Aftermath: 41 - Like an Ill-Sheathed Knife (2028)

To her profound credit, Mako retreats from nothing.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2028 (Forty-one – Like an Ill-Sheathed Knife)

Hermann feels acutely sorry for Mako, who’s struggling to maintain a brave face. Newton has not made it easy on her; he seems to be particularly upset that Mako is witnessing all of this, even though he hasn’t articulated as much. 

It’s probably coming.

To her profound credit, Mako retreats from nothing. She sticks it out, helps Hermann in a thousand small ways, and doesn’t back down in the face of Newton’s distress. She’s tried pleading with him, reasoning with him, shouting back at him, not reacting to his words or his manner—no strategy has reliably succeeded. 

It’s exhausting.

The only saving grace of this abysmal situation is that Newton can’t hang onto his distress indefinitely, and once he lets it go, it does truly dissipate. Once the cycle begins, they have never successfully broken it—but at least there is the knowledge that it will end, once Newton has worn himself out. 

This morning had turned excruciating. As the taper tapers, Newton gets progressively more able to sustain his distress and starts articulating more of what he is feeling. He tries desperately to work out what is happening to him, but can’t do it. He is less angry, more upset. As fatiguing as the anger can be, it is better, by far, than watching the man weep because he can’t follow a two-step logical abstraction and doesn’t know why. At the end of breakfast, Mako asks a benign question, it triggers some thought pathway the man can’t run to completion. 

“Newt, it doesn’t matter,” Mako says quickly, as soon as she can tell he’s struggling. 

Hermann might have been able to salvage things if he had been thinking faster on his feet, gotten the man up, changing subject and location at the same time, distracting him with physical touch, which is much more reliable than words alone. Hermann is not thinking quickly, however. He is overtaxed.

“It does matter, Mako,” Newton says, hands pressed to his temples. “Ugh, why can’t I—” he breaks off, and, because it still seems salvageable, Mako tries again.

“You’re not thinking clearly because you had a seizure, and now you’re taking medicine.” She gives him a variant of the same line she has heard Hermann use on multiple occasions, but it is unpracticed, and she makes the mistake that Hermann’s made on many occasions.

“What,” Newton snaps, dropping his hands. 

The situation is now unsalvageable.

“This is temporary, Newton,” Hermann interjects. But the words are without energy. They sound unconvincing even to him. He sighs. He just wants this round to be over.

“There is no way that’s true,” Newton says, venomously. “Stop lying to me, both of you. You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“Newt,” Mako says, “we’re not lying to you—”

“Oh yes,” Hermann says, sarcastic, unwisely cutting off Mako mid-sentence. “Heaven forbid we try to make you feel better. Because you’re so happy right now, yes?” Hermann asks. “This is certainly a scheme that worked as orchestrated and has paid off well.” He feels immediately guilty after he says it.

Newton gives him a mostly measured look, but when he speaks, Hermann can tell he’s close to tears. “Do you want to know how I know?” he asks. 

No, Hermann thinks. Not really.

“Because,” Newton continues, “if this were temporary, Mako wouldn’t be here.”

“Newton,” Hermann says, trying to stop him.

“You wouldn’t have let her come,” Newton says, unable to hold himself together any longer. He looks away from both of them, already crying. “You wouldn’t have let her see something like this.”

Hermann and Mako both freeze, but Newton is not done.

“This is horrible for me,” Newton says, short of breath, sounding like he is being tortured. “This is humiliating. But I am not so far gone that I can’t figure some of it out. So just—don’t misrepresent what’s happening here.” 

“Newt,” Mako says, her voice cracking on his name. “Stop it.”

“No, you stop, Mako,” he says, trying heroically not to cry. “You think I want you to see this? I don’t.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Mako says, a quaver in her voice. Then, with resolution, she says the worst possible thing. “Hermann cannot do this by himself. He shouldn’t have to.”

Hermann shuts his eyes, feeling his own guilt sticking in his organs like a lance. Why would she say that? Maybe she is trying to provoke Newton into crying so this conversation can be over. It works. Of course it works. It works so well all three of them are crying. Newton buries his head in his arms, crying quietly in what appears to be unmitigated despair.

“No, no, no,” Mako says, high pitched, moving her chair next to Newton’s chair, draping her arm over his shoulders, pressing her cheek against his hair. “Newt,” she whispers over and over. She tries, periodically, to draw him up, but Newton isn’t having it. 

Hermann feels a strange relief, watching her. She is trying so hard. She’s not giving up, even in the face of the worst that Newton can dish out, and if anything should happen to Hermann himself—Newton will not be alone; she won’t leave him to the world. It alleviates a concern he wasn’t aware of having. 

Finally, Mako gently pries him from the table, settles him on the couch, retrieves her laptop, and turns on Blue Planet. She wedges herself next to him. 

“Sorry,” Newton murmurs. 

“You shh,” Mako says, kissing his temple. “Watch the whales.”

Hermann, deeply grateful for the reprieve, cleans the kitchen, takes a shower, answers email, then makes sandwiches. When lunch is ready, he returns to find them exactly as he left them, except Newton is now asleep. 

“So odd,” Mako whispers, “to see him sleep this much.” She looks up at Hermann. “I don’t like it.”

“Me neither,” he admits, sitting on the coffee table. 

“He needs to wake up now?” Mako asks.

“I made lunch,” Hermann says.

“You think he’s going to put us through that again?” Mako asks.

“Unfortunately,” Hermann replies. “I believe it’s quite likely.”

“How much longer will this last?” Mako whispers.

“It’s hard to say,” Hermann admits. This is the worst time of it he’s had thus far. But he’s thinking more clearly.”

“That seems to be making it worse,” Mako says. 

Hermann nods. “For now, but I think maybe another day like this, and then enough improvement that it isn’t so intolerable.”

There is a nearly identical repeat of the morning’s performance, except this time it’s Hermann who leads the conversation, and Newton stops short of weeping head down on the table top, primarily because Hermann gets him on his feet, cleans him up, helps him shower, and manages to avoid significant conversation. 

Hermann feels acutely sorry for Mako, who cannot help but be internalizing the idea that Newton doesn’t want her here. 

In the early afternoon, Hermann sits with him while he hydrates. Newton carries on a monologue mostly with himself as he tries desperately to work out what is happening to him. Hermann distracts him with some Rilke, in German, gives him the next dose of the taper when it’s time, and watches him fall asleep. 

You poor thing, he thinks, feeling utterly wretched, stroking Newton’s hair. He has the urge to lie down, mostly atop the man, and take a nap, but there is Mako to consider.

Once he is certain Newton is asleep, Hermann goes in search of her. He comes upon her chopping vegetables in the kitchen, crying silently. 

“Mako,” he says gently.

“Onions,” Mako says, smiling at him through tears. “Onions.”

“Those,” Hermann says, taking the knife from her, “are carrots.” He folds her into a hug, but she shakes her head against his shoulder.

“I came to help you,” she says. “But I’m making it worse.”

“You are not,” he says.

“I made him cry,” Mako says. “Two times. Just today.”

“You did not make him cry,” Hermann replies. “He no control over emotions when he is like this. Zero. It’s not your fault.”

“I think about you often,” Mako says, wiping her face on her sleeve. There is something in her tone that allows Hermann to understand that when she says ‘you’ she is not speaking collectively, she is referring to Hermann specifically. “I think about you all the time. Since that day right here when you said about us drifting, in the end. I think about my life and the mistakes that I made, and why I made them. The frustrations that I had. The ones you shared.”

“Mako,” Hermann says gently, but does not try to stop the torrent of words that come. 

“They wouldn’t let us help them,” Mako says, her voice high and wild. “They tried to protect us, all of them did, the Marshal, Dr. Lightcap, Newt. They did so much. Serge, and Herc and Sasha. They fought so hard, all in different ways, and you and me—we wanted to. We wanted to.”

“Yes, Ms. Mori,” he says, using that old title like an endearment. “We did.”

“In many ways we would have been the better choice,” she whispers.

“I agree,” Hermann says. 

“I want to help now,” she whispers. “I want to live close to you, I want us to be together.”

Hermann nods, too overcome to speak.

“You wouldn’t mind?” Mako whispers. “If we moved to be close to you? It wouldn’t make it harder?”

“No,” Hermann whispers hoarsely. “I think that would be—I can think of nothing better.”

Hours later, Hermann shakes Newton into consciousness. He does not like or trust the postictal period; and he can’t let Newton fully accept the only gift it will ever offer. “I’m sorry,” Hermann whispers, stroking Newton’s hair. “You know I hate to wake you. I always hate to wake you.” 

Newton slurs a few sentence fragments that nearly make sense before he comes out with: “You don’t have to be so quiet. I’m not dying. You’re not disturbing my final hours, dude, you can unload the dishwasher, you know.” 

Hermann freezes, realizing that Newton may now have some insight. But it is too tenuous, he decides, to risk asking him. “Ridiculous man,” Hermann says, straightening the seams of the man’s makeshift sleepwear into perfect alignment. 

Dinner is not a disaster. Newton is exhausted, but not disoriented. Halfway through the meal, Newton makes a dry aside and Mako laughs, more from relief than anything else.

Early in the evening, once he’s taken his evening taper dose, Hermann puts him to bed, lies down with him beneath the glow of a single bedside lamp. He helps the man into one of the sprawled positions he so favors, face down, his head on Hermann’s shoulder, his arm across Hermann’s chest, his leg hooked over Hermann’s nearest thigh. Once he is comfortable, he lies there, unnaturally still. Hermann can feel the depth of his exhaustion in the weight of his shoulders, the angle of his head. It’s difficult for him to move. In a few days he’ll recover, a compensatory wildness growing out of these stone times. 

There would be a strange novelty to the pace of evenings like this one, a kind of peace to be found in the passing of quiet hours if they didn’t remind him so much of a transpacific flight he wishes he could banish from his thoughts. Hermann thinks too much on things he said in the Shatterdome, in the airport, on that plane, and doesn’t understand how they could have done no damage to a person blasted so wide open by a Drift he hadn’t wanted and that will never let him go. 

So, it’s easy to be kind to Newton, even when he is excruciatingly difficult, as he has been today. It’s easy to be quiet, easy to let him ride this out, this postictal, posthospital time. “I love you,” Hermann says, when he is like this, hoping words might heal a place deep down, any place that needs it. “I love you. I will always, always love you.”

Newton says nothing, but he is not sleeping. 

“What’s wrong,” Hermann asks. 

“Nothing,” Newton replies, not looking at him, his eyelids stubbornly half-open, his gaze directed at nothing Hermann can see.

“Something is troubling you,” Hermann whispers, his free hand running through the man’s hair.

“It’s not the same,” Newton says, artlessly cryptic.

“What’s not the same?” Hermann asks, artfully casual.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be quite like I was,” Newton replies.

The shock of the words is so extreme that he has to look away, into the dark recesses of the quiet room, his hand stilling quite involuntarily in Newton’s hair as he represses the urge to bring it to his own face. 

The past few days have allowed him to forget that this, too, is something within the Geiszlerian repertoire, the quiet revealed insight, coming late and unexpected, driving straight and deep and hard. At a different time, on a different night, he might have been able to straighten his expression, to say ‘don’t be ridiculous,’ to say anything mitigating at all. But nothing comes and he pulls his hand from Newton’s hair, makes a fist, and presses it against compressed lips. His eyes burn.

“Ah,” Newton whispers, in sympathetic revelation. “You didn’t think I knew.”

You are intolerable, Hermann wants to say, unfair and barely intelligible. But nothing comes. He lifts an inarticulate hand, trying to breathe enough that he’ll eventually be able to speak. It is no use. It won’t come soon enough. It may never come. His own throat may choke him to death. But he cannot just leave it at that. So tightens his arms around Newton, pulls him into a wordless embrace that the other man seems too drained to return. He does not lift his head. His fingers press against Hermann’s shoulder, briefly, then go slack. 

He is right. In many ways, the man is correct. He will not be the same, he will never be untroubled, he will never live free and clear of the war and its sequelae, his seizures seem to get worse each time he has one, he will not have the life that Hermann wanted for him, he still, even after three years, does not understand the depth of Hermann’s regard. 

“Newton,” he says quietly. “Do you trust me?”

“Myeah,” the other man says.

“Then you must simply wait,” Hermann whispers. “You will be fine. Ten days from now? You will be fine. The taper will be over, you will not be able to sleep, you will be climbing the walls and driving your poor graduate students to distraction.”

Newton sighs. “If you say so.”

“I love you,” Hermann whispers.

“Love you more,” Newton replies.

“No,” Hermann says.

“Loved you first,” Newton points out.

“I doubt that very much.” Hermann strokes his hair. Newton doesn’t reply, and Hermann can feel the moment that he falls asleep. His breathing evens, his muscles lose what little tone they had. Hermann returns to the Rilke.