Aftermath: 22 - Like an Ill-Sheathed Knife (2028)

The reality of death and destruction is fading. How terribly nice that should seem. 

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 (Twenty-two – Like an Ill-Sheathed Knife)

Despite an entire conversation about it with David Starr not five hours prior, Hermann quite forgets that Mako is coming for the holidays until she calls him to say she’s standing outside their apartment door, wondering where they are. 

Hermann drops his forehead into his free hand.

Hours ago, when Dr. McClure had outlined for Hermann her plan of attack, exuding consistent confidence, sketching synapses and neural circuits on recycled paper towels, Hermann had been struck by a peculiar sense of unreality. It hasn’t left him in the subsequent hours.

How odd, he thinks, that any of us are alive at all. 

“Hermann?” Mako repeats, not for the first time.

He tries to muster the wherewithal to determine what to tell her. Should he advise her to go home? To join Mr. Becket, who is in the midst of a PR campaign on behalf of the PPDC? She just arrived. She spent eight hours on a plane. Mako loathes PR campaigns.

“Hermann,” Mako whispers, when, still, he says nothing. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?” He can hear the anxiety in her voice. It snaps him free of his indecision.

“Newton has been hospitalized at UCSF,” Hermann admits. 

“Why?” The question comes in Japanese.

“As I’m sure you recall, he has a great talent for developing pneumonia,” Hermann replies. “And with pneumonia, comes a fever, and with a fever—”

“He had a seizure,” Mako finishes the sentence for him. “Okay. Got it. I’ll help you. I rented a car. I’ll drive there right now. See you soon.” She hangs up, leaving no room for argument. Hermann hasn’t even told her where to go—how to get here. 

She’ll find her way. She always does. 

Hermann is deeply grateful. 

Gratitude is not the only emotion he’s experiencing. Anger, fear, guilt—they come in waves. 

Anger at Newton Geiszler, stupidest intellectual prodigy since 1832 when Evariste Galois had gotten himself shot. The man has no common sense; he brings this on himself. He has always brought it on himself. Who does the things he does, honestly? But Hermann has Newton’s memories now, and he can understand what happens to an eight-year old ceded to MIT by his parents, neither of whom care to raise him because they both have other families. Hermann has spent a decade studiously ignoring this insight and converting every Newton-centered feeling he has to anger. It would be easy to continue in such a pattern now. But. It’s time to stop it, if he can. 

The fear? Obvious. 

The guilt—that one is hard to untangle. Why is it so hard? He spends hours examining his emotions, his memories, but half the time he can’t keep them straight. Certain of Dr. Geiszler’s experiences feel as salient as those belonging to Hermann Gottlieb. What’s happening now is not his fault. He tries to hold to that, knows it’s true—and yet. Could he not have done more? Years ago, months ago, days ago? Could he not have done more?

He’d put the question to Mako at her last visit. 

They’d been preparing something in the kitchen. Squash, he remembers, beneath a blade.

“It’s not good to think this way,” Mako tells him sternly, when he shares, tentatively, some of what he has been feeling. “Always there could be more. Always things could be different. 

“I suppose you’re right,” Hermann says, no longer chopping, clutching the knife like a lifeline, staring out the kitchen windows and across the city. 

“Do you not remember,” Mako says in a small, quiet voice, “how Dr. Lightcap tried with him? How he fought her?” 

“I suppose so,” Hermann murmurs.

“Hermann,” Mako begins, then hesitates. “We are all, all of us—we’ve made no allowances for ourselves. The war made us strange. Extreme versions of the people we would have been without those pressures.”

“True,” he admits. 

“You could not have done more,” she says. “You could never have saved him from this.”

“I—”

“No,” Mako says sharply. “And you should not have saved him from this. He did what needed to be done. We all did.”

Hermann says nothing, breathing raggedly. 

“I don’t like it either,” Mako says, her voice high pitched, uneven. “The costs we paid were high.”

“Yes,” Hermann says, her losses at the forefront of his thoughts.

“You want to know what he told me about that?”

“Very much,” Hermann replies. 

“He told me that we made trades to become who we are,” Mako says. “And he was right about that. We traded parts of ourselves for what we needed. I offered my love to fuel my anger. In the end, as I had always intended, I offered my life.”

Hermann nods.

“I traded for power,” Mako says. “Physical ability. Mental toughness. You traded for focus. For the ability to map the breach, say when it would open. We needed that. We needed you. Newt traded for insight. For knowledge that might end the war. We needed that too. And now, here we are,” she whispers, slicing delicately through an onion. “Still alive.”

Hermann looks from the brick of the phone in his hand, to Newton Geiszler, PhD to the sixth degree. 

He feels uneasy. Like Newton is already accusing him of orchestrating what’s certainly coming.

“I couldn’t send her away,” he says, defensively. He slips the phone into his pocket. “I’m sorry. I know. You aren’t going to like this,” he murmurs, not without sympathy.

Mako arrives in the early evening, her hair concealed beneath a scarf, large sunglasses in place, dressed in a black raincoat, no makeup. She opens her arms to Hermann as soon as she’s through the door and wraps him in a bone-crushing hug before he’s fully registered her arrival. She lets him go, shuts the door, and pulls off her scarf and sunglasses. 

She looks anxiously at Newton, her face guarded, her eyes wide, taking in the medical paraphernalia to which Hermann has become accustomed. She bends down and kisses the man gently on the cheek, then adjusts his hair into a semblance of its natural style. “It’s always this bad?” she asks, still looking down at him.

Hermann sighs. “More or less. This time, he seems to be more systemically ill; the seizure was a long one. He hasn’t gone a winter since 2025 without this happening at least once.” 

“Poor Newt,” Mako whispers, then looks up at Hermann. “And poor you,” she says, eyes glittering. “This is so awful for you. You always hated this.” She looks away, wipes her eyes. “I remember how you hated it. And, now, every year?” She shakes her head. 

“He tells me it’s a small price to pay,” Hermann says.

“He’s stupid,” Mako snaps. 

That startles a smile out of Hermann. 

“We did so much—we should be able to live clear of it,” Mako says. “Not all the way, but more clear than this.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Hermann replies.

“Hermann,” Mako says, explosively indignant. “It’s only been three years. We are, all of us, young enough to start again. Newt needs to learn certain ways to not be stupid. You need to learn how to have hope, Raleigh needs to learn how to think about the future, and I—” here she pauses, looks straight at him, and says, “I’m perfect. I need to learn nothing.”

This time, he laughs, feels his mood lifting. “True,” he admits. “Your optimism has, already, been so helpful.” His voice cracks. 

“You should invite me when this happens,” she says, keeping her tone light. “I can help. I can run errands, do your dishes.”

Hermann gives her a skeptical look.

“What? Just because I am a worldwide sensation and international fashion icon it doesn’t mean I’ve lost my ability to do practical things.” She shrugs coyly. 

“You have much better uses for your time, I’m sure,” he says. 

Her face falls, and he wants to unsay his words immediately. “I apologize. That—didn’t come out the way I meant it.”

“I know,” Mako says. “It’s all right.” She fishes around in her shoulder bag and pulls out her laptop. She sets it up next to Newton. “But I don’t,” she murmurs. “I don’t have better things than this.” And, with that, she starts playing the first episode of Blue Planet, apparently stored on her hard drive. “These have always been the best things,” she says quietly.

Hermann cocks his head, smiles at her faintly.

“Don’t give me that face. Traditions are important.” Mako drags a chair next to his. “Now. Let’s make a list.” She pulls out her phone. “Shopping,” she says, typing it in, “because Christmas is less than a week—this will be bad. I’ll do it. I already made a plan anyway, can I cook on the twenty-fifth? Do you mind?”

“Er,” Hermann says, “no, but—”

“Okay great,” Mako continues. “I’ll buy groceries today. What else should I do?”

“Nothing,” Hermann says. 

The look with which Mako favors him suggests a deep disappointment in his mental faculties. “Okay, how about dinner? We’ll eat here, yes? Maybe sandwiches? I can go shopping and drop it off at your place and then get dinner and come back if you don’t mind eating late. What time is it?” she checks her watch. “Maybe dinner first,” she says. “Then shopping. That’s better. There won’t be so many people. Do you stay overnight when he’s here?”

“Yes,” Hermann says. “I generally—I don’t leave the hospital at all.”

Mako looks at him, startled. “Not at all? But—why? You must be exhausted.”

“Irrational as it may be,” Hermann says, “I can’t shake the worry he’ll be dragged off to a lab somewhere in the middle of the night.”

Mako considers him steadily. She doesn’t dismiss his fear. “This time,” she says, “I can help you.”

Hermann nods. He is about to thank her when he hears a tentative knock on the closed door behind them. He turns, expecting a nurse to enter, but that doesn’t happen. He and Mako frown at one another. Mako stands to open the door, but Hermann grabs her wrist, shakes his head. “Unless you want to be signing autographs for the next half hour,” he says dryly. 

“Oh,” Mako whispers. “Right.”

Hermann opens the door to reveal Jacob and Charu hovering anxiously in the hallway. He feels a wave of relief so profound it’s almost physically sickening. One day he will stop worrying about the PPDC. When? Five years out? Ten? Twenty?

“We brought you dinner,” Jacob whispers, holding up a bag. Charu carries one as well. “We weren’t sure what you liked, so there’s a lot of options.”

Hermann makes no move to relieve them of their culinary burdens. Ridiculous, he thinks, looking fondly at them both. They seem younger, by far, than Mako, even though, chronologically, they are her peers.

“Sorry to intrude.” Charu shifts the bag to one hand, pushing her glasses up her face. “We just wanted to drop this off. We didn’t want to disturb you or anything.”

He hesitates for a moment, then makes a decision. “I hope you brought enough for four,” he says.

“He’s awake?” Jacob asks. 

“No,” Hermann says, before they can get too hopeful. Then he swings the door open and ushers them through. Mako turns, watching them, but, incredibly, they don’t pay much attention to her, focused as they are on Newton. Mako stands, edges back, sweeps her hair up and secures it with an elastic, concealing those dyed tips that are her trademark. She closes the laptop playing Blue Planet and moves the table so that Jacob and Charu have a place to set the bags. 

“Table,” she says, as she does it, and smiles. “Hello.”

“Hi,” Charu says, then takes Jacob’s bag, as he studies the monitors. “Jake, what are you trying to tell from that? You can’t tell anything from an EEG other than he’s not having a seizure, which you can clearly see.”

“Charu, will you just.” Jacob rolls his eyes. 

Mako looks at Hermann with expression of pure joy and silently mouths the word: “Students!”

Hermann nods. 

“So cute,” she says, exaggeratedly, without sound. 

Newton, Hermann is sure, would find this entire situation hilarious, and he will be heartbroken to have missed it. 

Having had enough of this EEG business, Charu turns to Mako, Jake not far behind her. “I’m Charu,” she says. “This is Jake.”

“Hi,” Mako says. “I’m Mako.”

“How do you know Newt?” Charu asks, oblivious. 

“Oh my god,” Jacob says, less oblivious.

Mako smiles, brilliant and delighted.

Hermann has forgotten how powerful Mako’s smile can be; he’s seen it so infrequently over the past half-decade. Perhaps it’s always been this way, perhaps it only strikes him now because he is taking the time to learn her thoughts, her moods, her manners. If he is honest with himself, Newton’s offhand supposition that, in another place and time, Mako might have been paired with Hermann as a Jaeger pilot has sharpened all his thoughts of her.

“Newt is my half-brother,” Mako informs Charu, so sincerely Hermann wonders if she, herself, believes it. 

“Oh, really?” Charu asks, surprised.

“Yes,” Mako replies. “You brought dinner? That’s so kind of you both.”

“It was no problem.” Charu pulls sandwiches out of a paper bag. 

“Charu,” Jacob begins, but Mako cuts him off, enjoying herself much too much.

“Jake, right?” Mako says. “Newt has told me about you. He called you ‘very sharp’.” Jacob blushes furiously at this, but Mako continues without mercy. “You’re the one with the Nature paper, right?”

“It isn’t accepted yet—” he trails off.

Mako shrugs. “It will be. Nature, Science, Cell. He says one of them will take it.” She looks pointedly at Newton. “It doesn’t matter which one really, right? They’re all just as good.”

“I guess not,” Jacob replies. “We’ll see I guess.”

“I think it’s going to be Nature,” Charu says.

Jacob shrugs, “Well, we should let you two catch up; we’ll just be going—”

“No no no!” Mako says, heading for the door. “You have to stay. I’m going to get more chairs.”

“Should we go?” Jacob says, turning to Hermann as soon as Mako is out of the room. “We should go, I think.”

“Jake, why are you being so weird?” Charu asks.

“Why am I being weird, Charu? Me? Why are YOU being weird? You realize that’s Mako Mori, right? Jaeger pilot?”

Charu stares at him. “Oh.” And then, very unconvincingly, “I knew that.”

“I believe,” Hermann says quietly, “that it would make Mako quite happy if you stayed. I’m sure she would like nothing more than to hear some stories of the current exploits of the Geiszler lab.” Newton, he thinks, would likely approve, given that the alternative involves himself and Mako trying to avoid thinking of the war while staring at Newton on a ventilator, unconscious. 

“You’re sure you’re not just being polite,” Jacob says.

“Quite sure,” Hermann replies. 

After returning with the chairs, Mako draws them out with questions, asking for descriptions of what they do, how the lab has changed, how many grants does Newton have now and how many students? Does he get in fights? Does he teach classes, has he flipped any tables yet?

“Newt?” Charu asks, scandalized. “Fights? A table? But he’s so nice.” 

“Nice?” Mako grins at Hermann. “Nice? He’s nice?”

“He actually—Newt flipped a table?” Jacob asks, he’s also smiling, but there’s an unsettled note to his voice.

“Twice, in fact,” Hermann says, managing to dry out his delivery respectably. And both times, he thinks, looking at Newton, you were profoundly unhappy. 

Mako eyes Hermann sharply. It’s strange to feel so understood by someone other than Newton Geiszler, and when she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “I want to hear about this ‘nice’,” she says to Charu. 

“Oh,” Charu says authoritatively, “ALL the graduate students love him. People go to him when they’re having trouble with their projects and he always has an idea or two to try. He’s also really good at pep talks.” Mako nods sagely as Charu continues. “He doesn’t yell at people. He remembers small things. He’s the best scientist in the department but he doesn’t act like he knows that.”

“Ah,” Mako says, turning to Hermann, “you know, I’d forgotten how much his own staff loved him. He was always making trouble for the Marshal, I heard about that all the time, but his people—”

“Yes.” Hermann voice is rough.

“Does he still sing in the lab when he thinks he’s alone?” Mako asks, slyly; as skillful a subject change as Hermann has ever seen.

“What??” Jacob demands, in mock outrage.

“No,” Charu gasps. “How can we make that happen?”

Hermann looks away, taking a moment to master himself as Mako describes Newton’s extremely memorable rendition of “Baba O’Riley.” 

He doesn’t know why this year has been, at times, so excruciatingly difficult to take. It has something to do, he suspects, with the adjustment to civilian life that he is, at last, beginning to make. In that adjustment, in claiming his present for his own—there is a certain reckoning that must occur between what is, what was, and what might have been. 

The reality of death and destruction is fading. How terribly nice that should seem. 

But instead, he can perceive, ever more clearly, the life they should have had if the breach had never opened. They would have found one another, Newton would have emailed him out of a blue sky, and they’d have spent a life in academics. This life, or something very like it, but without Kaiju and without Drifting, without the PPDC. Without the Coastal Wall.