt’s nearly asleep when Hermann shifts, just a little. “This room is quite like you,” he says softly. “I’ve never been here before but it—it feels like home.”

Newt stares at the darkness, heart hammering in his ears, and tries to separate his joy from his terror.

Newt sits on the edge of his bed, staring at nothing. Hermann's asleep behind him, a perfect, paper-pale pile of bony limbs, his clothes shed in a half-asleep, grumbling tangle, and Newt is trying very, very hard not to run away screaming.

There's a knock on his door and he rockets to his feet, crossing to it in a step and a half. He opens it to see Mako, brilliant in orange, her smiled confused when he slips out to door to join her rather than inviting her in.

"You have company?" she asks softly.

Newt nods distractedly and licks his lips. "Hermann, um, he dropped by, and we slept together and had this totally crazy fascinating moment of psychic resonance but—I, I don't think I can do this."

Mako blinks at him. “Why not?”

Newt gnaws on his lip. “I um—He, he chose me over his fiancee, Mako, and I can’t—I faked it for a weekend and we spent most of it at each others’ throats, I wanted this but not this, I’m not someone to rely on, I’m not a good emotional base, I’m not a good emotional anything, I can’t be around someone all the time, I disappear for days on end, sometimes I don’t talk to anyone for a week straight and sometimes—”

“He’s not a child, Newt,” Mako says. “You won’t need to take care of him.”

Newt swallows. “He said I felt like home,” he says. “I—I don’t even feel like home to myself.”

Mako smiles at him, which feels patently unfair considering all the agony Newt’s in. “Maybe he can teach you.”

Newt runs both hands through his hair, unendingly frustrated. “You don’t understand,” he says. “He chose me over his fiancee. I’m wearing his ring! That—that implies a level of commitment I’ve never gotten close to, ever in my life, because I can’t. I can’t handle it.”

Mako puts a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to,” she says. “Not alone. If Hermann needs emotional support, and I don’t even know that he does, the rest of us are here too. Tendo already knows him, and Raleigh and I will always shoulder anything you can’t.” Her eyes are warm. “We owe you that.”

Newt squeezes his eyes closed and takes a breath. She’s right—he knows she’s right. Not about owing him—they don’t owe him shit, if anything it’s the other way around—but about Hermann. He remembers the tears bright in Hermann’s eyes, when they first talked about Yancy, remembers how he shook Newt off. He’s not the kind to crumble, to need comfort. Broken as he may be, he’s strong, and, last night aside, their relationship is not exactly the most tender.

Maybe he can do this. Maybe he can let himself have this.

“I just came by to tell you we’re going with blue for the bridal party,” Mako says. “The bridesmaids are going to be in sky blue, and you should be in royal.”

Newt nods. Mako doesn’t have many close female friends, having been a soldier until Anchorage and somewhat of a hermit since. The few she does have are serving as bridesmaids, and Raleigh already has a best man, so it falls to Newt to be maid of honor. He’s pretty pumped about it, although he has no idea what he should wear.

“Get back in there,” Mako says, “and do what you want to do. Don’t think about what he wants. If it’s something you’re not already giving, he’ll tell you.”

Newt steps forward and wraps his arms around her, hugging her tight. She squeaks a little and the hugs him back. “Thank you,” Newt says into her hair, and lets go. She gives him a nod and vanishes down the hall.

Newt closes his eyes, takes a breath, and goes back into his room.

Hermann’s sitting up in his bed. He’s got a notebook on his knee and a pencil in hand, and he appears to be making calculations. “Your friend is smart,” he says, without looking up, “and if you don’t wish to be heard you may want to step away from the door.” He frowns a little at the rows of numbers in front of him. “Ears of the hawk, remember?”

Newt swallows hard. “Oh,” he says. “Um—”

“You seem, as usual, to be leaping to idiotic conclusions,” Hermann says calmly. “I did not choose you over Vanessa.”

Newt feels a little like the world’s slid sideways under his feet. “Wh-what?”

Hermann finally looks at him. “Oh, for God’s sake, Newton,” he snaps. “Stop looking so poleaxed, I merely mean my being here is the consequence of two separate decisions, rather than the one you have assumed.”

Newt frowns at him. “What do you mean?”

Hermann sighs and puts aside his notebook. “I decided not to get back together with Vanessa. because I am no longer the man she loves," he says. “Separately, I decided to come to you and make my offer, as it were, to see what options we can explore.”

“Oh,” says Newt. “You—you just came for the possibility of us being something?”

Hermann stares him down. “Unlike you, I don’t assume,” he says snidely. “I am willing to see where this—” he taps his temple, and the makes a gesture between them, “takes us, wherever that may be.”

Newt sinks down on the bed next to him, made boneless with relief. He reaches out and touches Hermann on the temple, and Hermann closes his eyes, the sneer fading from his lips. Newt blinks slow, curling his palm around Hermann’s cheek, tracing the line of his cheekbone with his thumb. “Yeah,” he says. “So am I.”

Hermann opens his eyes. “Should it not take you to class, at the moment?” he asks. “You are a student, are you not?”

Newt glances at the clock. “Shit,” he says, rocketing to his feet. He pulls on whatever clothes he can find, and loops a tie around his neck, fucking up the knot royally in his hurry. “Um, I usually get coffee at Mako’s before class if you want to come?”

Hermann shakes his head. “I think not. The younger Mr. Becket, he’ll be there, yes?”

Newt bites his lip. “Yeah, probably. You know he’s not angry with y—”

“Newton,” Hermann says sharply. “I am simply not ready for that hurdle. Give me time.”

“Right,” Newt says, “Yeah, okay.”

They spend a minute just looking at each other, and then Newt remembers himself and grabs his backpack from the floor. “Anyway, I’ll see you after class I guess, if you need—”

“Get out,” Hermann commands, “I have work to do.”

He picks up his notebook, still shirtless, and Newt lets himself out without another word, making his way half-running and half-skipping to the coffee shop.

When he gets back to his room he’s thinking about the wedding again. Tradition says he should wear a dress, but what kind of dress? Should it have suit-elements, like a kind of suit-jacket top and a bow tie but then a kind of floofy skirt? Should he forego the dress altogether, because he’s never met a dress that actually suits him, and just match the groom’s tuxedo style but with bridal party colors? That might be confusing in pictures, though, he wants it to be clear what role he’s playing.

Hermann has reading glasses perched on his nose and tethered around his neck with a beaded chain, and he’s not wearing anything but his boxers. He’s perched on Newt’s desk chair like some kind of pale, beautiful bird, and he’s drawing at Newt’s desk, which he’s cleaned off.

“What did you do!” Newt demands. “My documents—”

“I alphabetized them,” Hermann says calmly. “They’re all in your filing cabinet.”

“You alphabetized them?!” Newt screeches, horrified. “How? Most of them aren’t even named anything, what did you use to—”

“Subject,” says Hermann. “You have far too many theories about infant kaiju, I took the liberty of shredding a few of them.”

Newt feels the blood drain from his face. “You what?” He fists both hands in his hair. “You—you—you fucking elitist, superior asshole, you can’t just come into someone else’s space and fuck with their important work, I spent months on some of those theories!”

Hermann’s eyes glitter. “Important work? When was the last time you theorized anything that didn’t have to do with fictional monsters with incredibly stupid names? When was the last time you were a real scientist, Newton?”

Newt steps up into his space, furious. “At least I’m doing science at all, you fucking dick,” he spits. “When was the last time you tried to think about anything new, rather than riding on the cash and the fame your work three years ago got you? Some of us are still alive inside our heads, Doctor—”

Hermann hooks two fingers into his tie and yanks him forward, kissing him hard.

Newt wants to pull away and yell more, but then Hermann’s tongue, and his fingers gentle at the corner of his jaw, and his teeth clamping down on Newt’s lower lip and tugging as he pulls away. Newt gasps. “Fuck,” he mutters, and then has to turn it into “f-fuck you,” and then Hermann’s laughing at him, a low, pleased chuckle that makes Newt want to make him laugh all the time.

“Relax,” he breathes against Newt’s ear, and Newt shivers, feels wrecked and overwhelmed and they’ve done nothing but fight and kiss. “I didn’t shred any of your work. You don’t even have a shredder.”

He scrapes his teeth along the shell of Newt’s ear, and Newt mutters back, dazed, “I didn’t even think I had a filing cabinet.”

“You need another one,” Hermann says absently, and Newt leans down to kiss the line of his collarbone. “Yours is, mmm, too full. Perhaps I’ll buy you one.”

“Speaking of buying me things,” Newt says as he sinks to his knees, “how did you know?”

Hermann doesn’t ask what he means. He looks down at Newt, and then quickly away, swallowing hard. His gaze ends up on the print of Otachi. “I knew,” he said, “the same way you knew to say we met in Munich.”

Newt trails his hands down Hermann's chest. "Why buy me anything at all, if it wasn't to thank me for getting you back with Vanessa?"

Hermann looks down at him, and his voice is quiet, private: "because you wanted it."

Newt takes a minute to breathe, and, in lieu of anything worthy response, says shakily, “I also want to suck you off." He noses at the knife-edge of Hermann’s hipbone. “If that’s cool.”

Hermann hums. “I think I could be persuaded,” he says absently. Newt nips him to make him pay attention, and Hermann jolts forward, his hands ending up in Newt’s hair. Newt grins up at him and starts tugging his boxers down, but Hermann pulls him away and upward, letting him go with one hand to fish around behind him for the notepad he’d been drawing on before. “H-however,” he says, color high on his cheeks, “first we need a full-length mirror and one of these.”

He holds out the notepad, where he’s drawn what looks like a cross between a crown, a football helmet, and the Cerebro system from X-Men. There are little lines coming off of every piece leading to symbols, which correspond to neat lists on the side of the page. A spine-like cord leads off one edge, and Newt can see that it leads onto the next, where there’s something big and blocky and complicated.

He sits back on his heels and takes the pad. “Is this—you read my umbilical cord theory.”

Hermann raises an eyebrow. “You posted it on forums we both frequent, yes,” he says.

Newt flips to the next page, reading the notes scrawled sideways next to the machine Hermann’s drawn there. “I didn’t think you cared,” he says, sugar-sweet, to cover the actual swell of affection he feels.

Hermann coughs a little. “It’s a completely ridiculous theory if you base it off alien life-forms,” he says. “But after we spoke about remote viewing, I did some research into the possibility of capturing and then digitizing neural signals—”

“—and then sending them along something like an umbilical cord, yeah, yeah,” Newt says. “Everyone’s so focused on a wireless kind of telepathy and the impossibility of directing it, but if we’re just trying to share between two relatively stationary people—” He looks up at Hermann. “It’s a drift system. We can build a drift system.”

Hermann grins, unfurling, perfect, his face still a little flushed. “I believe so. And because we have experienced a kind of drift-compatibility in moments of high emotion and, ah, carnal pleasure—”

Newt gapes at him. “You want to test it while I suck you off,” he says. “Um. Fuck. Wow.”

Hermann rolls his eyes at him, but his lips are twitching and his pupils are blown. “We did say we would experiment, did we not?”

Newt laughs, a little hysterically. “I thought I was past the point where I was experimenting with boys,” he says. He leans in to kiss him, and then stops. “Hang on, what’s the mirror for?”

Hermann licks his lips, his eyes on Newt’s mouth. “I want to test how sight is affected,” he says. “If I watch us in the mirror as you, um, and you can see out of my eyes—”

Newt takes a breath and imagines being able to see Hermann, all of him, while swallowing him down. “Jesus,” he says shakily. “I—jesus.” He pushes forward to kiss him, pushing the I love you into Hermann’s mouth so it’s not in his own anymore, knocking against his teeth and waiting to get out.

He ends up texting Kennedy to get Hannibal Chau’s phone number, because there’s some stuff on the parts list for their drift-prototype that are either illegal or way too expensive, and he could probably pitch the idea to Pentecost but then they’d be embroiled again with the military and the last thing he wants is to have his perfect, chaotic, creative, sexy work process with Hermann forced into some bullshit authoritarian mold that involves paperwork and grants and permission.

So he calls Hannibal Chau, and ends up not only with the shit he needs, but also a dress and/or suit fitting date with the man himself. In return, all he has to do is invite Hannibal to the wedding

“Miss Mori, she’s the adoptive daughter of Stacker Pentecost, yes?” Hannibal asks.

“Uh,” says Newt, “yes?”

Hannibal makes a pleased noise and hangs up, and Newt stares at his phone, baffled.

“Please don’t tell me you’re allowing that overstuffed peacock of a man to dress you,” Hermann remarks from where he’s set up shop in the corner of Newt’s room. They’ve shoved his bed against the wall, stacked his chair on his desk, and shoved as much of his other stuff into his closet as possible. The mysterious filing cabinet serves as one end of a long makeshift workbench that consists of a piece of plywood and a stolen sawhorse at the other end. It’s spread with diagrams and equations, and Hermann’s wearing his glasses, piecing together a circuit board.

“No offense, dude,” Newt says, “but your idea of fashion is like, multiple sweater-vests at once, preferably in hideous stripes.” He rubs his eyes. There hasn’t been much sleep involved in the past few days. A lot of kissing, and fighting, and dozing off over plans, and a good amount of handjobs, but sleep itself just doesn’t really seem important, comparatively. “Coffee,” he announces, and shrugs into a shirt, prepared to head out and bring something back for Hermann.

“Let me come with you,” Hermann says instead, without looking at him, and places the parts he’s fiddling with carefully down on the bench. He retrieves his jacket and shrugs it on, grabs his cane, and then scowls expectantly. “Well?”

“Right,” says Newt, trying not to smile proudly at him. “Let’s go.”

Mako sees them coming first. Her eyes go a little wide, and she nudges Raleigh, who’s sitting with Stacker at the counter, and he looks up, and then all three of them are watching them approach, silent.

Raleigh’s the first to move, breaking into a genuinely pleased smile, and Newt loves him more fiercely in that moment than he has in years. “You must be Doctor Gottlieb,” he says. “I’m a great admirer of your work.” He holds out a hand, and Newt watches Hermann steel himself before taking it, but he does, shaking it with a tiny, uncertain smile.

Mako stands up next, holding out her own hand. “Mako Mori,” she says, “I’ve heard a lot about you, it’s an honor.”

“Likewise,” Hermann says quietly, his gaze a little slow to leave Raleigh’s face, but he returns her smile, a little steadier.

Pentecost just gives him a short nod, but his eyes are mild. “Good to see you out in the sunshine, Doctor,” he says.

Hermann, embarrassingly, salutes. Newt elbows him. “You don’t have to, you’re not a soldier,” he mutters. “Anyway, he’s retired.”

Hermann gives him a quelling look. “I am simply showing respect, Newton. It’s a capacity I don’t believe you have, so I understand why you might be confused.”

“A respect that is returned, Dr. Gottlieb,” Stacker says gravely. “If you’ll excuse me.”

He drains his shot of espresso, smooths a hand down the front of his suit, and vanishes off to do whatever the hell he does when he’s not here.

Mako gestures Hermann to take his chair, which he does gingerly, like he’s afraid it might break under his scarecrow frame. Newt leans against the table between him and Mako. He glances at Hermann, who’s staring at his hands, and then at Raleigh, who looks desperate to say something but unsure whether he should. “Mako,” Newt says slowly, “can I talk to you about something? Uh, wedding-related and thus top secret?”

Mako gets to her feet, giving him a knowing smile. “Of course,” she says. “Anything to drink, boys?”

“Some tea would be lovely,” Hermann says, “thank you.”

They retreat to the counter, where Newt positions himself so that he can see, but not hear, what’s happening at the table, just in case. “I made a date with Hannibal Chau to get my suit slash dress,” he says absently, “but also that’s totally not why I came over here and you know it.”

Mako nods. “I do,” she says.

Raleigh’s leaning forward over the table, speaking earnestly, and Hermann has his head bowed, listening, his face unreadable. Newt’s anxious, but not terribly—he trusts Raleigh to handle this, if anyone can.

“When’s Tendo coming in?” he asks, because that’s another, if slightly less terrifying, hurdle to pass.

“Wednesday,” Mako says, pouring him a cup of coffee.

“Good,” says Newt, taking it. “We need his help.”

Mako raises her eyebrows at him, and at the table Hermann has one hand over his eyes, and Newt tastes tears in the back of his throat. He grins at Mako, and how strange that is, to know his own happiness and someone else’s sorrow at once. “We’re working on something,” he says conspiratorially, and then darts around her to approach the table again.

Hermann looks up at his approach, wiping his eyes with quick, subtle fingers, but Newt shakes his head at him, sliding into Mako’s chair and gesturing at his throat. “I can taste it,” he says, and Hermann’s eyes go wide, and then thoughtful, and he pulls a small notebook out of his pocket and writes something down.

Newt turns to Raleigh, whose eyes are a little bright, and steeples his hands in front of him. “Do you ever share dreams?” he asks.

Raleigh blinks at him. “What?”

“You and Mako,” Newt clarifies. “Or,” he glances at Hermann, but that barrier’s been broken, now. “Or with Yancy, before Anchorage.”

Raleigh frowns at his palms. Mako comes over with Hermann’s tea and he moves back to make room for her to perch in his lap. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Yancy and I had a, like a dream world? We wouldn’t dream together so much as we would visit the same place, both of us, at different times, and the other would be there too. Usually only one of us would remember it but sometimes both.”

Mako nods. “Raleigh dreamed of my parents’ car crash once,” she offers. “Exactly like it happened, me with my shoe and everything.”

Raleigh smiles a little and kisses her on the cheek. “I even dreamed the part where Stacker found her and put her up on his shoulders,” he says. “I wasn’t her, it was just like I was just—there, watching her memory.”

Newt nods. “Yeah, yeah, exactly,” he says. Hermann’s still writing. “Good.”

Raleigh looks at him sideways. “Why?” he asks.

Hermann looks up. “Newton and I—”

“—are working on something secret,” Newt interrupts him. “To be revealed after the wedding.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Possibly a very long time after the wedding, depending.”

Mako looks excited. “A present?”

Hermann gives her a tiny smile. “Not exactly,” he says.

“Kind of,” Newt offers in argument, and gives Hermann a significant look. “Certainly aspects of it promise to be… fun.”

Hermann glares daggers at him, face red. “Indeed,” he says furiously, “we should probably get back to work.” He flips the notebook closed and tucks it back into his pocket, standing with a graceful kind of lurch. “It was lovely to meet you both at last,” he says, holding Raleigh’s eyes. “I truly mean that. You’re a beautiful couple and I am honored to be able to attend your marriage.”

Mako and Raleigh turn adorable matching shades of red, and Mako hides her face in Raleigh’s neck. “Thank you,” says Raleigh, smiling, “and keep in mind what I said, okay?”

Hermann stares at the ground. “Ah,” he mutters, “yes, thank you again for that.”

Newt stands to walk with him, scooping up his coffee and Hermann’s tea both from the table. He glances back at Raleigh and Mako, and Mako gives him a grinning thumbs-up.

He turns to look at Hermann, who looks lost in thought, and smiles a little to himself. There’s a man at his side who demands everything and nothing from him, and friends at his back who love him, and work in front of him that he loves. He doesn’t believe in perfect contentment, but this is as close as he’s ever gotten.

“Are you going to ask me what Raleigh told me?” Hermann asks, glancing at him sideways as they walk through the chilly streets.

Newt shrugs. “Not my business,” he says. “And anyway, maybe I’ll come across it anyway, depending on how well this machine of ours works.”

Hermann looks at him for a long moment. “Respect,” he murmurs.

New frowns at him. “Sorry?”

Hermann stares upwards at the clouds gone gold with afternoon sun. “Could you really taste my tears, in the coffee shop?”

Newt nods. “Yeah, like I was going to cry myself, but without the actual sorrow.”

Hermann hums to himself and they walk on in silence. Newt can almost hear the cogs turning in his head, but he’s pretty sure that has less to do with psychic confluence and more to do with the same machinery working in his own.

Tendo Choi does, indeed, arrive on Wednesday. Alison’s coming for the wedding itself, but couldn’t get off for the few days before, so he alone knocks on Newt’s door at about five in the afternoon. He looks amazing, hair slicked back from his face, his bow tie perfect and his face relaxed from its troubled, military severity to something warm and amused. Newt curls into his arms without thinking about it and wonders what it feels like to stop being in love with someone.

Tendo gathers him in tight and doesn’t let go until Hermann appears in the doorway behind him, and Newt steps out of the way to let them exchange handshakes. Except Tendo uses his grip on Hermann’s hand to pull him forward into a hug and mutters, just loud enough that Newt can hear, “I missed you, you asshole,” into his ear, and Hermann relaxes into him, fisting a pale hand in his impeccable purple jacket.

Later, when they’ve managed to cram Tendo into the workspace in the corner of the dorm room, when they’ve filled him in on all the specs and taken all his (valid) engineering tips into account, when Hermann’s chewed him out for ten straight minutes, only to have Tendo kiss him cheekily on the nose and move on as if nothing had happened; much, much later, when they’re mostly pretending to work, when Hermann’s hands are even paler than normal with chalk dust, when Newt’s finished his last cup of coffee, when the sun is just starting to filter through the single crack in Newt’s blackout curtains: Tendo slips a hand at the small of Newt’s back and whispers in his ear, “Happy sunrise.”

Newt closes his eyes, takes a breath, and starts to maybe believe in perfect contentment.

The wedding goes as perfectly as any wedding ever has. Newt looks, if he does say so himself, pretty fucking magnificent, partially due to the fact that Tendo took one look at what he’d bought with Hannibal Chau and then took scissors to it, removing about six miles of ruffled blue ribbon. What he ended up with was just tattered enough to be a little bit punk rock: mostly it was a sleek blue suit with black trim, cut to fit, but instead of trousers it had something between harem pants and a long-trained skirt, lots of blue crinoline and black swatches, shaped so it swirled around his feet when he walked and showed off his new swanky boots. The jacket was short-sleeved and tight, showing off his tattoos from the elbows down.

He’d done his eyeliner, too, a skill held over from his more intensely punk days, and had Tendo teach him to tame his hair into something sleek and not half bad. The overall impression was half fox-hunting gentlewoman and half David Bowie (if David Bowie were shorter, a little bit thicker all over, worse at shaving, and addicted to coffee). Mako seemed pleased, and that was what mattered. Also, Hermann watched him like a cat as he applied his eyeliner, and that might have mattered a little too.

Mako, for her part, was absolutely resplendent in white, with perfect white streaks where she always had them and blue ribbons knotting up the rest of her hair in complicated patterns. The bottom of her dress was trimmed in blue, so that waves rose around her feet when she walked, and Raleigh looked rugged and handsome and absolutely started crying as soon as she walked down the aisle. From his place at the head of the church, Newt watched Hermann make a note of it, imagined him writing in his quick, precise hand, could Mako feel tears too? and he almost laughs.

He settles for grinning at his feet and knowing that Hermann sees.

They take their time, that night, undressing one another with a kind of reverence they haven’t bothered with yet. This isn’t argument dissolving into argumentative, competitive handjobs, or kissing and teasing and little moments stolen between scientific breakthroughs. Newt kneels between Hermann’s legs and slides his hands down his thighs, pausing above his knee on his bad leg to examine the intense, puckered scar, spreading like an explosion out from his kneecap. He runs his nails over the very edges of it, and Hermann opens his eyes, looking down at him, not telling him to stop but not saying anything else, either. He’s entirely naked. They both are, and it’s the first time they’ve taken the time for that, too.

Newt stops anyway, coming back up to kiss him. “I might die,” he says matter-of-factly. “I might die of sexual frustration before we ever finish this goddamn machine.”

They have an agreement, mostly unspoken, that they won’t do anything beyond handjobs until they can do it while testing their machine. Which would be fine, because they should be finished with the machine in as little as two weeks, except that Hermann’s, like, really hot, and he really likes Newt’s tattoos, and he won’t stop touching them, or talking about them, and he has a really nice mouth and a nicer ass and the nicest dick and he’s mostly naked in Newt’s bed all the time.

Hermann slides his fingers into Newt’s hair, dragging his nails against Newt’s scalp, and Newt makes an embarrassing half-purring noise, his eyelids fluttering closed. Hermann mouths at his ear. “Just imagine,” he says, "being able to feel everything, every muscle in your body and mine."

“Don’t be a dick,” Newt mutters against his jaw.

Hermann chuckles a little. “If we die,” he says quietly, “we die together.”

They finish it the first day of winter break, which is also the day before Mako and Raleigh are due back from their honeymoon.

Tendo sticks around until they finish, helping them finalize the designs and doing some of the more finicky soldering work. He has amazingly steady hands, and thin fingers well-suited to tiny, intricate tasks.

Having him around was surprisingly comfortable. Newt had expected it to kind of throw him off, having both him and Hermann in the room, but Tendo’s kind of a natural third point in their triangle, earth to Newt’s fire and Hermann’s water, giving as good as he gets but never letting them under his skin. He’s just kind of there, moving between them, rosary swinging from his wrist, his lips moving in calculation and his hands arranging parts with a kind of casual precision.

He’ll leave once they’re in, but they all decide it’s a good idea to have someone manning the cut-off switch.

“Miracle-worker,” Hermann mutters, examining a perfectly-soldered connection where the umbilical cord meets the helmet, and Newt is inclined to agree.

Newt’s the one who actually finishes, ratcheting the last bolt tight to the main frame of the machine, and then he sits back and just stares. Hermann looks up from where he’s setting up the portable mini-generator they’ve rented for the occasion, and they lock eyes. Hermann tucks his pencil behind his ear and comes to stand next to Newt, accepting the crown/helmet he hands him. Newt picks up the other, and, in perfect synchronization, they put them on. Without thinking about it, Newt reaches down and tangles their fingers together.

“Ready?” Tendo asks softly, and when they nod, he turns it on.

There’s a wild kind of swinging feeling, and then Newt feels his lips moving and makes an effort, takes control of that action, reciting with Hermann the words that, hopefully, will teach the machine the range of their brainwaves. They’d agreed on a set of words that had strong emotional connotations for both of them, but different associations. The biggest danger is that somewhere in the space between their minds, in the drift, they’ll get lost—become too divorced from their bodies and from their selves—so the point of the words is to try and set out who they are right at the beginning. Most of them are general things, like mother and home; Newt gets little flickers, a woman with long, straight hair, a tiny house on a grassy hill fading into a rowhouse in London, and, for the smallest second, Vanessa’s face. But—

“Anchorage,” they say, in two voices made one, and there’s a great heaving and crashing of metal, stinging seawater, Raleigh’s face and Yancy’s face merging into one hopeless loss, and pain, searing up Newt’s side and never really fading. He grits his teeth and concentrates on his own, healthy leg, but it’s like trying to grab onto sleep. He can’t even really feel it, beyond an expectation that it should be there, beyond this dead-weight thing that plagues him, beyond the incessant beeping of hospital wards, beyond the dull certainty of his own guilt and eventual death—

And then Hermann digs his nails into his very physical hand, and he surfaces, gasping, into his dorm room again, both Tendo and Hermann staring at him, faces blank with fear. Tendo’s hand is hovering over the switch on the machine. “No,” Newt spits, “no, I’m okay, I’m okay.”

He feels—he feels more than okay, if for no other reason than he is literally feeling more. He can feel his own hand in Hermann’s, and feel Hermann’s hand around his all at once. He can feel the ground beneath four feet, two his own and another set, ghostly, and yes—the pain of Hermann’s leg, a thousand times duller than it was in the Drift, but there, constant, a reminder and a warning. He thinks of Icarus.

Hermann snorts. “Please, spare me your clumsy classical analogies.”

Newt stares at him, and then grins, and there’s a little weird jolt in his chest as he sees, just a little, the way you can see a memory with your eyes still open, the way he looks through Hermann’s eyes. “I don’t think I can,” he says absently, and reaches up to touch his own face. “You think I’m hot. Shit, I kind of am hot.”

Hermann scowls at him, but Newt feels him trying not to laugh. “We’ve just made the most important scientific discovery of the century,” he snaps, “and that is what you take from it?”

Newt steps into his space, thrilling at the way Hermann’s heartbeat picks up. Every action is a loop—action, reaction, reaction to reaction, and onwards forever, making every moment of even potential physical contact electric. “Shouldn’t it be?” he says, but talking seems kind of unimportant, surface-level. He leans in as slowly as he can stand, and Hermann meets him halfway, and.

“I’m, um,” says Tendo, from very, very far away, “I’ll leave you guys to it.”

Skin is incredible. Lips, even more so. Breath moves into lungs and out of lungs and everything feels amazing, hands sliding up and over shoulders, teeth catching and tugging. There’s no feeling of uncertainty, no wondering what move to make, because what he wants and what Hermann wants occur to him so close together as to be entirely indistinguishable. It is literally movement without thought, bodies reacting to bodies without decisions needing to be made. Surprise becomes both impossible and constant: neither of them can do unexpected things, but the way the things they do feel, well.

Newt strips Hermann bare with quick, sure hands, undoing the buttons on his shirt and kissing his way down his chest. He pauses to flick his tongue over Hermann’s nipple because Hermann wants him to, and that knowledge—that constant, visceral knowledge, what Hermann wants from him, the way Hermann wants his hands, his tongue, his lips, the way he aches for them—threatens to overwhelm him. He watches, his lips against Hermann’s skin, as an alternate scenario plays out in Hermann’s mind, as he imagines reversing their positions, imagines learning to suck cock through psychic links, imagines taking all of Newt in. Newt groans, and feels the hum of it against Hermann’s stomach. The image dissipates, Newt impossibly hard, and suddenly everything is more desperate, needier, both because he can feel how close and he and Hermann both are and because this is dangerous, there’s a real risk here that they could quite literally lose themselves in this, in amongst the layers of fantasy and desire and reality.

He pulls down Hermann’s boxers and leans in, nosing against his cock, breathing him in and knowing he knows how good Newt thinks he smells, the same way he can feel how desperate Hermann is for his mouth, and if he were a stronger man maybe he could resist that, could tease, but he’s only human and most days a pretty poor excuse for one and so he gives in, wraps a hand around the base of Newt’s cock and his lips around the tip.

Hermann makes a noise that Newt feels ripped from his throat, his hands trembling and moving anywhere they can, tracing over Newt’s face and into his hair and down his shoulders. Little babbled scraps of thought slip by that Newt would love to examine, he really would, but he’s too busy feeling, the stretch of his lips and their warmth, the heat of his own mouth and the weight of Hermann’s cock. He has no idea how long it actually lasts, because it feels like an eternity and no time at all before Hermann’s coming, before they’re both coming in a wave of almost unbearable sensation. Newt’s completely untouched and unbelievably satisfied, licking the stickiness from his lips and sitting back on his heels. Hermann stares down at him, licking his own lips, though they’re clean, his pupils blown so wide Newt can almost see stars against the black.

Neither of them say anything. Hermann hooks a hand under Newt’s chin and pulls him up, and Newt lets his eyes slip closed as they kiss. It makes it easier to bear when Hermann gently lifts the helmet from his head and he is, suddenly and intensely, alone.

“Oh,” he says, and there are tears in his voice that are no one’s but his own.

He opens his eyes to see Hermann full-on crying, tears dripping silent down his cheeks as he pulls the helmet from his own head and stares at Newt. He makes no move to wipe them away, so Newt does it for him, running his thumbs over his cheeks again and again as Hermann sobs, his shoulders shaking, his hands twisting and twisting in the front of Newt’s shirt. Newt wraps his arms around him and leads him to the bed, curling up with him and holding him until he’s only trembling a little, until they’re both only trembling a little, arms tight around one another.

Hermann takes a long, shaky breath. “We forgot about the mirror,” he says, and Newt bursts out laughing, shoving his face hard into Hermann’s chest.

Mako and Raleigh get back the next day, and Tendo waits with Newt and Hermann to greet them, lounging around the closed coffee shop, accessed with Newt’s spare key. The late afternoon sun is filtering through the windows, outlining Hermann’s pensive face as he idly works out some equation. Tendo’s leaning against the counter, tossing peanuts up in the air and catching them in his mouth. Each one makes a smooth arc, glinting in the sun.

Newt, for his part, is sketching plans for his Otachi tattoo. He wants to get it done so he can maybe get another—not a kaiju but a real organism, a curled nautilus in black and white, on his hip, maybe, or just below his knee.

“Hermann,” Tendo says, between peanuts. “How much of the patents for the Anchorage materials do you still own?”

“Most of them,” Hermann says, looking up, eyebrows curled in curiosity. “Anything that was never developed beyond its domestic capacities.”

Newt stares at Tendo, and then at Hermann, who stares back, realization dawning. “I’d ask if you were thinking what I’m thinking,” Newt says, starting to grin, “but I think we’re a little past that point, Pinky.”

Hermann’s little smile turns to a scowl like a switch has been flipped. “There is no chance that I’m Pinky,” he sneers.

Tendo laughs. “Brilliant but evil? Yeah, he’s got Brain down pat, Newt.”

Newt stares between them. “But I’m Brain. I’ve always been Brain.”

Hermann reaches over and pats his hand condescendingly. “We all of us have our illusions.” Tendo cackles.

From the doorway, Mako clears her throat delicately. “Are we interrupting something?”

She’s a vision in yellowgold, Raleigh behind her like he’s emerging from the sun itself. Newt launches himself at her, swinging her up and around. “Favorite girl! I missed you, welcome home.”

“Please,” Mako murmurs happily, “like you noticed I was gone.”

Newt smacks a wet kiss onto her cheek and lets her go, spinning her away into Tendo’s arms. Raleigh pulls him into a bear hug, and Newt returns it, grinning into his stupid jacket.

“So,” he says, as they stand back, watching Mako give Tendo a kiss on the forehead and move to hug Hermann. “I know you’re a small goals guy, now, but…” He turns to meet Raleigh’s eyes. “How would you like another shot at saving the world?”