Aftermath: 17 - Until Our City Be Afire (2017)

Newt loooooooves discovering design flaws in the field.

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 (Seventeen – Until Our City Be Afire)

Yup. Newt’s made some miscalculations, that’s true. For example, it’d be great if he could just go back in time real quick, and when Lightcap had said: “Dollface, I need you to oversee the retrieval effort; Crimson Typhoon is tangled in the fucking fucker’s mother-fucking tail and I do NOT trust J-Tech to not ALL DIE during the extraction,” Newt should’ve said, “No,” or, “Tendo is more than capable,” or, “Lightcap, I’m happy to do that but please realize you might be trading me for a half-destroyed Jaeger.” Because of course she hadn’t realized. 

To be fair, neither had he, really?

He knows his lungs are bad, but he didn’t know they’d be this pissed at him. They’re, like, having lung-PTSD right now. Or something. This is unexpected. This is weird. Weird is usually bad when it comes to K-Science. 

“Kid,” Serge says, covered head-to-toe in biohazard gear. “She’s gonna tear you apart.”

No need to specify the she. 

Privately, Newt thinks that’s possible. Publicly, he coughs and can’t stop, He grips the bench in the back of the containment truck.

He’d figured out the problem. Right around the time Lightcap and Hermann called, actually. While talking to them. His filter is clogging. Clogged. Why? 

He’s coughing shit up. Not much, but enough. Some serous fluid with just a hint of sanguinity, maybe?

Yum.

That’s great. That’s just perfect.

It’s not a lot of blood, hopefully, just secondary to irritation, hopefully, but it’s enough to create too much of a mist on the wrong side of micron-scale holes. He’s not supposed to be coughing a bunch of shit onto his inner, finer filter. That is not what that filter’s designed for.

Newt loooooooves discovering design flaws in the field. Really he does. It’s his faaaaaavorite.

He’ll have to make a call pretty soon—either take off the mask before he reaches the decon station and hope for the best, or suffocate behind this freaking filter. It would probably be helpful if he could explain this conundrum to someone, but he’s lucky to be breathing at all. Could he write it down? Maybe, if someone has the presence of mind to give him a white board and a dry-erase marker. Probably they won’t. The sheer effort of trying to get Serge to understand his desire for writing materials seems way too daunting. Bottom line, they won’t understand until the filter comes off and they can see what the real problem is. 

Why he’s coughing up the blood is another question. Probably lung-PTSD at the molecular level? At a minimum the capillary level? He doesn’t think he’s inhaled Blue again.

He remembers what that felt like. 

All the same, this seems extreme to him? It’s been two years and some change. His pulmonary vascular beds must be really angry. Long memory on those little guys, apparently. Maybe this is reasonable. Only a handful of people have ever survived an encounter with Kaiju Blue. Most of them aren’t getting up and personal with kaiju corpses. For all Newt knows, there’s, like, some prion inserted into his alveolar membranes that’s started chopping away in response to some kaiju rage pheromone the respirators can’t filter.

Oooh. Yup. That’s interesting. That’s cool. That’s a real possibility. He should make a note.

Hmm. Can’t do that just now. No voice recorder, bulky gloves, and, also, he’s losing sensation in his hands. Feet too. How would that fit into the prion theory? Oh wait. No. It wouldn’t, except as a downstream effect of hypoxia probably. In other news, he’s hypoxic. That’s why he can’t feel his hands and the world’s looking grayer than its historical norm.

Serge, pretty smart for a Jaeger pilot, says: “You gonna make it to decon?” 

Newt, always with the fantastic timing, watches his vision start to go.

Fuck you, cerebral cortex, don’t you DARE.

There’s a roaring in his ears. He doesn’t say anything to Serge, just tries to pull air through a resistant filter with underpowered lungs and NOT COUGH. He manages to beat back unconsciousness with a stick, but only just. He gets enough oxygen for his brain to start powering his limbic system again and he goes from barely conscious to borderline panic, which is good. He needs. That panic.

“Shit, Geiszler.” Serge sounds as stressed as he ever gets (not very), holding Newt upright. “Stay with me, here.”

Newt nods, really working to breathe, trying not to fall behind, but the harder he works, the more air he needs. He tries to calm down, reverse that trend. Serge knocks on the glass, talks to the driver. Newt feels their speed increase. He can’t say how long it takes, exactly, that drive. While it’s happening, it feels like it’ll last the rest of his life.

Three people help him through the decon. None of them are sure what’s wrong with him, because he’s not talking. Lightcap is talking, maybe just in Newt’s head, maybe over some kind of speaker. People keep asking him questions, but he doesn’t answer a single one. He’s busy. He gets an occasional shake that helpfully interrupts his consistent flirting with unconsciousness. Thanks, decon team! He’s operating on about ten percent of the oxygen they think he’s operating on, but there’s no way to tell them that. 

He keeps his mind on one thing, the most important thing. He loses it here and there, but it comes back, fluctuating with his alertness level. 

This is the important thing. 

They will FREAK OUT when they get to the step of the decon procedure where they pull that filter off his face because they’re going to see something unexpected and alarming. Namely blood. Inside the filter. Possibly also on his face a little bit.

People who are startled in the middle of an already dicey decon procedure do Unfortunate Things by Reflex. [Editorial note: a passable band name; a better album name; ideally, not a way that Newt will die.] On the plus side though, his brain sharpens up when they get to the danger step. Of course it does. His brain is awesome, and he’s been anticipating this from the first rusty tang of blood at the back of his throat a few hours back and a few miles away. 

They pull the mask off. 

The natural inclination of a normal human when it sees something horrible, like #SurpriseBlood, is to try to shove the bleeding thing back where it came from. 

Aaaaand this is exactly what one of his poor decon friends does. Newt evades the mask coming at his face. He just—steps back. Aggressively. It would’ve been much easier if two people weren’t actively trying to prevent him from falling over. He has to fight them to get out of range, but he does. It’s close, even as close calls go. 

He staggers, doesn’t fall thank you very much, and all three suited people freeze in abject horror, hands up, palms out.

Nothing happens. 

No one says anything. 

Newt is paying down an oxygen deficit and everyone else is trying to catch up with what just (almost) happened. 

Yay, he thinks, air! 

The recirculators are going full tilt, he notices absently. That’s good. That’s very good. He still hasn’t worked out the implications of the prion situation. It’s probably membrane bound. The hypothetical prion. But could he transfer this susceptibility if—

All hell breaks loose. 

Oh. Right.

Because of the whole deal with the mask and the contamination and the patina of Blue and the fine mist of blood.

Newt’s moved on, mostly. The world, less so.

The decon alarm goes off.

Everyone is shouting. 

In the room, out of the room, shouting shouting shouting shouting. 

Newt can barely parse any of it. Quarantine, people are saying. Review the footage, people are saying. The woman holding his mask is frozen, staring at him like she just killed him. She didn’t though. But will she know that if he dies from the lung-PTSD or whatever the heck is going on in his chest?

“It’s okay,” Newt says, just in case. He doubts she hears him, because he’s barely moving any air. “Not your fault.” He tries to enunciate well enough that they’ll be able to see it on the footage afterward because his friend with the mask doesn’t look like she’s taking in much external stimuli.

“Did it touch you?” It’s Lightcap’s voice, over the speakers, so tight Newt barely recognizes her. She doesn’t know shit about Blue. What’s she even doing here? She should be in bed. He shakes his head. Waits for them to come to a decision about the mask. After reviewing the footage everyone who matters agrees he’s in the clear.

On an absolute scale they’re pretty quick about it, but it feels like a long wait on the subjective side for a guy who could probably use some supplemental oxygen and a bronchodilator right about now. His prion theory is looking better and better, because this doesn’t really feel like just lung irritation. He should be recovering more than he is. He hopes someone is smart enough to a) do a bronchoalveolar lavage and b) save it for later analysis. Later analysis by Newt, who will, in a perfect world, still be alive. 

Stripped down to boxers and T-shirt, he manages to walk to the airlock without re-contaminating himself. He gets through it, and that’s all he needs to do to not die. 

Probably.

In the next room, they start running the UV decon protocol. He tries to stand for it, like he’s supposed to. Assume the position and whatnot. Arms up, wide legged stance, eyes closed. He really should be feeling better by now, but his pissed off airways have clamped down, and they are NOT letting up. He coughs again. Stuff comes up that’s less serosanguinous and more straight up sanguinous. That’s probably not good. It tastes like it’s gonna look real bad. He tries to swallow it so as to be less dramatic, but he has to stop coughing to swallow, and that is NOT something his airways are interested in. Eyes still shut, arms still elevated (mostly) he turns his head and spit/coughs a bunch of it on the floor. 

He can, literally, hear Lightcap screaming on the other side of the glass. A priori, he wouldn’t have thought such a thing would be possible.

“GET HIM THE FUCK OUT OF THERE RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!”

Full-on Lightcap. Wow. She shouldn’t be screaming so hard, he thinks vaguely. Those splinted ribs, those stitches. She raises a good point though. Or, rather, she implies a good point. 

Unlike the filter situation, which was squarely in his arena, the not being able to breathe and the coughing blood aren’t his problems to solve. They’re squarely in the provenance of someone from medical wielding albuterol, steroids, and, probably, alas, an endotracheal tube. 

In other words, now that he’s saved his own life? Other people can work out the remaining details just fine on their own.

There’s the bright flash that comes with the UV decon. 

And now? He really is done.