Aftermath: 15 - Chimes at Midnight (2025)

These are no tears of joy, despite the way the world won’t end.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2025 (Fifteen – The Omen Coming On)

On a windswept foreign balcony, clad only in a bathrobe, Hermann rests his forearms on the rail. The sun burns orange as it sinks toward the Coastal Wall. Gulls sweep out arcs above him, their white wings sunset-tipped and startling against the deepening dark. The city below is a carpet of glass, split by ribbons of asphalt. There aren’t many people on the streets.

Of course, Hermann thinks, there wouldn’t be. 

He’d attended a conference here when San Francisco was at its peak, creating technological masterworks and tossing them into the world like cheap candy. Tiny, glittering chips scattered with confetti-like abandon. 

He pulls his phone from the pocket of his bathrobe and contemplates it.

God, he thinks, his thoughts going gratuitously Geiszler-glazed as he studies shatterproof glass. The joy they poured into this little block of circuits. The promise. Inherent to this is object is the belief that humanity endures. 

Are these his thoughts? Do they belong to the neural ghost of a living man? Or might the strata of death and cognition go deeper?

They do. Of course they do.

“No,” he whispers, because he has the memory now. It’s not his. It’s Newton’s. And the speaker—he sees her in his mind’s eye, glorious in the floodlights of the Seattle Shatterdome, weeks before her death, beer in one hand, phone in the other—the speaker is Lightcap. She’d made that observation. Inherent to this object is the belief that humanity endures. 

He can hear her whistle still. 

Hermann has thought of her more in the past day than he has in the past half-decade. Is this EPIC Rapport? Newton’s influence? His own? Why is Hermann out here, on this balcony, right now? Why is he looking toward the sea? Why had he done the same thing in Hong Kong when feeling particularly wretched?

It’s a proclivity that comes from Newton.

When the man’s upset he goes to places she would be, were she alive to be there. 

“No,” Hermann says. 

He won’t permit this. 

“No.” He had no fondness for Caitlin Lightcap in life; he has none for her in death. This is not him, this abyss of grief that threatens from within, this is EPIC Rapport. It must be. It can be nothing else. 

He finds his hands are shaking. 

He returns his phone his bathrobe pocket and grips the balcony rail with both his hands. His breath comes too short, too fast, too shallow. 

Think of something else.

They’d made it out of Hong Kong. That’s good. That’s promising. Newton is asleep in their hotel room on the other side of a sliding glass door, and not locked inside a Pan-Pacific lab. Hermann hasn’t been arrested or charged with an international crime.

All of this is good.

We made it out of Hong Kong, he tells himself, and tries to calm his breathing. 

Yes.

They’d made it out of Hong Kong. 

But only barely. By the thinnest of margins, the edge of a razor. 

Without his father’s intervention, they wouldn’t have made it at all. Without his father. His father? Who has done nothing for him in the past half-decade but torture the Jaeger Program to its death? His father! Who’d stepped in with an intervention that feels miraculous? Astonishingly unlikely? The kind of thing that could only happen after the ending of the world?

He chokes the life out of the balcony rail, struggling for air, tearing his eyes from the Coastal Wall. He can’t bear to look at it. If only That Thing hadn’t drained away their resources, if only Lightcap hadn’t died, if only she’d killed it. She could have done it. She, and she alone, could have killed the Coastal Wall. 

If she’d lived.

Hermann finds he’s crying. He’s not sure why. Are these his tears? Are these his thoughts?

I don’t need to be alive to help you, baby, Lightcap whispers.

“Leave me alone,” he sobs. “I don’t need you here. I don’t want you here. I’m not him.” This is identity confusion and nothing more.

Lightcap looks over the city, her elbows braced against the rail, her face turned away, her shoulders hunched. She, too, is weeping. These are no tears of joy, despite the way the world won’t end.

Why are you crying, he snarls at her, dashing away his own tears with the back of his hand. You got what you wanted. You got all you wanted. Everything.

The shine of sun on snow prisms into every wavelength of light to ever fall on her: the red of Jaeger hearts; the yellow-gold of the light in her nights; the green-tinged columns of glowing aldehydes; the blue of Ops in Anchorage; the indigo dawns of early morning test runs; the violet glow of roving lights on a night of karaoke for a little girl who would, a decade later, seal the quantum tear he’d studied all his life.

You were not the only one who suffered, he rages at her. 

I know that. I know. I always knew. He sees her, a mote in his mind’s new eye, turning away, turning away, always ahead, always maddeningly out of reach and this can only come from Newton, this view from behind, this belief that she can do anything, anything in the world—

“My heart breaks to think of you,” Hermann admits.

The tracks of her tears glint orange in the setting sun. Her hair, her face, her eyes have taken on a twilit cast, still alight in a darkening world. Her feet are bare. Her bathrobe matches his.

“You should be happy,” Hermann whispers.

But still she cries. They both do.