Aftermath: 1 - Untangle This (2030)

Don’t think of the war.

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness.

Text iteration: Witchingest hour.

Additional notes: None.

2030 (One – Untangle This)

Five years out from the day the world didn’t end—with no stakes, no looming destruction, nothing more strenuous hanging over him than a short drive made twice a day, the preparation of meals and of lectures—still Hermann finds the rain trying.

More than trying.

In the distance, lightning fans through the cloud cover. Rain pools in the low-lying areas of the parking lot. The air carries the smell of ozone, wet asphalt, and the sea. Trespasser’s ghost roams somewhere to the west, traversing water, land, sky.

Don’t think of the war.

Easily done. He won’t. He can’t. He’s busy. Having an argument. With Newton.

“Well,” Hermann snaps, “if someone hadn’t insisted on making the cross-campus walk and had, instead, used even a scrap of his ungodly—”

“Oh, give it a rest,” Newton says, irritated, irritating, and vexingly—vexing. Could the man not have waited? In his lab? For Hermann to get the car? Is that really asking so much? The wind blows briskly off the bay, and Newton raises his voice to be heard. “I had no idea this was going to happen.” 

“You give it a rest, Newton,” Hermann snarls, losing what tenuous grip on his temper remains. “You.”

“Okay. You were right. You were so right, Hermann. You were so so right, and I was so so wrong.” Newton speaks with egregious hand gestures and a mockingly conciliatory tone. “We did not make it to the car before it started raining. I’m sorry.” 

He does not sound sorry. He does not sound sorry in the least. Hermann glares at him. They walk in silence as the rain turns drenching. By the time they reach the car, they’re soaked. Clothes, skin, bone. 

Hermann hates the rain, and hates Newton in it.

They’ll have a terrible night. A terrible one. He already knows just how it will go—has seen it play out in too many iterations—and even if Newton is incapable of learning based on past experience, well, Hermann is not. None of this, none of this, is fair. It is not now, has never been, and never will be fair. His anger, still molten, is turning to guilt even before it cools.

“Hermann,” Newton shouts over the wind and the driving rain, with that oh-so-reasonable prosody that Hermann loathes, “I can see you getting progressively pissed by the minute. Will you relax? It’s rain.”

This is not Newton’s fault. The man does not, in fact, control the weather. This knowledge puts no dent in Hermann’s anger; he cannot help his responses, keyed as they are to a past without a certain future, to memories of distress and despair. He contains the fallout by speaking as little as possible. Newton does not take well to this. He’s never taken well to this.

“I’ll make it up to you,” the man says, his glasses streaked with rain, his hair dripping. 

“Make it up to me?” Hermann shouts back at him. “Make it up to me? Unless you can reverse the arrow of time, Dr. Geiszler, that’s a categoric impossibility.”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Newton says, slowing his pace and prolonging their time in this deluge. “Did I violate some law of interpersonal thermodynamics that you worship on your Neoplatonist Altar?” He spreads his arms wide as if, in the space between them, a consecrated table lies. 

Hermann throws up a dismissive hand and increases his pace. The car isn’t far, though it hardly matters, given how thoroughly soaked they are. Five steps or five hundred steps, the damage has been done. He unlocks the car remotely, wrenches the back door open, deposits a soaked bag and a soaked cane, slams the back door shut, opens the driver’s side door, and gets in. Newton follows suit, but slowly, as if unprepared to commit to a ride home. He takes spans of seconds to swing the passenger side door open, hours to get in the car, years to shut the door, decades to buckle his seatbelt. “Hi Hwi,” he says, epochs later. 

“Hello Newt,” Hermann’s car replies. 

Hermann backs the vehicle into a tight and rapid arc. He accelerates out of the parking lot. 

Stop driving,” Newton snaps. “I’m trying to have a fight with you.”

“Best of luck.” Hermann’s consonants crisp with their own frost.

“I’ve figured you out, you know.” 

“Have you,” Hermann replies. “Have you really, Newton. Because—”

“Yes, actually.” Newton speaks over him. “Yes, I have, Hermann—”

“Well then by all means enlighten me.” Hermann escalates to shouting. “Tell me what it is—”

“You are impossible,” Newton shouts right back. “Will you just—”

“If you tell me to chill so much as one more time, in our lives, so help me God, Newton, I will—”

“Oh yes,” Newton says, deploying his sarcasm to its theoretical maximum, “how dare I insinuate—”

“I will throw you out of this car,” Hermann informs him. “I will do it at highway speeds.”

A quiet chime that stops them both. Hwi says, “Doors will not open during transit.”

“Well at least someone’s thinking critically,” Newton begins again, “even if it is your car.”

“Do not—”

“Oh right, because this is my fault.”

“You—”

“I SAID I WAS SORRY.” 

“DO NOT APOLOGIZE,” Hermann shouts, maximum rage, maximum volume. 

“Well I don’t know what you want me to do.” Newton moves straight from righteous outrage to forlorn defeat in the span of a single sentence. Perversely, this ratchets Hermann’s anger and attendant guilt to mind-destroying levels. “I want to do whatever it is you want me to do, but I don’t know what that is. You have to tell me.”

“I have to tell you,” Hermann repeats, unable to keep the ice out of his tone, the contempt. Of course, these feelings are misdirected, as they’ve always been. They are for himself. Not for Newton. 

“Or not, I guess,” the man says. He removes his glasses and tries to clean them with a soaked shirt.