Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 24

“Évariste.” Newton provocatively snaps a sterile glove as he pulls it on. “Galois.”

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness. Panic attacks. Self-harm.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 24

Late afternoon sunlight streams laterally into Hermann’s UC Berkeley office, bleaching the spines of assorted books to pale reds and greens, giving the walls and the shelves a yellowed hue.

It’s a Friday afternoon and, vexingly, in the back of his mind, a conflicted twenty-something biologist is singing Hedy Lamarr with unacceptable zeal. 

Insupportable.

On this particular afternoon, one week after the commencement of his official UC Berkeley employment, two days after Newton climbed the Wall, three weeks after leaving Hong Kong, four weeks since his head was just his head, five minutes past Newton’s most recent text (I’m replacing you as a life partner. With a dead enlightenment philosopher. Just so you know. God, what are you even doing? Math? I bet it’s not even math), six hours since his last conversation with Hypothetical Rain, seven days since their most recent neurology appointment, and eight hours before Friday will be over in his current, UTC minus eight time zone, Hermann decides he will, following the termination of the work day, purchase a bottle of tequila. 

It is in no way significant, this bottle of future tequila, exported and imported by air or by land but not by sea.

It’s simply a bottle of tequila.

It bears no particular importance; it’s notable only in its classification as a member in a series of endless capitulations to the Geiszlerian proclivities laid out in his mind like dominoes, prone to occasional, catastrophic collapse into a personality that isn’t his own.

There’s a knock on his office door, which fortunately puts an end to his distracted ruminating on tequila, of all things. Unfortunately, he’s not feeling particularly sociable at this precise moment. 

It’s been a long week.

It has, in fact, been a long month. 

Hermann arranges his face into a pleasant expression and says, “Yes?” in a manner that’s crisp and polite and ideally gives no insight into his interrupted ruminations on alcohol and tiled games of blocking.

His door opens to reveal Professor Starr.

“Hermann,” Starr says, like an American.

It’s not Professor Starr’s fault that Hermann is a tormented vessel for triplicated identity confusion that would like to sequester itself in a dark hole somewhere to marinate in its own mental misery, but he finds this difficult to keep in mind.

“Professor Starr,” Hermann replies.

“David. It’s David,” Starr says, marking what may be the bicentennial anniversary of his lexical point missing.

You are so weird, his inner Dr. Geiszler learnedly opines. Adapt to the local laid-back culture dude, adapt to it. As a human, your brain is wired to observe social norms and conform to them so you don’t get targeted for harassment as a masquerading out-group member. This explains whole swaths of your childhood experience. You seem like a guy in need of some belated pointers. In general, you can’t make a group conform to you unless you’re dripping with charisma or you happen to arrive at a flux-point in collective decision making and you step into a forming niche like a baller. This implies that the endgame of an uncompromising individualist within a conformist social structure is persecution. Ridicule. Marginalization. My point is: when all that hangs in the balance is the honoring of academic honoraries and the maintenance of your own pretentiousness, well, maybe that’s an instance where you should fake it till you make it, bro. First names! They’re not so bad. I can make an argument for using them as levelers of the intellectual playing field and putting ideas rather than individuals and their doctorates into a position of prominence. So, consider this a free tip, dude. Call him David.

It’s only a matter of time before Hermann attempts to throttle his own inner monologue.

“Quite right,” Hermann says to “David.” “You’ll have to forgive my habitual use of titles.”

Professor Starr waves a hand with awkward affability. 

“How can I help you?” Hermann asks.

“Were you planning on coming to the spring-semester get-together next weekend?”

“Er.” Hermann tries to work out a way of saying, “I’d rather die,” on short notice and in a significantly more polite fashion, but can’t come up with anything in the heat of the moment. It’s not that he dislikes the Berkeley Mathematics Department, on the contrary, he quite enjoys associating with them, but he wouldn’t characterize his current existence as psychologically easy. He’d prefer to spend his free time either assisting Newton with his ongoing attempts to scrape himself into a semblance of a functional scientist or, failing that, lying quietly and miserably in a room, trying to be himself rather than an emotionally labile biologist or a monster with the desire to rend apart human cities.

This is a difficult sentiment to convey.

“So,” Starr says slowly, “I—I want to just put this out there?” He extends his hands, palms forward, like he’s trying to distance himself from what he’s about to utter. “Some of us were talking? Well, most of us. After the faculty meeting on Wednesday?”

This doesn’t sound promising to Hermann.

“About?” he snaps.

Offense as defense, his brain says. Good call.

Hermann suspects immediately that it was not a “good call” at all.

“Ugh,” Starr says, “I knew it would go like this. I didn’t mean it in that way,” he continues. “I meant it in the best kind of way. Look, the point is we were talking, and the idea was brought forward that we should tell you specifically that it would be fine if you want to bring Dr. Geiszler. Totally fine.”

Hermann is perplexed by this conversational turn. 

One—he cannot imagine a circumstance under which he would bring Newton to a UC Berkeley Mathematics Department “get together.” Such a thing would be an unmitigated disaster in that Newton, being a narcissist of incredible caliber and arguable justification, wouldn’t be able to resist flouting and flaunting his mathematical knowledge in an indecorous and entirely charming way. Hermann would prefer that Newton Geiszler not become the coquettish, glittering socialite of his current mathematical circle. He can only endure so much.

Two—he cannot imagine a circumstance under which anyone in the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department would object to Newton’s presence at a social gathering; the very fact they had elected someone to communicate this to him makes him uneasy. He’s certain this can have nothing to do with outmoded prejudices; well, he’d like to believe he’s certain of that. But if it’s not an anachronistic statement of overt support for marriage equality, then it must be that people find Newton himself objectionable in some way? Hermann cannot imagine what this way might be—he’s kept an eye on the popular press, and Geiszler-related coverage, while wildly erroneous and overtly romanticized, has not, to his knowledge, vilified Newton in any way. Quite the contrary; speculations about his heroic mental sacrifice are rampant in popular media. 

Hermann has no idea what to say.

“I don’t understand why you felt the need to explicitly state this,” he says cautiously.

“Noooo.” Starr tries to avoid a misunderstanding by petting the air. “I’m doing a bad job explaining.”

Yes, Hermann thinks, you are. 

“Okay.” Starr remarshals his forces. “So it had occurred to us, to a lot of us, actually, because of the information that’s out there, that your boyfriend. Partner. That he’s probably—that he could, maybe, not be totally—oh god, this is so awkward.”

Hermann narrows his eyes. 

“If Dr. Geiszler has brain damage, still bring him; it’s cool,” Professor Starr says in a rush. “We’re not saying he does, but we thought he might. And that maybe we should say something. Because you might not want that kind of thing spread around. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, being brain-damaged, I mean. If he is, I mean. Totally understandable, right? He drifted with a kaiju; that’s gotta mess one up. The point is, if you don’t want to bring him, that’s great, that’s fine, but if you did, it’s not like anyone, anyone would go talk to the press or whatever, and it’s not like we’d be surprised and weirded out; we get it, or rather, we get that we don’t get it. At all.”

“Ah.” Hermann finds himself excessively irritated, profoundly relieved, and mildly touched. 

Moderately touched.

“I see,” he says.

“And it’s not like—it came up spontaneously because we were talking about pranking the faculty—you might have heard what happened to the Caltech guy who was just recruited to Astrophysics? The one who discovered all the exoplanets? He was ‘kidnapped’ by the upper-level Caltech students, driven back to Pasadena, and duct-taped to his replacement’s desk. By the forearms. Not anything weird. He’s okay. Anyway, someone brought up your story about all Geiszler’s forms of ID getting stolen and replaced with cardboard equivalents reading ‘IHTFP’ during MIT’s international symposium on Regenerative Biology. Did you know there’s a whole Geiszler subheading under the Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wikipedia page? That was the context. Then we got to talking, and, well, we just wanted to let you know.”

“Your—” Hermann struggles to find the appropriate word, “—thoughtfulness is much appreciated. I assure you that Dr. Geiszler, while stressed and suffering some physical and psychological aftereffects of his recent experiences, is quite as compos mentis as he has ever been.”

“Ah,” Starr says, like a man who doesn’t think their conversation is over. “That’s something?”

“Yes.” Hermann isn’t sure what else to add.

“I mean, ‘aftereffects’ don’t sound like the best, but the important thing is you guys have each other,” Starr says.

Hermann’s not certain what is taking place here.

Is he possibly being consoled?

“Er, yes,” he says.

“We were just thinking,” Starr continues, self-conscious, “I mean, the guys. By which I also mean the ladies. The women. All of us. The Department. That, maybe, we’d just tell you that if you wanted to talk to us about any of the stuff that’s going on, that we’d be—that we’d be trustworthy about that kind of thing, because I don’t know if that leaked correspondence that came out in Wired was real or not, but if it was, if it was even close, well, I could see you, I could see both of you maybe having some institutional trust issues after that kind of thing, and it’s just, well, we wanted to say it’s not like that here. I was kind of elected to talk to you because you and I have this friend-thing going. I mean, we both feel bad for Leibniz, am I right? That’s solid friend territory. So, I didn’t mean for this to be a big deal, just—y’know. Formal message delivery. Solidarity. Yup.” 

“I—” Hermann is struggling with a total derailment of all his running cognitive processes and trying not to default into threatening Geiszlerian coping mechanisms.

They sit, looking uncomfortably at one another, until Starr begins to study the titles on Hermann’s bookshelf.

Hermann tries to decide if he considers Starr his “friend.” The prospect hits as presumptuous. It seems to him that, at a minimum, friendship requires something substantive, such as years of correspondence or mutual embracing when coworkers die in horrible ways.

“Thank you for the sentiment,” Hermann says, then curiously he continues with, “it was—it was difficult, actually. The PPDC is a different world. A different environment from academia altogether. It suits some individuals better than others, and it—it suited me well, or, I thought it did, I imagined it did, but there are times now that I—I find I’ve missed aspects of university life. For all the departmental politics, academia functions under collective governance rather than a rigid hierarchy, and—” Hermann breaks off, preposterously too overcome to speak. 

“How right did Wired get it?” Starr asks. 

Hermann tries not to see the magazine cover in his mind’s eye—that terrible photo from the Hong Kong airport rendered in black and white—his glare at the camera and Newton’s hand, stretched out toward empty air. He tries not to remember the details of the double feature—his leaked correspondence with Marshal Hansen in the immediate aftermath of their departure from Hong Kong, and the circumstantial reporting that had ferreted out the context, if not the details, of what had happened to his colleague. 

“Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann says, controlling his tone admirably, “is exhausted. His personality and IQ, however, remain intact post his experience last month, I am happy to report. When he’s sufficiently recovered, he has a standing offer to join UC Berkeley’s Neuroscience Department.”

“Good,” Starr says. “That’s great. Not the first part, really, but the last part.”

“Yes.” Hermann drags his fingers across his forehead. “Yes, quite.” 

“So do you think you might bring him?” Starr asks. “Next Saturday, I mean?”

Hermann doesn’t want to attend this gathering; still less does he want to bring Newton, but neither does he want to face the quotidian pity of his department, staffed by those who assume he’s lying about the functional status of his life-partner, who pity him for it, who don’t understand and never will understand what it was like to work for a decade at the screaming edge of technological advancement, who cannot comprehend the experience of working for Caitlin Lightcap, of watching her die; of working with Newton, of watching him nearly kill himself in an almost identical, necessary, gut-wrenching, vainglory of the mind; he wants to inflict his colleague upon them, because Newton is an infliction, his very presence is a cognitive brisance, and, in a way, they deserve him, these people Hermann doesn’t truly know, who sit around a conference table and discuss potential brain damage in kind, enlightened tones. 

“Yes,” Hermann says with friendly vindictiveness. “I think I shall.”

When Hermann pushes their apartment door open, groceries and keys and cane all improbably in hand, a sheaf of papers tucked beneath one arm because he’s not yet found time to purchase a suitable briefcase, he sees no sign of his colleague.

“I have an idea,” Newton says with alarming immediacy into Hermann’s ear.

Hermann jerks, startled. His keys and half his papers end up on the apartment floor. 

Turning his head reveals his recusant roommate leaning against the wall adjacent to the door, inches from the lateral border of Hermann’s shoulder, exuding stylized and preconcerted insouciance.

Newton is extremely irritating at times.

“How long have you been standing there?” Hermann asks dryly, pushing past him, not bothering to retrieve his keys or his papers from where they’ve fallen at Newton’s shoeless feet. “Tell me it was hours.” 

“It was not hours.” Newton kneels to retrieve the items Hermann dropped. “You, my friend, have been EPIC Rapport’d. I knew you were coming home.”

“That’s hardly evidence of an ongoing neural connection, as I come home every day,” Hermann says. “Furthermore, I come home at approximately the same time each day. Speaking of which, I’m pleased to find you conscious. How relieving for me.”

“Let’s not create a shared mythology of disparagement around things that didn’t even happen,” Newton says with a tone of voice and aggrieved demeanor that together most certainly constitute whining. “I was sleeping in an inconsiderate pose,” his colleague continues, torquing petulance into wounded dignity, where it so often ends up. 

“Ah,” Hermann says, “my mistake.”

“You’re going to be cranky about this for light years,” Newton says, as Hermann deposits the groceries on their kitchen table. “Don’t you want to hear my—”

“Light years are a unit of distance, Newton,” Hermann snarls, before he realizes Newton, of course, knows this, and is likely testing interpersonal waters because an element in Hermann’s demeanor or stance or carriage or mode of speech has tipped him off to possible intrapersonal torment in the mind of his colleague and the man has no other means of assessing systemic stability than poking said system with a stick to see what happens. 

It is a miracle that Dr. Geiszler did not die in childhood.

“So,” Newton says, “someone had a bad day. Are you getting harassed by your new colleagues? Are they trying to talk to you when there’s math to be done? Do they try to get you to go out to lunch? Do they offer you coffee, possibly? The nerve of some people. Honestly, dude, I feel that. I feel that with fifty percent of my brain. Thirty-three percent. Sometimes one hundred percent. One hundred percent of my brain thirty-three to fifty percent of the time.”

Hermann sighs.

Newton straightens and reorients Hermann’s dropped papers and places them on the kitchen table adjacent to the groceries.

“I find them somewhat tiresome, yes,” Hermann admits. He doesn’t particularly care to tell Newton that the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department, if not the totality of the academic world, currently presumes Dr. Geiszler to be incapable of meeting the rigors of academia. He doesn’t care to find out if Newton himself agrees with their assessment. He doesn’t care to maintain a neutral expression while Newton tries to determine whether Hermann himself agrees with their assessment.

All he wants is a terror-free, disaster-free evening as a prelude to an attempt to discuss their recent experiences over a moderate amount of tequila.

Specifically, he’d like to discuss the third Drift. 

Specifically, he’d like to ask the question that’s been echoing in his head for weeks now.

What happens to a fraction of a hive mind?

If he doesn’t ask it soon, he will never ask it.

“Well,” Newton says philosophically, pulling items out of reusable bags with an approximation of his historical brio. “Coming from you, ‘somewhat tiresome’ can mean anything from inviting you to lunch to secretly sabotaging your work, so if you want legit sympathy you’ll need to elaborate, dude.”

There are other things he would like to know.

Can you look at your own body?

That question is one he may never broach, because the act of asking would feel too righteously vindictive for Hermann to tolerate.

He already knows the answer.

“I do not require sympathy, Newton.”

“Myeah, let me just go ahead iron that on a T-shirt for you,” Newton replies. “Waaaaaittt—did you buy tequila?” He pulls a bottle of tequila out of a shopping bag and stares as it, as if he’s not inclined to trust his own senses.

Hermann can’t blame him there. “Yes,” he replies. 

“You. You are the person who bought the tequila?”

“I,” Hermann says pointedly, “do not comment at all on your strange obsession with Descartes or your sweater-wearing proclivities so I’ll thank you to—”

“Hey. Wait. Stop right there. The whole sweater-thing is not a ‘proclivity’ it’s—”

“If you purchased the equipment to implant yourself with an RFID chip over the internet, you can certainly purchase a shirt.”

“Backlit screens, man,” Newton says weakly. “I have to—”

“As a counter-argument, that was particularly pathetic,” Hermann informs him. “On the other hand, I applaud your newly acquired taste for rationalism and your respectable clothing choices. I suggest you take advantage of my evolving tastes in alcohol.”

“I only buy tequila when I want to get ragingly drunk.” Newton spins the bottle in his grip. “Which is really out of character for you. Soooo, congratulations? I’ll watch you drink this, man, but I’m not drinking it because I’m picking caffeine for my substance trial, I’ve already decided.”

“You are not,” Hermann replies, “picking caffeine.”

“Yes,” Newton says. “I am. You realize, right, that mechanistically they’re both equally risky when it comes to perturbing my arguably twitchy neural switchery? Seriously though, caffeine is activating but alcohol will inhibit inhibitory pathways, so—”

“If,” Hermann says, “if you choose the tequila, Newton, I am prepared to—”

He does not want to say this.

Newton raises his eyebrows in intent expectation.

“I will allow you to put an RFID chip in my hand. I will, in fact, allow you to do it right now.”

“Done.” Newton sweeps his left hand in a dramatic arc to point at Hermann in time with the word. “Sit.”

Hermann most certainly will not sit, primarily on principle. “I’ll be back shortly.” 

“Or, yeah,” Newton calls after him. “Okay. Lose the jacket, man. Wash your hands. Roll your sleeves up past your elbows. Wash your forearms while you’re at it. Do not forget to—”

Hermann shuts his bedroom door.

He flips on the lights. Manually.

He’s not looking forward to remotely controlling his external environment, but he must admit it strikes him as both useful and, well, yes, it has a certain appealing panache to it. He’s not excited about the actual implantation of the RFID chip, but he assumes it will be fine. Newton has, after all, done it to himself without any apparent difficulty.

Of course, the same could be said of drifting, so Hermann is unsure where that leaves him.

He doesn’t like the messy realities of biology; he doesn’t like the horror in the slow spread of a fluid over a flat surface, or the frictionless slide of alien viscera. He doesn’t like the cut and crack of comparative anatomy, he doesn’t like interfacing technological and biological systems. He doesn’t like medical tests, he doesn’t like medical procedures; he’s had too many of them in his life.

Newton, of course, knows as much.

Newton, of course, now shares these mental idiosyncrasies.

Nominally, he does. 

Newton is better at walling off Hermann’s insecurities than Hermann is at not appropriating his colleague’s exquisite blend of minor childhood traumas that have hardened into his adult personality. 

This is too much analysis for what’s actually taking place, which is that his colleague is trying to make a quixotic reparation for things not his fault in the most reliable way he can—by building something and inappropriately interfacing it with the human nervous system.

Hermann sighs.

After removing his blazer, he iteratively cuffs his sleeves to the elbow, then washes his hands and forearms with anti-bacterial soap. He uses a foot to open the cabinet beneath the sink and pulls out a fresh hand towel, touching only the towel itself. Ideally he’d walk back to the kitchen, his arms held in front of him in a borrowed Geiszlerian capitulation to sterile technique, but he needs his cane. 

So, he compromises. 

The idea of holding one arm in front of him seems reasonable until he rounds a corner, and Newton, in the midst of constructing his sterile field, looks up at him and says, “Everything you’re doing right now is pointless.”

“I could not agree more.” Hermann lowers his outstretched arm. 

“Adorkable though,” Newton continues. “Very fetching in a one to one Geiszler-to-Other ratio. Touch nothing. If I toss you this packet of sterile gel can you catch it?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, flustered. 

“Well, that would be stupid. We’re not doing that; why would we? That’s just inviting disaster, Hermann, come on. Just get over here and lose the cane along the way. I’ll hand your sterile gel to you like a normal person,” Newton says.

“Did you just call me ‘fetching’?” Hermann inquires.

“Eh,” Newton says. “Sure. It was a little more like looking at myself through a glass erotically and mathematically; you feel me?”

“No.”

“Yes you do. You do the same thing. For example, you think it’s outrageously attractive when I say things like ‘group theory,’ or ‘P most certainly does not equal NP, have you taken leave of your senses, sir?’ or ‘Andrica’s conjecture,’ or ‘Erdös number,’ or when I invoke my dead mathematical alter-ego.”

“Your what?” Hermann leans his cane against an unsterile edge of the kitchen table. 

“Évariste Galois.” Newton rolls the ‘r’ in ‘Évariste’ in an obscenely unacceptable manner. 

“I forbid you to mention Galois ever again.” Hermann accepts the packet of sterile gel Newton drops into his hand. He tears it open, feeling anxious and raveled up and lightheaded.

“Évariste.” Newton provocatively snaps a sterile glove as he pulls it on. “Galois.”

“You’re a terrible human being.” Hermann rubs cool blue gel over both hands. “You shouldn’t have your sleeves down.” 

“Alas,” Newton replies, “logic gives way before practical needs.” 

“Do not quote yourself.” Hermann secretly wishes that if the man was inclined to cite his own lyrics, he would just sing them. “It’s terribly unattractive.”

Newton rolls his eyes, clearly amused, then models the pronated, spread-fingered pose he presumably wants Hermann to adopt before pointing at the table.

Hermann complies, fixing his ethanol-cleansed hand palm down on the drape at a convenient angle.

Newton pulls sterile tools out of sterile packaging, snaps a sterile blade onto his sterile scalpel, and says, “Don’t move. I’m serious.” He fixes Hermann with an atypically flinty expression. “Position-wise, I won’t be holding you down in anything more than a nominal way.”

“Fine.” Hermann lifts his eyebrows in a manner he hopes is eminently unimpressed.

Newton looks at him. “I’m serious about this, dude, it’s going to hurt, kind of a lot, for thirty seconds or so.”

“I’m familiar with pain on a conceptual level,” Hermann informs him. 

“Myeah.” Newton looks increasingly edgy. “Look, this is like—well. Here’s how this is going to work: you’re going to trust me to not slice up your hand and I’m going to trust you not to move, and not to, like, er, hunt me. Kaiju-style?”

“I’m not certain this is a good idea,” Hermann says.

“Cost/benefit-wise it’s at least defensible if not advisable. We’re intrapersonal if not interpersonal risk-takers, man. Either way. We’ll get drunk later, presuming no one dies. Are you still in? Because this is kind of the point of no return.”

“I suppose,” Hermann says, “but I don’t think you should be getting drunk, Newton, I—”

“Yeah, okay, that’s a whole different topic that we’ll cover later in annoying detail.” Newton draws a line with a marking pen over the sterile plastic that coats Hermann’s hand. “For now, I’m going in. Look out the window or something.”

“I—” Hermann begins, but, true to his word, Newton fixes his hand over Hermann’s, repositions his scalpel, and starts cutting, blade to skin, blade into skin, disappearing along its edge in a manner that’s extremely disturbing and, after an interval that seems too long, painful. Hermann hadn’t expected this level of hot, acidic agony in his dominant hand. He keeps watching. A narrow ribbon of irregularly beading blood appears behind the track of the blade.

“Window, dude, window, look out the window. What are you thinking? Look at the Wall, um, pretend you’re me for sixteen seconds or something? This is terrible,” Newton sounds stressed, which makes the experience worse, if that’s possible, and it is possible, it is; he should know better than to make these kinds of statements; he’s only asking for karmic retribution by advertising the limited scope of his own mental capacity.

“Oh my god,” Newton says, sounding breathless, “this is bad, this is actually kind of intolerable, extremely intolerable, totally,” he says, angling the blade beneath Hermann’s skin, “ragingly intolerable, I don’t know if I can—”

Hermann can’t even speak; his brain is a ravaged no-man’s land of caving Gottliebian architecture and the compensatory rise of altered states of consciousness to replace the parts of him trying to escape this current experience without moving because he can’t move, he won’t move, he will not yank his hand away, he will not resist the cruelties of physical therapy, even as a child he won’t, because he can defer not only satisfaction but also responses to pain, he can defer weeping, he can defer weakness if he can’t banish it, he can defer and defer and defer to the point all his distress can be packed down and compressed into something brittle he’ll break and spread at his own convenience like chalk over boards and so when they tell him—

Nope, we’re not doing this, buddy, his brain decides.

He’s not sure who isn’t doing what as simultaneous desire for and disgust at RFID chip implantation vie for superiority in his thoughts.

Rescue rises de profundus from the subterranean reaches of his consciousness, pulling him out of the sea of his own distress. His brain turns out, in medias res, to be an epic freaking baller, thank god; and he’s shoving memories he doesn’t want to have back into the places that they’re trying to cut their way free of, snapping down emerging instincts for violence that come from an alien species he shouldn’t have so much in common with but does.

Ugh. Hermann tries to force his vision to clear. The continuing pain in his hand, which had seemed so distressing just a moment ago is, really, not that bad now that he thinks about it? He can totally deal. No problem.

“For god’s sake, man,” Newt snaps, gluing his hand together, because Newt is really, he’s just really so great at these kinds of things, or maybe it’s Hermann that’s great? Or maybe they’re both great in different ways but with equal magnitude. Aw. That’s nice. “Put your head down, won’t you?”

“What?” Hermann isn’t sure what this whole postural-change suggestion the guy is making is really supposed to accomplish, other than—

Aaaaaaand he is looking at the floor.

He’s looking at the floor, which is rocking the whole eco-conscious-wood-reflects-fluorescent-overhead-lights-meeting-the-vespertine-purple-of-a-sun-setting-behind-a-Wall vibe. Yeah. Because that’s a vibe. Ninety-three million miles away is a sun. Just a sun. Some planet’s sun, positionally behind some jerk’s Wall. Some planet’s sun sunning the floor of some jerk’s son.

So witty, his brain says admiringly. 

The floor looks weird though, like kind of if yellow and purple had an internecine spectrum war, then both colors died together on a brown surface. It really shouldn’t be attractive but it’s looking pretty great, surprisingly. Dutch Golden Age style. Not really but kind of. 

“Honestly,” Newt says. “Honestly, Hermann, make an attempt to control yourself and your overly sensitive vasovagal responses, will you please?”

“Hey,” he says weakly, as Newt pulls the sterile adhesive off his hand with a brisk sweep and tapes down a piece of gauze. “Did you just contaminate your sterile field, because—”

“I no longer need this sterile field,” Newt replies, sounding slightly more forgiving. “Hermann. Please just sit there, if you would, without moving, and try not to faint.”

Yeah, so that’s a little harsh, Hermann’s brain says. Primarily because he might have a point; you aren’t doing too well right now, friend, which is weird, usually you’re great with this kind of thing. Right? Yes. Yes. Are you? You are. I think you are. Who are you, do you think?

“Up.” Newt grabs a handful of Hermann’s shirt and his elbow in an imperious, handsy-type way and drags him to his feet. “Get up, you ridiculous man.” 

“Can you not?” Hermann says, definitely not whining, not whining at all, not even toeing the border of petulance. “You’re the ridiculous one. God. Jedi-neohipster.”

He snaps twice and the lights obligingly flash from on to off and back on, which he notes appreciatively before Dr. Geiszler gives him a sharp couchward press and says, “Lie down,” in his most forbidding manner, which, truth be told, isn’t all that forbidding. It’s maybe not the worst idea Newt has ever had though, because Hermann’s feeling a little weird; his leg hurts, he’s not sure what that’s about exactly, it seems unusual. He’s leaning on Newt because his gait just doesn’t feel like his gait is supposed to feel. That’s weird; he’s not sure he likes that. It’s not far to the couch, though, which is pretty great, because yeah, this lying down thing is seeming like a better plan all the time; he’s not sure he can keep all his running processes straight. His sympathetic nervous system is making an attempt to shut down all the active programs in his head.

So yeah.

He lies down, getting all his organ systems on a horizontal plane. 

This is better. 

“Are you all right?” Newt is really close, because he’s doing the kneeling-on-the-floor thing. Yep. Up close and looking nauseated.

Newt is.

Looking nauseated, he means.

Obviously.

“Yeah,” Hermann says. “Yeah, I’m totally fine. Do not even worry about me, dude. You look kind of awful, though. Don’t throw up on this couch, or, ideally, on me. Throw up on the coffee table, maybe.”

“Not helpful, Hermann,” Newt says through clenched teeth. “I am fine. I did, perhaps, experience a brief interval of intense cognitive dissonance, but, fortunately, it has since resolved.”

“Congrats.” Hermann drags a finger through the air in a loose approximation of check-box ticking.

“Indeed,” Newt replies dryly. 

Something about this whole situation strikes me as a little odd, Hermann’s brain says, watching Newt push himself to his feet with a simultaneous press against cane and coffee table. 

“Relax, will you please?” Newt leans into the cane and glares down at him in unconcealed disapproval. “Do not move. I’ll be back shortly.” 

“Um,” Hermann says, trying to decide what it is about the current state of affairs that’s troubling him. 

He can’t escape the feeling that he’s missing something. 

This is extremely unusual for him.

Missing things, that is. He’s usually rocking a sibylline song when it comes to science. And really, everything comes back to science. Well. All true things do. Science always has room for true things and calls false things bullshit before tearing them away. Hermann can get behind that. He can get behind that hardcore. 

He levers himself up on one elbow. 

“No.” Newt freezes in the midst of sterile-field breakdown to fix Hermann with a stern look beneath lowered eyebrows and above the rims of his glasses, which he then ruins by pushing his glasses back up his face, because Newt is totally blind and, also? A poser. “Absolutely not. Lie down.”

Hermann tries not to take this kind of thing personally, he really does, and, in total fairness, he might look a little bit bad right now; he’s slightly covered with a cold sweat, possibly, and shivering or maybe just having some kind of post-adrenaline tremor thing, whatever, it’s not important. The important thing here is that Newt needs to listen to him because something is going on here, something weird, so he doesn’t say ‘make me,’ in lascivious response to his colleague’s totally inappropriate protective streak, he instead says: “Dude.”

Newt rolls his eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Hermann says. “Listen to me, god, will you? Just. Listen. There’s something weird going on here—”

Newt gives him a scathingly pointed look that’s probably intended to communicate something along the lines of, Oh-really-Hermann-how-fascinating-you-don’t-suppose-it-could-be-you-failing-to-perfuse-your-own-brain-do-you?

“Don’t give me that, man, I’m serious,” Hermann says. “I’m getting a weird vibe.”

“Take a nap.” Newt rolls up the remains of his sterile field into a green heap and heads for the kitchen, presumably to trash the stuff. “Perhaps it will clarify things for you,” he throws back over his shoulder.

Well.

Yeah.

Okay. So, of course, Hermann will get no reasonable help until he’s laid down like ninety percent of the conceptual groundwork. Of course.

He looks absently at the gauze taped to his right hand. 

Okay brain, he thinks. Talk to me. Something here is creeping you out. Spill.

Hey kid, his brain replies, mysteriously impersonating Caitlin Lightcap. Remember how it used to be? Remember how you and I used to go down to the end of the deployment dock with a bottle of nine-dollar tequila and talk trash about J-Tech and throw ideas at a metaphorical wall labeled “Remote Interface” hoping something would stick? Remember the day you told me that I’d die? Remember the day you were right?

He feels a wave of acute and needless grief.

I don’t see what this has to do with anything, but yeah, Hermann replies, staring at the ceiling, listening to Newt mutter at himself in German in the kitchen.

Throw some stuff at the wall, Caitlin Lightcap says, as if she’s spelling something out for him.

“Right,” Hermann murmurs, still staring at the ceiling.

I have a bad feeling about this, Princess Leia says in his brain.

You and me both, Princess, he replies dryly.

So.

Wall-throwing.

He takes an inventory. Physically, he is fine, if one doesn’t count the anxiety, which is intolerable and persistent and intolerably persistent; its bladed edge presses into the blur of running thoughts, as it has always done, as it has never done, as it has always and never done. His sleeves are rolled up and that seems right but his arms are bare and that doesn’t; he can’t do this alone, he doesn’t have the right perspective, he can’t see where he’s standing, he needs someone else, not someone else, not anyone else, but Newt; Newt is who he needs but Newt isn’t listening because one of them doesn’t listen and clearly that person is Newt, because if it isn’t Newt then who else would it be?

He runs his hands through his hair and sits up, his gaze fixing on the walls, on the Wall. There’s something wrong with him, there are things that wait in his head. There are things that wait for propitious circumstance; he can feel them there, waiting. 

He’s paranoid. Slightly. Maybe slightly. He’s paranoid. He’s not. Had he been, historically, paranoid? He doesn’t know. He feels nervous. He feels weird. Maybe nervousness and weirdness together combine to paranoia.

Something is wrong; it’s wrong. 

It’s wrong.

He feels the warm rush of blood in his sinuses. 

This isn’t the best, his brain says. I don’t get this.

He pulls down a sleeve of his dress shirt, presses it to his face, and tries to think.

Tries to think.

Tries.

What is happening to him?

He doesn’t feel right.

He can remember his day, he can remember what happened, he can remember buying tequila, can remember coming home and agreeing to Newt’s RFID chip proposal if only to gain leverage to employ the tequila, and god, god, something about the chip is what triggered all of this, something about the chip or the cutting, or the distress, because everything had been fine before the chip. 

He snaps his fingers.

The chip is cool.

“Was that really necessary?” Newt snarls, still in the kitchen.

The chip is cool, the chip is fine; this weirdness vibe is something else.

Hermann snaps again, restoring the lights. “A little,” he says, somewhat resentfully.

Newt reappears, having disposed of his sterile field. He leans against the doorframe that separates the kitchen from the rest of the apartment with a sasstastic hip thrust slash maybe hip asymmetry thing that would be impossible to maintain without the cane he’s appropriated. Hermann finds this a confusing mixture of stupid and attractive, much like Newt himself. 

“Can you not with the pissed yet sexy librarian thing? I’m trying to think,” Hermann says. 

“I beg your pardon?” Newt says, nonplussed. “Why are you bleeding.”

“For fun, dude,” Hermann says darkly, or as darkly as is possible for a guy who has his shirt cuff pressed to his face. “For fun. For the double-distilled pleasure of it. Get over here, I need to talk to you.”

Newt sighs and rolls his eyes but approaches the couch, seating himself on the coffee table, extending his bad leg in front of him, which is weird, because last time Hermann checked—and he checks Newt out pretty regularly, ha—Newt didn’t have a bad leg.

Hermann is the one with the “mobility challenges.”

Right?

Are you sure about that? his brain asks.

Hermann is not sure.

His leg aches, though, with a foreign familiarity.

Newt hands him a handkerchief. Hermann swaps it in for his sleeve.

“Something weird is happening here, dude,” he says. 

“Well, you’re bleeding,” Newt says dryly. “Is that not sufficient for you?”

“It’s not that,” Hermann says. “You’re not making an effort, dude, I’m trying to get you to help me.”

“Could you be more vague?” Newt says with a concerned waspishness. “Endeavor not to bleed.”

Hermann compresses his lips and exhales pointedly, glaring at Newt. “I’m telling you, I think there’s some cognitive weirdness happening here and I—”

Newt moves closer and does a thing to Hermann that is kind of hard to follow because it involves shoving him horizontally and, like, doing a thing with his ankles. The end result is that he’s lying down. This is not fair. Newt is supposed to be helping him, not being a bastard about this whole thing.

“Lie down,” Newt says with pointed aridity. 

“You’re a jerk,” Hermann replies. “Can you please,” his voice cracks, “just listen.” 

“I always listen, Hermann.” Newt resumes his position on the coffee table and looks at Hermann in an extremely unfair, totally green-eyed type of way, which is just really fixed, and really intent and full of all this Hermann-you-need-a-sitter-by-Jove-and-by-Jupiter-and-by-metric-tons-of-Ancient-deities-that-weirdos-use-as-profanity and Hermann is NOT cool with that, he is not cool with that AT ALL.

So what if Newt is an aesthetically pleasing guy? He too is an aesthetically pleasing guy. Really now, do people come along every day with Hermann’s cheekbones? He thinks not, thank you very much, so Newt can just can that skeptical smolder thing he’s got going over there; he can put it in a freaking can and seal it in there, because Hermann doesn’t care, he doesn’t care at all.

Newt looks at him in patient expectation.

Oh.

Right.

Because Hermann is supposed to be talking right now.

“I have a bad feeling,” he unwisely confesses.

“I find this unsurprising,” Newt says gently. “I just unwisely cut open your hand.” 

This pisses Hermann off.

Because yeah! Newt, stupid stupid stupid Newt did cut open his hand, like a freaking jerk, but only because Hermann had wanted to make him drink tequila which had, admittedly, also been a little bit of a manipulative dick move. So they’re even right now. Probably. But that’s neither here nor there. 

“Relax,” Newt says reasonably. “I will make you dinner.”

“No.” Hermann surges forward to snag the nearest part of Newt’s sweater/dress-shirt combo thing that he’s rocking. “There is a thing we need to figure out. Some kind of cognitive problem, dude, some truly epically freakish perspective-level stuff is happening right now.” 

“Confident though I am,” Newt says, “that it appears that way to you, Hermann, I really don’t think—”

“Come on.” Hermann shakes the fistful of shirt he has. “You owe me this, dude. Think of it as a professional courtesy if not a personal favor.”

“Very well,” Newt sighs. “Proceed.”

“Well, I—” Hermann begins, because he doesn’t know what’s wrong exactly, he just knows that something is wrong. He needs Newt to figure it out or at least help him search out the borders of a problem he doesn’t understand. “I don’t know, but something is wrong, I’m telling you it is; can you just—try and—” he finishes with a helpless, circular hand gesture. 

Newt compresses his lips and stares absently out the window, clearly thinking. At least that’s something, Hermann supposes. Newt is better at certain things than he himself is, and this— this is one of those things.

Isn’t it?

He has no idea actually, which is weird. 

Hermann watches Newt intently, trying to latch onto his train of thought via EPIC Rapport or via the SPECTER Effect or via whatever freaky cognitive train he can hitch a ride on, because he wants to do this together; they work best when they’re together. 

Newt pulls his cane off the floor and stares at it.

“Yes,” Hermann says. “Yes.”

“This,” Newt says, “is mine.”

“Is it?” Hermann replies. 

“Yes?” Newt pulls the word into a slow, stiff question, like cooling toffee. 

Come on, a dead woman says. You’re almost there. You can feel it. You can taste it. Get there, buddy. Just get there. Name it. Name what’s happening to you. Tag it. Your life partner is holding a cane he shouldn’t be holding. What is that. Give it a name. Name it.

“No,” Newt says in breathy horror. Their eyes meet again, and Hermann finds this hard to take. “This is yours.” 

Get there, kiddo, Caitlin Lightcap says. Get there.

“Identity confusion,” Hermann says, victorious, finally finding the correct tag for what’s happening to him. 

To them.

It’s weird, it’s subtle, he can’t map the whole of it. He knows, ostensibly, who he is, but he doesn’t feel like that guy, he feels instead like the guy who started a rock band, like the guy who used to get drunk with Caitlin Lightcap in the middle of the night in hypomanic misery, like the guy who saw Mako Mori, covered with dirt, her face streaked with tears, a single red shoe held in a death grip, and who had taken her from Stacker Pentecost while he got checked by medical, saying, “Aw, Mako Mori? More like Maks in Socks, am I right? Hey, it’s cool, crying is, like, a thing. Evolutionary. You just go for it, kiddo. Weeping seems like a reasonable choice to me. Very defensible. Myeah, you speak no English, do you? Absolutely none.” That’s him. Isn’t it? That’s him, not the guy who screamed half his childhood away in physical therapy regimens so maybe, one day, he could become a pilot, not the guy who had hated his body so much he’d tried to escape to the complex plane, to algebraic topologies and into sets of sets. That’s not who he is, is it? He’s not the guy who’d stupidly, stupidly, epically stupidly tried to be a Jaeger pilot despite all messages to the contrary and who’d failed. That isn’t him. That can’t be him.

Newt looks at him in consternation and growing horror.

Yup, you’re getting it now, buddy, his brain says vindictively. 

“I told you.” Hermann’s voice cracks against something he can’t sense. “I told you.” 

“So you did,” Newt says, looking at him. “Hermann, I believe we may have—” he breaks off, studying the cane he’s holding.

“We swapped,” Hermann says under the pressure of building revelation, before he’s fully understood it himself. “We swapped, dude. We both got super stressed and I defaulted to you, and, weirdly and surprisingly, you also defaulted to me.”

“No,” Newt says, obviously offended. “That can’t be the case, I have—I have excellent mental control. I—”

Hermann almost feels sorry for him.

Almost.

“Yeah, well, newsflash: not so much,” Hermann says.

“I’m you?” Newt sounds painfully unsure of himself. “And—you’re me?” 

“I think so,” Hermann replies. “Not really, but kind of.” 

“Well,” Newt says, “how do you propose we reverse our current predicament?”

“This is your area,” Hermann says pointedly. 

“Only nominally,” Newt snaps. “You’re more me than I am, arguably.” 

Oh.

Right.

“Well,” Hermann says, staring at the ceiling, “when this happened previously, you manipulated me into resuming my historical thought patterns.” 

Newt compresses his lips and exhales, directing his gaze toward the ceiling. “Very well. You are an insensitive miscreant.”

“You suck at this,” Hermann points out kindly. “That was just an insult. There was no manipulation there, dude.”

Newt shoots him a fiery green glare that Hermann is not above aesthetically appreciating. 

“Keep your pants on,” Hermann says. “I’ll do it for you.” 

“Keep my—” Newt echoes incredulously. “I’ll have you know that—”

“Shh,” Hermann says. 

You know exactly where to take this, dead Caitlin Lightcap chimes in. Because you’re a bastard. A hellshit Dollar-Store ghoul.

Hermann whistles En Règle (And Out) through his teeth.

Newt stares at him with something that looks like fear. 

“Sing,” Hermann says, as he finishes the first verse. 

“I can’t sing,” Newt snaps back at him. 

“You can,” Hermann replies archly. “Of course you can. Do it. Do it right now.”

Newt shakes his head.

Hermann whistles a few more bars and then says, “Don’t be me, be you. You’re a literal rock star. Against all odds.”

“Atmospheric.” Newt looks like Hermann is pulling his teeth. “Esoteric.”

“Sing,” Hermann says. “Actually sing it.”

“I don’t understand,” Newt whispers with proper prosody, trying.

Hermann is really not sure if he’s seen anything more painful and ridiculous in his life than Dr. Newton Geiszler of the subtle guyliner and the clothes that were designer not manning up in a vocal way, but this whole day has been pretty pathetic according to every mental metric Hermann can recall or construct. 

Unbelievable, his brain says. You’re going to have to do this for him, champ. Maybe your Geiszler-derived pathways will lend you some reasonable intonation. 

He sits up, yanks his ridiculous colleague into a quarter turn so that they’re face to face, and goes straight for the chorus. 

Cognizance kills confidence
In any providence. 

“Sing it!” He pulls Newt forward, shaking him. “You have to sing. This is all I’ve got. You have to do it. I have literally nothing else, Newt; you must do this, dude.”

Newt isn’t doing it.

He’s just sitting there, staring at Hermann, looking totally traumatized by this entire experience, clutching Hermann’s cane. 

It’s my tough to translate
Psychological state
Subjective and ornate. 

“SING!” Hermann shouts in Newt’s face. 

“Incurring costs,” Newt half-snarls, half sings, “that we’ll exchange for our benefits,” he continues.

“Why is it that we don’t have them yet?” They continue together, and Newt begins to access something that sounds right; that sounds wrong, that sounds like Hermann is sure he’s supposed to sound, but doesn’t, and that’s right too, maybe. What is rightness anyway? Is it even a thing? “Just a null set of our own regret?”

“And I am upset,” Newt continues, finally, finally sounding like the frontman he’d been, that he could still be if he hadn’t traded music for science a decade ago. “Pinning my worth on my sobriquet, tracing ennui with my—oh goddamn it.” He breaks from song to speech, his hands coming to his temples as he folds forward, trying not to throw up, trying not crack apart along the throughlines of his mind. 

“There you go.” Hermann pats Newt’s shoulder in what he hopes is an encouraging way. “You just try and be you, champ. Don’t—”

Newt shuts his eyes, presses his hands to his temples and wordlessly screams through a locked jaw.

That takes Hermann aback a little bit because yikes. 

Seriously. 

Freaking yikes. 

While the whole clenched-teeth, bilateral-temple-grab scream is a very Geiszlerian thing to do, it looks kinda distressing. 

Really distressing. 

“Hey.” Hermann tries to calm Newt down with some semi-suave shoulder patting because sure, that’s a good idea. “Dude. Everyone is fine. Probably. Maybe. I mean, ostensibly?” 

Newt opens alarmingly bloodshot eyes, and locks his gaze with Hermann’s.

“Are you okay?” Hermann asks him.

“Don’t say ‘okay’,” Newt whispers, starting to bleed from his face.

“I’ll say ‘okay’ if and when I want to say it.” Hermann fishes in his own pocket for another handkerchief and hands it to Newt. “Try not to bleed out in protracted increments, bro.” 

“Oh god.” Newt looks at him like he’s a dead person, which Hermann is really NOT into, because he’s seen Newt and been Newt and kind of is currently Newt, a little bit, and he knows what that face means and he also knows that he doesn’t deserve it.

Hermann is abruptly not quite sure whether his colleague is going to cry or not.

If it happens, he’s not sure how that will go for either of them. Already, Hermann feels sort of mentally stressed, sort of cracking apart, already his face hurts, but maybe that’s because he’s bleeding from it?

“I’m pretty sure you’re overreacting,” Hermann says to Newt’s unarticulated but obvious despair, in what he hopes is a comforting way. Honestly, the guy looks so acutely miserable, it’s kind of freaking him out. 

A little bit. 

Not really, but kind of. 

“I can’t get you back,” Newt says in a cracked whisper, like a tormented, half-mythical thing. Like maybe if a pretty decent looking fairy prince or princess mated with a pretty decent looking banshee. Are all banshees women? Would fairies and banshees be compatible? Genetically? Hermann is not well informed when it comes to this kind of thing. Maybe it’s more of a fangless-vampire meets intractable-nerd kind of deal. Maybe it’s more like a regular guy with a horde in his head having a hard time hanging onto his hemoglobin.

“Of course you can,” Hermann says. “You’ll think of something. I’ll think of something. This is hardly an intractable problem, okay? Just chill.”

Newt smiles faintly in that kind of way that people smile when they can’t believe that you’ve stabbed them with the razor blade included in your commercial model rocket kit, not that Hermann would know anything about what that kind of face might look like, nope, that’s weird, what is that even? Hermann doesn’t vindictively stab people even when they deserve it, even when they deserve it so so so so so much, nope, that’s not what Dr. Gottlieb of the flawless equanimity and the impressive neural circuitry does, nope, definitely definitely not, nope. No way.

What had he been thinking about?

There’s a learning curve when it comes to Newt’s brain, it seems.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Hermann snaps, because it’s a weird look he’s getting from Newt, a weird look he’s been getting from Newt this whole time, actually, as if Newt has any grounds for dispensing colleague-directed pity, as if Newt doesn’t live in a glass house that’s already been shattered, as if he’s not surprised every time it’s windy or it rains on him or he’s subjected to any kind of environmental vagary because Newt thinks he has invisible walls that he doesn’t have, that, maybe? He never had. So Newt can just suck it and stop looking at him as if he knows what’s going on, as if Hermann is the confused one, as if Newt isn’t the stupidest brilliant person on this stupid little planet that has too many oceans and too many deep places that are too willing to transit monsters.

Newt doesn’t stop looking at him. 

“I’m easy,” Newt says finally, pulling his handkerchief away from his face and wiping away most of the blood in iterating swipes. “But you, you’re difficult, Hermann, you’re very—you’re just very difficult. You will be. To get back, I mean.”

“You did it before,” Hermann says. “Snapping me back over, I mean. Into a separate set. You don’t have to get emo about this and bleed everywhere. It’s a solvable problem.”

“This isn’t the same,” Newt whispers. “Last time, you had insight. Last time you knew. Last time it was in response to an ongoing stressor. We just spent, I don’t know, five minutes, maybe ten, as each other. Without insight. Without insight. Either of us.”

“It can be done,” Hermann snaps dismissively, because first of all, hi, yes, he’d had at least partial insight, thanks. Second of all, Newt hates admitting when Hermann’s right about things. Third of all, whatever. “We know it can be done. I just did it for you.”

“Yes but there’s no reciprocal trick,” Newt whispers. “Not this time. I don’t know a reciprocal trick.”

Hermann shoots him an unimpressed look and pulls the handkerchief he holds away from his own face. 

“You don’t, maybe.” Hermann tries to decide if he’s still bleeding. It seems like no, so score one for Team Gottlieb. Score like one million actually, because a) he already solved fifty percent of the extremely weird problems in this apartment, and, despite his super emo colleague’s doubts, he’s going to solve the other fifty percent because come on, b) he is the most rational guy ever, possibly ever to have lived; if any human has quantum mechanical instincts it’s him, that’s freaking badass, and c) Newt has just been all kinds of depressing lately and Hermann doesn’t blame him for that, but maybe Dr. Geiszler just needs a snack and a nap while the professionals do the consciousness-restoring. Yup.

So.

Points of difference.

He’s smarter than Newt.

Thaaaaaats probably not going to get him anywhere though.

He’s faster than Newt, more coordinated, better at pretty much everything except for his disaster of a leg, thank you genes and environment, thank you soooo much for that one.

He should just do some quantum mechanics.

Of course, Newt can also do quantum mechanics.

He should do some algebraic topology.

Of course, Newt can also do that.

He should play the guitar.

Wait, nope, that’s not him. Technically.

He should drive a car. He’s awesome at that. 

Er, except, well, the thing is that, right now. He really really really just doesn’t want to do that right now, cars, they just, well they move very quickly and he feels a little weird about driving stick at the moment and the consequences of screwing up mid-car driving are, yeah, a little more extreme when compared to, say, singing. It was pretty hard to get Newt to sing but Newt is going to suck at trying to goad him into driving aggressively, Newt is going to suck at that so hardcore. Epic suckage at the concomitant accelerating and browbeating. 

Newt distracts him by standing, walking over to the sliding glass door of the balcony, and staring into the darkness beyond the reflected sheen of the room lights. That’s interesting. Dr. Gottlieb as Dr. Geiszler couldn’t care less about the Wall, other than as a tribute to human stupidity and a monolithic monument to someone’s family fracturing down a split that stemmed from conceptual turned practical disagreements about the limits of human engineering as a discipline. It’s impossible to fence in a coastline; everyone, literally everyone, from biologists to mathematicians will tell you it’s an idea worthy of ridicule. 

For reals, his brain agrees. 

Hermann shakes his head and tries to remember what he’s supposed to be doing.

“I do not,” Newt says, staring westward, “want to do this.”

“Want to do what?” Hermann feels slightly more than slightly anxious because yes. 

Newt turns around. 

Newt turns around, and when he does, god, he doesn’t look like Newt, not really, he looks like someone else, someone pushed too far, someone out over an edge Hermann can’t see but that circumstantial evidence indicates is there nonetheless. And Newt comes back, away from the window, back toward the couch, and there’s something about the whole thing snaps an associative switch, igniting anxiety into a paranoid conflagration because what is he doing, what is he—

“You think you’re me?” his colleague asks, terrified and angry; a mostly-human monster with Erinyeic eyes. “You think that’s who you are? This isn’t you, you moron; you don’t lose your trigonometry in pursuit of awesome fish, you lose your books when people take them, and they do, they always take them. Your toys that weren’t your toys, your books, your thoughts, your funding; but you could take them back, oh god, you want to take things back—why is it that you don’t? Is it because you’re afraid of how you’d wear it—your creeper vengeance cloak? Or do you think it wouldn’t fit you and let you keep your mind, like a freak-show Russian novel, disturbing—Gogolesque? You know you could have killed them, not the humans, not the humans, but that shit that crawled from trenches, miles beneath the sea. But still they wouldn’t let you, not your father, not the people in control of things that you had helped design; they let Caitlin Lightcap do it and she had OCD, they would have let me do it if they’d trusted me to kill what I abstracted and draped across my skin; they let everyone but you in there, and why? Because your motor cortex fails a point-to-point alignment with a cheap and thoughtless standard that someone just defined. Did you think if you saluted that that might change their minds?”

“Stop,” Hermann whispers.

“Stop? You think I’m stopping? I’m not stopping Hermann, never, I’m the only one who’s seen you for what you truly are. An angry, righteous ‘expert,’ half deranged with self-restraint, who can’t fly off a handle that’s become a dead-man’s switch; a guy who hates his very nature, who longs for thoughts as waves and erasure of the self because he’s fought too long with unfairness as genetics to remember how to live. You’re killing who you are, that’s why you can’t snap back; you aren’t sure you want to; it’s so easy to be Geiszler; his thoughts aren’t freaking blades. But you’re not me, you know you’re not, I drive you to distraction and for years you called that ‘hatred’ because everything you feel is warped by what you are and sharpened into verbal blades you drive at what you’re not because they’re the only weapons anyone will grant you that you trust yourself to take.”

“Shut up.” Hermann’s words are soundless. “That’s not true. It isn’t true.”

“It’s true, you brain-swapped bastard, of course it’s freaking true; things aren’t false because you hate them, they’re false because they’re false. There’s your one confoundment—if what’s logical wins approbation, then what you despise is flawed. A fallacy that you don’t like to look at because upon examination it turns into why I felt I had to kill myself so I could prove you wrong.”

“Stop,” Hermann shouts; the word is torquing into German.

“No,” his colleague screams. “I want you back; I want you back, don’t allow yourself to do this. This isn’t who you are, it’s a shortcut of the mind straight to a state of lower energy but you have to run it back, it has to be reversible, don’t leave me here without you, don’t leave me with the person I unmade—”

It’s here he breaks and here that Hermann has his breakthrough; through breaking himself into triplicated dissonance and choosing a new throughline.

“Snap out of it!” Newton, panicked, closes his hands on the front of Hermann’s dress shirt.

Hermann squares his shoulders, shakes his head, and determines he’s not Newton.

Anymore.

He is who he is—a bolted-together conglomeration of overengineering and inadequacies that has, for years, aspired to move beyond itself by not acknowledging the ways in which it’s tied to his own biology, to joints that don’t move in accordance with the ne plus ultra ease of the prototypical Jaeger pilot, to a mind mired in its own circuitry that has, certainly, been damaged by its interface with a system never meant to be compatible.

He’s proven theorems, programmed Jaegers, mapped the quantum foam, helped save his planet from exogenous destruction, but still he is and always will be the failed pilot, the social outcast, the unbending son, the man who backs his colleagues into conceptual corners so tight that the only way they can cut free is by cutting themselves apart. The consolidation of all he is and the exclusion of what he isn’t supernova and collapse into a hyperdensity that wants nothing more than to pull away from the agony of the last fifteen minutes, but can’t.

Because someone has him by his shirt and is screaming in his face.

“You have to,” Newton says, overwrought, collapsing to command-form hysterics in the absence of perceptible recourse. 

Hermann’s never seen him like this.

Except for—

Yes, except for.

“Stop.” He lacks the respiratory resources for full vocal confrontation. 

Newton doesn’t stop. 

“You have to,” his colleague screams, inches from his face.

“Newton.” Hermann does some reciprocal clothing-gripping of his own for emphasis. “It worked. It worked. Calm down. Calm down.”

Hermann has to physically shake him to get him to listen, but finally, finally, his words penetrate the man’s agitated haze.

Newton looks at him in expectation.

Hermann tries to muster a sufficiently reassuring expression, but he’s not certain how efficacious it is given his state of emotional upset and Newton’s intolerable look of cautious optimism. 

“Are you sure?” Newton asks with a subtle shirt-shake. 

“To the extent I can be,” Hermann replies.

Newton lets him go, pulls his glasses off, and buries his face in his book-like, open palms.

Hermann is too shocked and too exhausted to do anything but stare at Newton, at his atypically clean hands, at the revolting memento mori in metal he’s worn on his finger since the day that Caitlin Lightcap died.

His thoughts are stunned to silence by the enormity of what has taken place. 

Newton drops his hands and tips his head back to stare at the junction between the wall and the ceiling. 

“Newton,” Hermann says with absolutely no subsequent plans.

“Yup,” Newton says. “Okay, good. I’ll be in the bathroom weeping for something like sixteen hours if you, like, need me for anything, so. Yeah. See you later.” He stands. 

Hermann snaps a hand out and closes his fingers around his colleague’s wrist. With the application of limited pressure, Newton caves like rotten ice, collapsing into an awkward embrace, turning his face into Hermann’s shoulder, vibrating with emotional brisance and repression in accord with whatever secret, internal frequencies his oscillatory circuits use to transmit their signals. 

“Don’t hug me,” Newton says into his shoulder. “I’m a dick.” 

“You’re not,” Hermann whispers, feeling like he’s dying.

“I didn’t mean any of those things,” Newton says. “They aren’t true.”

They are, though.

They are.

Oh, how they are true.

It is the how, of course, that is the most terrible. The why—the why is understandable. Motive always is. That’s what makes it motive. It’s the how of human failings where true cruelty lies. It is the same with bridges. The same with O-rings. The same with Jaegers. The same with neural interfaces that fuse the circuits of the human mind until catastrophic failure. Not the why of failure, but the how; the shrieks of rending metal, the screams of rending minds.

If the things his colleague had said hadn’t been true, they’d have had no power to pull him back to himself. 

“I know.” Hermann delivers the kindest lie he can get himself to speak. “I know that, you ridiculous man.” 

He has no idea what it is about these words or this circumstance that finally exceeds his colleague’s ability to hold himself together but—

Newton begins sobbing.

Hermann feels his own expression crack in sympathetic relief. 

“It’s all right,” Hermann manages to say, one hand in Newton’s hair.

Counterintuitively, Hermann’s statement makes Newton cry harder, but whether because Newton believes him or because he doesn’t is impossible to say. 

Hermann spends uncounted sets of minutes with his own burning eyes shut against the watery glare of the room, not saying anything, trying to recover his self-possession in the wake of an internecine personality exchange while Newton exhausts a pre-defined quota of chthonic torment that will no longer be suppressed.

When the ache in his back begins to seriously contend with the ache in his thoughts, when the burn of misery in his closed eyes cools to liquid tolerability, when the contracted knot of Geiszlerian misery clinging to his shoulder relaxes toward fatigue, Hermann opens his eyes, leans back, and drags his colleague-turned-roommate into a more topologically favorable conformation. 

“Next time you wish to do something nice for me, Newton,” he whispers, “I strongly advise you to purchase a book.”

“Meh,” Newton says indistinctly. “Boring.” 

“Yes,” Hermann says pointedly. 

“You’re like a personified war,” Newton murmurs into his shoulder, sounding like he has mostly finished crying. “Really tedious. Totally terrifying. Make a list of books; I don’t think there are enough books in the world to make up for the magnitude of my bad idea. RFID chips for none. Books for all. In other news, I bled all over your shirt. I think. 

Hermann sighs, posturing toward a casual aridity he doesn’t truly feel. “You say this as if it’s a notable thing. The only person’s clothes you ruin more regularly than your own are mine.”

“That’s a gross misrepresentation,” Newton replies fretfully, gathering additional shirt material and using it to wipe his face in either a pointed fulfillment of Hermann’s pronouncement or in hopeless acquiescence that belies his own statement. “Don’t look at me.” 

“Why?” Hermann says. 

“I am legit disgusting right now, dude.”

“How you think that your current state is more objectionable than your propensity for addressing me while covered with a patina of alien viscera, I will never understand,” Hermann says, quite truthfully. 

“Meh.” Newton pulls back and presses his shirt sleeve to his face. “Let’s get takeout Chinese food. From what I can tell with my sub-sub-sub par vision, your shirt looks really bad. Category-Five hematic fashion disaster. I’m gonna go effect an aesthetic reset and pretend none of this ever happened. Enjoy your RFID chip,” he finishes in obvious misery, locating his glasses by feel alone. “It was totally worth it, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Hermann lets him put his glasses on, stand up, and cross the room before he says, “Newton.”

If he does not say this now, in the brave void that his sense-of-self usually fills, there will never be a time he says it; he can feel the truth of that in every corner of his mind. 

Newton says nothing, but he stops and turns back.

“Thank you,” Hermann says, meaning it. Meaning it not just locally, not just for this here and this now, but globally, for all the times he cannot name and that Newton would not stand still for. For mirrored thoughts and reference books, coffee runs and drifting. 

“Myeah,” Newton replies with a vague wave, already disappearing behind a wall. “You’re welcome. Don’t die of self-castigation before I wash my face.”

“I shall make every effort,” Hermann replies, with all the meager aridity he can bring to bear.

The door to the bathroom shuts. 

He gets to his feet, pulls his cane off the floor, and makes his way down a dark hallway to his room, where he turns on the lights with a wave of his hand, strips off his shirt, leaves it to soak, and replaces it with a sweater chosen in a fog of indifference.

His thoughts run through their arcane algorithmic tracts, solidifying incremental insight into the unperceived biases of his past and the ontological uncertainty of his future.

He resolves to open the tequila immediately.