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: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

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

Newt coughs subtly and digs into crushed ice with a gloved hand to create a trough. He wedges in a rack of 15 mL conicals, then presses ice in and around his tubes.

“The thing you want, Maks,” he 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 buried in ice, he finds her giving him a silent look 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, safe, and very normal 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. Extremely strange. He’s pretty sure he was well on his way to bitter at her age. But then, who wouldn’t be bitter when their biochemistry textbook 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, while I’m ostensibly and 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 unscrews his 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, warning in his tone as he looks pointedly at 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, 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.”

Newt tries not to smile. Mako is a cool, weird little person sometimes.

Lightcap doesn’t know what to say 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 re: science.

“Maks.” Newt assembles, queues up, and deploys a genius plan in the span of about two seconds. “You know who loooooves karaoke? Dr. Lightcap!”

Lightcap shoots him a confused and vaguely murderous look. 

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

“Yes,” Lightcap says, because really, there’s 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. “Lightcap is friends with the Marshal. She could invite him to karaoke. Maybe for your birthday?” 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’ll 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 powers to her feet from her stiletto crouch and looks 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 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 doesn’t do that though. Newt bites his lip, tries to keep breathing, and doesn’t cry from displaced hilarity. Much.

“Oh.” Lightcap drops 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 look promising venom and glee and sparkly twee. “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 Lightcap clearly communicated the central take-home message to Mako. Because there is one. 

“Just to be clear, Maks,” Newt says, “what Dr. Lightcap means is don’t say ‘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 hisses 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.