Aftermath: 21 - Chimes at Midnight (2015)

Curse the arrow of time, anyway.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

2015 (Twenty-one – Chimes at Midnight)

When Newton emerges from the torqued metal hatch of Pentecost’s Jaeger—behind Lightcap, who is shouting instructions at the medical personnel as she helps the injured pilot onto a gurney—Hermann blinks. 

Newton is carrying a little girl. 

It seems so intensely improbable. 

She’s dressed in a blue coat, covered with dust, clutching a small red shoe, and crying inconsolably as the medical personnel try to pry her from her grip on Newton. How in God’s name did she get in there? Why does Newton have her in his arms?

Hermann has the impulse to help, but doesn’t know what he could possibly offer. Instead, he watches from the forefront of the gathered crowd.

“Hey.” Newton shifts his grip on the girl so he can look directly at her. “Hey hey hey. Mako, come on kiddo; you gotta go with these guys.” The waiting medic holds her arms out. “She doesn’t speak English,” Newton explains. There’s a streak of grease down the right side of his face, his ridiculous green and black hair glistens under the lights. He’s breathing hard. 

His stamina, thinks a generous part of Hermann’s mind, is still impaired. Even now, as much of a disappointment Dr. Geiszler has turned out to be—Manila’s never far from Hermann’s thoughts. 

“Kid, just let go of her,” the nearest medic says, impatient.

“Myeah, trying,” Newton snaps. He looks at the girl and switches his tone. “They’re very nice I’m sure,” he says gently, even as he eyes the medical team with overt skepticism. 

“She could be hurt,” one of the medics says. “We need to get this show on the road.”

“Mako,” Newton says, and Hermann wonders how it is he’s already learned her name. “These guys are doctors. Medical ones even. Come on. He tries to break her grip, but she fights him, clinging to his neck, moving away from the medics who reach for her. When one of them starts bodily prying her away with true determination, she produces an earsplitting, high-pitched scream that echoes through the cavernous heart of the Shatterdome.

Silence follows. 

Someone drops a wrench.

“Ooooookay,” Newton says, as the ambient soundscape of hammered metal and venting pressure valves reasserts itself. He pulls her back, wraps his arms around her, and turns away from the medical personnel. As soon as he does so, the girl resumes a more sedate level of weeping. “I get it,” Newton sighs. “Do I ever.”

“Geiszler,” the medic says warningly.

“Oh will you just.” Newton glares over his shoulder. “Aren’t you people supposed to be the sensitive ones?” He sits down pointedly on the gurney meant for the little girl. “This isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s not even robotics.” He looks directly at Hermann, as though he’s been aware of his presence the entire time. They exchange an intimate, sympathetic, can-you-believe-these-idiots look, one that draws on their thousands of pages of shared correspondence. Newton’s knowledge of what Hermann has suffered at the hands of the medical establishment is there, in that look. So is an implicit acknowledgement of the ordeal from which the man himself has only recently recovered. A mutual disdain for the general lack of common sense around the Shatterdome resonates between them. 

“Newt,” he hears the little Japanese girl say quite distinctly.

“Yup.” Newton looks down at her. “That’s me.”

Hermann feels a mental resistance give way, and—oh dear. 

No, he thinks sternly to himself. No no no. Unacceptable. But it’d been that look. That damned look that Newton had just now given him. As the man is wheeled out of the docking bay, still sitting on that gurney, still holding that little girl, Hermann realizes, in a too-rapid slide, the scope of the problem that now faces him.

He returns to his quarters, washes his face, braces his hands against the lip of the sink, and tries to snap out of it.

It doesn’t work.

He can’t stop the horrible realignment of his thoughts, he can’t prevent the mental amalgamation of Dr. Geiszler from his letters and Newton in the flesh. Because they are the same. 

They’re not.

They are.

They’re not.

Ohhhhhh, but they are.

Hermann dries his face, then lies down fully clothed on his bunk. He stares aggressively at his nondescript ceiling and tries to control his thoughts. 

The man is not wise. He has no equanimity, he lacks taste, he’s annoying, his voice is nothing like Hermann imagined. He is too loud, too informal, but—here the difficulty comes—because Hermann has no problem picturing his imagined Dr. Geiszler calmly commanding JET Force, making high-stakes decisions, facing his own mortality with casual aplomb—but Newton, the real Newton Geiszler, doing those things? 

Insupportable.

INSUPPORTABLE.

But now, somehow, after what he witnessed this afternoon—he can see it. 

He knows he’ll see more of it. 

Already, images and ideas begin to haunt him. 

Manila. The man had described it—completely and circumspectly both. Hermann sees him in his mind’s eye, staring into a yellow sky, choking behind a respirator, feeling alien toxins coat his lungs. The real man is so young. So young. Twenty-five and running half of JET-Force? Twenty-five and designing the equipment that will function in the most toxic environment humanity has yet faced? Twenty-five, and dying in Manila? Twenty-five, and working feverishly unto the hour of his death? Like Galois had, centuries ago.

There’s a thought he doesn’t need.

He’s struck unbidden by a vision of Newton sitting on a hospital bed in the Philippines, dressed in scrubs, feet bare, dictating into his phone, already breathing supplemental oxygen. His hair is unstyled, unkempt, and those green streaks look strangely natural beneath the poisoned sky. There’s a golden glow beyond the window—sunlight filtered by an atmosphere of dust and smoke and aerosolized kaiju. What had he said? Never did get around to the Rilke. But it always would have been something.

Hermann shuts his eyes against a surge of emotion. Pure acuity, unparsable.

More than Manila will haunt him. Newton’s real hands are things beyond prediction, strong, dexterous, capable. His features are striking, his prosody full of verve. The way he speaks is driving. He is brilliant, Hermann realizes, in every sense of the word. His eyes are fantastically green. All these things, all of them, had been impossible to foresee. 

He’s known he was in love with the idea of Dr. Geiszler since their first flurried rounds of correspondence. But his idle fantasies of Newton, entertained on the Shatterdome roof—they seem foolish, childish things. He’s in love with the real man. The real man, whom he knows, and knows intimately. Who, this very night, crawled into a damaged Jaeger and rescued a child.

He is, not to put too fine a point on it? Doomed.

Covering his face with his hands, he screws his eyes shut and tries to de-epiphanize himself. It doesn’t work. Curse the arrow of time, anyway. Curse it to the frozen depths of thermodynamic hell.