Aftermath: 34 - Until Our City Be Afire (2017)

“Bitch Prince of the Xenome!!” Lightcap announces.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2017 (Thirty-four – Until Our City Be Afire)

Newt coughs (subtly) and digs into ice with a gloved hand, creating a trough into which he can wedge a rack of tubes. That done, he presses ice in and around his 15 mL conicals.

“The thing you want, Maks,” Newt says, as Mako, holding a disposable plastic pipette like a microphone, finishes an a cappella half-Japanese rendition of “Killer Queen,” “is karaoke.” 

She gasps audibly, and, when he looks up from the tube rack he’s burying in ice, he finds her giving him a silent look that is so full of imploring hope that it’s really just totally unfair.

To him.

What’s he supposed to do with tiny, hopeful people? 

This isn’t his area.

No child is cuter than Mako. This is an axiomatic truth that could be objectively verified with time, resources, and adequate funding.

Newt sighs.

Mako’s expression loses its hopeful cast. 

Newt thinks about his own death a little bit.

“I will try,” he says, certain his chances of convincing Marshal Pentecost that it would be fun, totally safe, very normal, and not at all creepy to take the guy’s very newly adopted pre-teen to a karaoke bar?  Yeah. Said chances are pretty minimal. He’s only in this situation at all because stupid stupid stupid Lightcap had told said daughter that Newt had a band and Mako likes learning songs and singing them to people, where “people” is best defined as “Newt” for some reason.

Lightcap will pay.

Today, in fact.

Mako again gives him a look of total faith.

Kids are weird. Totally strange. He’s pretty sure that he was well on his way to bitter at her age. But then, who wouldn’t be bitter when their biochemistry textbook definitely had a greater volume than their own ribcage?

Mako must’ve had nice parents that rewarded those hopeful looks. 

Yup.

Nice parents that are now dead.

“It’s just that your—er, Marshal Pentecost is very important and I am, ostensibly, bureaucratically, less important. Smarter, but less important. Technically. Everyone’s a special snowflake et cetera, et cetera, as I’m sure someone with a western-centric ethos will shortly teach you, Maks, but some special snowflakes don’t hang out with other special snowflakes because of chains of command and vastly different outlooks on life and proper decorum.”

“You are smarter?” Mako angles her head in evident suspicion. 

“Yes.” Newt begins to unscrew capped tubes.

“Bitch Prince of the Xenome!!” Lightcap announces, rounding the corner into his lab with one hand on the wall. “And how are your nucleic acids today? Continuing to break down into the nothingness that awaits us all?”

Mako ducks under his lab bench because of course she does. 

Who wouldn’t be terrified of Lightcap? 

Even Pentecost is wary around her.

“Lightcap,” Newt replies in a tone of distinct warning, looking pointedly towards the floor.

She shifts her stance, sees Mako, makes a horrified face, and mouths the words, “FUCKING hell shit god DAMN it Geiszler,” in perfect silence.

Newt shrugs, finishes his serial unscrewing, and aliquots media into each of eighteen tubes, quenching ongoing lysis. 

Lightcap makes a show of losing her grip on her pen and then drops into a crouch, her weight rocked back onto stiletto heels in a way that looks impressively precarious to Newt.

“Oh,” she says. “Hello, Mako. What are you doing under there?”

Mako crawls out from under the lab bench, gives Lightcap a nervous bow, which the woman in no way deserves, and says, “Hello, Dr. Lightcap. I am not doing anything. I am just here.”

Mako is a cool weird little person sometimes.

Lightcap doesn’t know what to say next and that, Newt thinks, is because Maks is pretty poised for a tiny tiny child and Lightcap is terrible at relating to humans she can’t insult, assault, or consult with science.

“Maks,” Newt says, assembling and queueing up and deploying a master plan in the span of about two seconds. “You know who loves karaoke? Dr. Lightcap.”

Lightcap shoots him a confused, vaguely murderous look. 

“Really?” Mako tips her face up, tenses her entire body, and comes up onto her toes in painfully contained total excitement. 

“Yes,” Lightcap says, because really, there is probably only one human on the planet who can resist Mako and that human is Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, PhDick.

“Maybe we should all go sometime,” Newt says. “You’re friends with the Marshal. You could invite him to karaoke. You could invite him to bring Mako for her birthday. You could call the bar and threaten them until they allow a minor to set foot on their premises.” Newt finishes his lysis-quenching and screws tube tops back on. 

If this works, he is going to look awesome.

To Mako.

To everyone else he will just look like an idiot, probably.

Lightcap stares him down, her expression switching from uncomfortable to vaguely devious to satisfied. 

Newt isn’t sure he likes this.

In fact, he’s sure he does not.

“Okay,” Lightcap says, powering to her feet from her stiletto crouch, and looking down at Mako. “I’ll figure something out. Your job is to drop a hint to the Marshal. Tell him how much you like karaoke. Sing him a song, okay?”

Mako nods. “Dr. Lightcap,” she says politely, “what is ‘bitch prince’?”

Newt chokes a little as he tries really hard not to dissolve into endless hysterical laughter that will not be punctuated with words but that will be punctuated with emphatic pointing in Lightcap’s general and horrified direction. Newt does doesn’t do that though. Newt bites his lip, tries to keep breathing, and does not cry from displaced hilarity. Much.

“Oh,” Lightcap says, dropping right back down into that patented stiletto crouch. “No baby, that’s—those aren’t even words. They don’t mean anything; grown-ups just say those kinds of things to harass, er, tease, other grown-ups but they don’t really—”

“Prince is a word,” Mako says, not one to suffer platitudes.

“Yes, Lightcap,” Newt adds. “Prince is a word.” 

Lightcap shoots him a venomous look with an amused edge. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, I’m sorry Mako, yes. You’re right. ‘Bitch’ is also a word. Back in the day, it was a very sad word that implied that it was bad in some way to be a woman. Later it came to serve as a stand-in for irritating leadership qualities in a man or a woman and also for complaining. Historically it was a noun, but when used as a synonym for ‘complain’ it becomes a verb. It can also be used like an adjective, in which case it means that the noun it describes is really neat. Like I might say to Dr. Geiszler, ‘bitchin’ boots, boy genius,’ and that would be a compliment.”

“My boots are, indeed, quite bitchin’,” Newt concurs, setting his incubation timer.

“It’s a complicated word,’ Dr. Lightcap continues, “and that’s why it’s hard for kids to use it correctly. Dr. Geiszler knows that I don’t really mean to hurt his feelings when I call him ‘Bitch Prince of an Alien Xenome;’ it’s more like a compliment. But if I didn’t know him so well, I wouldn’t call him that.”

“Meh,” Newt says, “wouldn’t you though?”  

“Dr. Geiszler never calls me a bitch, even though it wouldn’t upset me, because lots and lots of people have called me a bitch in a mean way and really meant it, and Dr. Geiszler doesn’t like that because deep down he’s a nice guy. A really annoying, manipulative, bitter, snide, sanctimonious, sarcastic, arrogant, histrionic, drama-queen of a bleeding-heart, vegetarian, starry-eyed, kind-hearted, fair-minded, left-wing, starving-orphan, idealist who breaks every rule he can, like, for example, letting little kids play in his lab without telling their adopted parents because he doesn’t want to get either the kid or himself into trouble.”

Mako nods, looking anxious. “Thank you for your explanation.”

Newt’s not positive that Mako’s English is solid enough to have followed that whole list. He’s also not sure that Lightcap clearly communicated the central take-home message Mako. Because there is one. 

“Just to be clear, Maks,” Newt says, “what Dr. Lightcap means is don’t say the word ‘bitch’ in front of the Marshal.” 

Mako nods.

Newt lets her put his tubes in the centrifuge for him, then sends her on her way to do whatever little kid things she does, like eat snacks and learn division, probably.

Lightcap, wisely waits for Mako to leave before saying anything else. 

“Geiszler, you manipulative little Demon Lord of the Viscera,” she says as soon as Mako rounds the doorframe. “How am I supposed to make this karaoke thing happen? This isn’t academia. I can’t drag the top brass to a karaoke bar.”

“Hmm,” Newt says. “Weak. Poor, poor showing.”

“You’re a bastard,” Lightcap says.

“Bitch,” Newt whispers. 

“Baby,” she replies, turning the word into a blend of endearment and insult by smacking him gently in the face. “Vituperative little wunderkind. I’m onto you, with your post-punk, edgy, neohipster temperamental front for your heart made of nothing but mush.”

“What a lovely glass house you have,” Newt replies. “Put your rocks down maybe.”

“I’m a glass breaker by nature, kiddo. You should know that by now.”

“Hmm. True. Stay away from my lab bench,” Newt shoots back. 

“Technically? It’s my lab bench, Geiszler. They’re all, all of them, my benches.” 

He looks at her briefly and then drops his eyes, for once not saying what he’s thinking.

“What, no morbid counter-observation regarding your inevitable ascendancy?” Lightcap asks. 

“I’ll miss you when you’re dead.” Newt tries to sound bored about it.

“You’d better,” she replies.

He spreads ethanol over his bench and doesn’t watch as she walks away.