Aftermath: 2 - The Omen Coming On (2025)

If Lightcap could speak, Hermann knows what she would say.

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

Text iteration: Witchingest hour.

Additional notes: None.

2025 (Two – The Omen Coming On)

The hour is late. Hong Kong glows with the light of continued celebration. The crack of fireworks punctuate the roar of distant traffic and the murmur of dark waters. Hermann stands on the cement platform of the deployment dock.

Right out at the end. The place Dr. Lightcap would have chosen, had she lived to see the Hong Kong Shatterdome.

He can almost hear her whistle. Piercing and pleasant, true of tone, always one of Newton’s songs. Hermann tries to picture her, finally at rest, but her ghost paces behind him, stalking a semicircle around this spot that should be hers.

He feels her eyes upon his back, his neck, the side of his face. If she could speak, Hermann knows what she would say. Coward, she’d call him. Say what you like about me, Gottlieb, but at least I knew how to love people. I’d never let him take whatever fall he’s taking for you in there. If you had any guts, any at all, you’d be using that decade-old torch you’ve been carrying for him to burn this place to the ground. You don’t know these people, this foreign team! Stacker’s blown to hell, Mako’s heart is broken, most of the people I loved are dead or gone—there’s no one to protect that baby-faced little bastard but YOU. She’s screaming at him now, stepping laterally, foot over foot over foot. AND YOU PROMISED ME, Gottlieb, you PROMISED. The word tears from her throat, frayed and furious. I know you didn’t like me but I thought you’d keep your word about this much at least. You’re such a fucking disappointment.

You’re right, he thinks. You were right about more than I ever gave you credit for. He swallows, with difficulty, in a tight throat. 

Lightcap’s life is over. Her days are spent. 

But his time upon this earth is not yet done.

He has dreamed of the ending of the world for a decade. It will not proceed in any manner he’d envisioned. It will not end at all.

Hermann straightens his jacket. He takes several breaths, borrowing a bit of Newton’s boldness, a bit of that unselfconscious bravery. He searches his memory, casts back, looking for a time of gold light, hot days, suffocation. He recalls sitting with his back against a brick wall, gasping in turbid and contaminated air, feeling the burn of Kaiju Blue trace every breath he takes, coat delicately his airways. He remembers shutting his eyes, thinking of Alaska, a place that he has never seen and, now, he never will. Even as his colleagues find him, pull him to his feet, he’s crafting a list: Things I Should Have Told Him. The memory’s a decade old. It isn’t even his. But it gives him the resolve he needs. 

He turns, and Lightcap’s presence is so powerful that he sees her silhouette, dark against the lights of the Shatterdome. There ya go, Gottlieb, she whispers. I knew you had it in you.