Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 11

Geiszler victorious, Newt tags this moment.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 11

Geiszler victorious, Newt tags this moment.

Oh sure, it might not feel quite like victory in the classical sense, what with this headache that seems to be the climax of a migraine that started with a crescendo he slept through; all the nociceptive receptors he has seem to be screaming a coordinated magnum opus in A-delta and C. It might not look quite right, either, it might not look all that victorious to an outside observer or even to a semi-inside observer who might or might not be wearing a bathrobe right about now, yup, nope, it probably doesn’t look like what it is, but that doesn’t change the truth of it, the verifiable subjective yesness of his sweeping win.

Take a seat in my drift interface, Newt thinks, pull up a cognitive chair, and measure my subjective superposition if you think you can get away with it, I guarantee you that when you do it’s going to collapse into something awesome, he thinks, not certain who it is he’s addressing. The hypothetical straw man in his head who’s not into empirical validations of subjectivity?  Whomever it is, it’s not his brain—his brain is on vacation somewhere, hopefully somewhere nice. It’s taking a leave of absence. That’s fine. He supports his brain, even when it doesn’t support him back, because Newt, unlike his brain, is loyal. Newt is, Newt is just—right now, he is just—he is, he is just—he is just killing this, he is killing this, he is winning; he has everything he wanted, he can look his past self in the face and he can say, dude, you crushed it. You crushed it. Way to trade resources to get what you want, past-self, you are a lot more plucky than even I gave you credit for. Nice work.

“You should try to eat,” Hermann says.

“Yeah dude,” Newt replies, shivering or shaking or tremoring subtly atop a hotel room bed. “Good idea. I will get right on that.” 

He doesn’t move though, which is fine, there are a lot reasons for that, one—his eyes hurt and he prefers to keep them closed, two—his head hurts and that is related to all different kinds of things, the eye thing, the neck pain, the jaw pain, the mouth pain, and probably some kind of distressed vasculature thing that’s going on anywhere there are openings in his skull, three—he’s pretty cold and food doesn’t seem worth it just right now, four—he’s thrown up once already since waking up in this hotel room, five—he took a look at this incipient room-service dinner and it’s soup which seems like a disaster, though, to be fair, no more of a disaster than anything else is going to be, six—he’s pacing himself, seven—the soup doesn’t look that great, he’s seen more appetizing soup in his life, that’s for sure, eight—whatever, he’s had a long day, probably, even if he did sleep through most of it for reasons that still aren’t perfectly clear to him, nine—he’s going to move in a little while, ten—nope, eleven—nothing’s leaking out of him right now, he’s not bleeding, he’s not throwing up, he’s got a little problem with the streaming eye thing he has going, he’s not about to tag that ‘crying’ because it’s not; obviously when the capillary beds in one’s sclera blow out, the eye just tries to fix that misery right up, like a champ, like a thing evolved by natural selection to be a progressively more awesome Swiss army-knife of sensory transduction with its sexy sexy rhodopsin; how many layers does the retina even have, it’s a lot—maybe eight, maybe ten, he thinks it’s ten—it’s like a layer cake, no it’s not, it’s way more like a nested set of wet, multicolored, translucent tissue paper that gets signal transduction done like a boss even though it sometimes just falls off the back of the eye in a folding slide of biological wetness, yuck. That’s less of a good job for evolution. The kaiju eye is better, a little more substantial, a little more engineered, well yeah, duh, it would be, put the photoreceptors on the surface if you’re building things from scratch, obviously, and man, if one’s really thinking about literal retinal layer cakes, just in terms of size the kaiju eye is really the kind of thing that yields up a satisfying visual on a macro scale when sliced into, and—

Nope, his brain thinks, making a belated reappearance that seems kind of ominous in its alarmed intensity before—

A wall of disorganized shrieking blue rises up from his memory; Otachi and dismembered neural tissue, some of which he himself cut apart—how could you do that, how could you, you who knew, you who guessed, you who—mortared together into something that might or might not be real, he can’t tell, there’s no way to know; there are parts of them still here, still on this planet; parts of them in formaldehyde; parts of them still thinking, like small animals everywhere are thinking; parts of them just waiting for him to come back to the drift; parts of them that maybe don’t have to wait, that maybe won’t have to wait, that maybe are right here, right now. He is terrified but not alone, his mind isn’t a lockbox anymore it’s wide open. He’s sure people were meant to be this way.  

Something snaps back into place, his thoughts turn less blue in a room that’s mostly dark and slightly red and he sits up gasping, but his airway is clear, and he can breathe and he can move and it’s just him, holding onto his shirt sleeves, his hands over his chest, and it’s definitely just him, only him, in this bed, in his head, and that’s great, that’s a win. Okay, sure, he thinks, trying to make friends with the screaming tenants of his subconscious mind. Everyone just relax. You’re not turning psychotic right here, right now, nope you are not. Whatever had just happened was probably a flashback to something he doesn’t fully remember, which is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself and a fun new thing that apparently his brain can do, traitorous, vacationing, talented bastard that it is; it’s always been a little too good at everything to be any good to anybody at all. 

I can’t work under these conditions, his brain shrieks at him, deciding not to take responsibility for its own actions.   

I am so sorry, dude, he apologizes, while trying to breathe, trying to decide if he’s traumatized or coming down off a short hit of a brief and creepy high. You are totally right about that. Please try to remember that we’re a team though. A team.   

“Newton,” Hermann says, with medium sharpness, medium concern, and maximum freaking out, like maybe it’s not the first time he’s said it. And oh, hey, speaking of inexplicably bathrobe clad German ex-pats, Hermann has decided to sit on the edge of the bed. Newt frankly finds this pretty baffling; this is for sure the weirdest thing they have ever done together—Newt, fully dressed and having periodic Synapse-tastrophies in Blue, Hermann with his still-damp hair and his improbable bathrobe. Dr. Gottlieb, Newt thinks, I was not aware that your hair was capable of being wet, any more than I was aware that my eyes could hurt this much and still be functional. Welcome to this crappy hotel bed that I will now probably bleed alarmingly all over if the past twenty minutes have been any indicator of how the rest of the night is going to go.

“Myeah,” Newt says, confirming his identity and his ability to speak, which is about all he’s game for at the moment. 

Hermann rolls his eyes. It’s not the whole shebang, it’s not his maximum oh-please-Newton-what-preposterous-nonsense-is-coming-out-of-your-mouth-now, it’s not even mid-range of-course-you-decided-not-to-make-more-coffee, it’s a low-grade, everyday-exasperation kind of eye roll. “You are fine, and your night will only improve,” he says, clipped and totally normal except for the looking away part and the part where he’s got a good grip on Newt, a really solid grip right over Newt’s right shoulder, which is less normal, Newt usually just sits on his own, and he is so cold.  

“I think you can read my thoughts,” Newt says.

“No,” Hermann replies, doing some complicated stacking thing with pillows out of Newt’s line of sight. “I cannot.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that,” Newt says, and while he’d like to expound on that topic, this is about the best he can really do while trying to make sure he can breathe at the same time. “I’m pretty sure you’ve always been wrong about that.”

“I am not wrong,” Hermann says, rolling his r just a little and shoving Newt in the general direction of the temple of pillows he has constructed against the headboard, and Newt just goes with it, because his muscles don’t seem to be good for much these days other than locking up and giving out in that order. 

“Who are you even,” Newt says, though he knows, he knows down to the roots of his teeth, who Hermann is, knows it so completely that he can’t fully separate knowledge of Hermann from knowledge of himself anymore. “Did you steal me from the PPDC?”

“No,” Hermann says.

“Good,” Newt replies.

“Possibly, there might have been a point at which the word ‘abduction’ was used by a member of the upper military echelons, but the situation has since been clarified.”

Newt brings a shaking hand to his face. He rests it on his temple before gingerly sliding two fingers beneath his glasses. He’s been in a high velocity skid straight toward a brick wall from the moment that the PPDC decided they needed one more data set on the anteverse following breach closure and all he remembers is the feeling of his own momentum in the face of blue-tinged brick and so, yeah, it’s pretty understandable that he’s confused to find that Hermann has managed to arrange for quantum tunneling on a macro scale, or whatever it is that he’s done, because while it had been nice to fantasize about rescue from bureaucracy, he really hadn’t expected any such thing, and can’t imagine how Hermann might have pulled him through that metaphorical wall without some huge and actual personal cost. 

“Don’t touch your eyes,” Hermann says, dragging Newt’s fingers from beneath his glasses in a slow, controlled slide. “Your intraocular pressure is elevated.”

“You’re really annoying,” Newt whispers, trying to pretend that Hermann actually is being annoying, irritating, an overeducated nag in an undereducated bathrobe, trying to pretend that he’s really being anything at all other than outrageously nice, because he’s pretty sure that if anyone, especially Hermann, is even remotely nice to him right now he’s going to start crying hysterically and possibly not stop for hours because his brain is not around running the show like it’s supposed to. “Has anyone ever told you that?  How much trouble are we in right now?”

“Please do not worry about that at the present moment,” Hermann says unevenly. “Please just try to relax, and trust that I am capable of handling this."

Hermann’s definitely having the same problem that Newt is having when it comes to the runaway trajectory of thought and tone. Where have everyone’s superegos gone?  Who is driving these thought chariots?  Why does he not understand the minutiae of what’s happening here?  Why is Hermann not wearing his clothes?  Why is it so cold?  How difficult must it have been for Hermann to get him from Hong Kong to San Francisco if Newt doesn’t remember anything about it?  Did he actually meet Hypothetical Rain, surfer neurologist, earlier or was that just a dream?  Why does he feel so bad?  How is it that both his eyes were affected by the really terrible decisions he made over the past three days?  Will this headache ever go away?  What would Descartes do right now?  Who sent that team that fried his brain?  Will they send another one?  Should he change his name and disappear off the face of the planet, dragging Hermann with him?  Should he make a paper chain and count down the days until he can drift again and he won’t have to be alone in his own mind?  Which does he prefer, the confused and unenlightened rage of dead and slowly fixing tissue, or the raging void that his thoughts can’t quite fill?  Is that a trick question?  Who is going to water his plants that have spent months growing a little too well on the ledge of a now abandoned Hong Kong lab?  What happened to his drift interface and can it now be used on other people?  Will it?  If he cloned a kaiju would that fix the screaming vacuum that makes up more than half his mind?  How long has it been since he drifted?  How many hours?  How many times did he do it?  How many times did they do it to him?  How many seizures has he had?  Will the PPDC pay his medical bills?  Is he brain damaged?  Is he capable of complex analytical tasks?  Is this flurry of thoughts made scattershot his new, permanent deal?  Why doesn’t he have any clear memories of the span between seizure number two and twenty minutes ago?  Is he going to retain memories of this?  How long does he have to live?  Out of all of the appalling things that have happened to him and to the planet how many of them are going to happen again and how soon?  Why does he—

“Stop,” Hermann says. 

Yeah, like that’s going to work. It would be nice if that worked, it would be nice if Newt could say, stop it, brain, you realize you’re cloistered coils of semi-solid goo, isolated by tight junctions and atypically thick basement membranes, there’s really not anything special about you so just shut up already, god, no one wants to listen to the things you find interesting or the inappropriate questions you’re forming just now, least of all me. Are you not supposed to be on vacation?  If you’re not interested in cleaning up your messes then just stay away, and let me eat my soup and then throw up in relative peace.

“What exactly am I supposed to be stopping?” Newt asks.

Surprisingly, Hermann looks like he doesn’t know how to answer that one. This makes sense to Newt, sort of. It should, he supposes, because he asked like he wanted an answer, meaning that he himself doesn’t know. It’s hard to put a label on anything that’s happening, but that’s all to the good, he supposes, and maybe one of the few things that’s preventing him from entirely freaking out, because he’s pretty sure that whatever label gets affixed to whatever is happening right now, he’s not going to like it, he’s not going to like it at all. No one is doing any labeling at the moment, it’s just bathrobes and cold soup and a room where no one is turning on the light even though the sun is well on its way to totally, entirely set.

Newt looks at Hermann, really looks at him, and the more Newt looks, the more awful things seem. Hermann is giving him an exhausted, hopeful look, like maybe some kind of miracle will happen and Newt will start making sense or stop doing whatever it is that he’s doing that Hermann wishes he wouldn’t. Like maybe Newt will magically think of a way to eat soup without throwing up or needing fine motor control. Like maybe Newt will start fixing whatever it is that’s been disassembled, because Newt is generally the one who constructs things—interfaces, arguments, layered shots with witty names, sick guitar riffs, prototypes and proposals, stylized representations of kaiju to transfer to his skin, patch clamp apparatuses, mobile stereotactic drift interfaces, relocatable blackboards, agendas, playlists, routes through foreign cities. Hermann is, at heart, a critical thinker, better at saying no than saying yes, and right now he’s got the look of a guy who’s surrounded by a nest of disassembly and isn’t really sure how things should be coming together, because that’s not his job, not this logistical stuff, he predicts things and he models them, he picks out patterns where no patterns are, he’s a redirector of effort, misapplied. He builds things out of code and draws up plans for Jaegers, but he’s less at home with chemistry and colleagues bleeding from their eyes.

“Why are you wearing a bathrobe?” Newt asks.

“Because the laundry service is washing our clothes,” Hermann replies.

Surprise that actually surprises no one—this answer ups his anxiety. Newt is pretty sure he’s wearing his clothes; that’s what it looks like, this button-down white shirt and these black jeans are most definitely his. Is he wrong about this?  Is he not wearing clothes?  If he thinks he’s wearing clothes and he’s not, his problems are more profound than he is really prepared to handle at the present moment. Alternatively, could he be wearing clothes that aren’t actually his?  If so, they fit really well. If both their clothes are being washed, which makes sense because Hermann distinctly said “our,” then why does he have clothes?  Why is there a clothing disparity between them?  If there were to be a clothing disparity it should certainly go the other way, since Newt cannot conceive that he had been in any state to pack anything at all prior to their departure. What had he been wearing when Hermann had pulled him out of Medical?  Had he even been wearing clothes?  He has no idea. 

“Newton,” Hermann says carefully. 

“Yup,” Newt replies, trying to believe that he’s having no problems with getting sufficient air to support all the anxious catabolism that his cells are kicking into gear all over his vital organs. “I um—“  he breaks off, expression neutral, eyes fixed on the dim patterns that the geometric designs on the bedspread make in the deepening darkness, about to lay down a hand of cards that he’d just as soon keep close to his chest, because he’s certain that he doesn’t understand everything about what has happened over the past several days and he’s certain he doesn’t understand everything about what’s happening now in this hotel room, and he’s certain that his own mind will remain a horrible, closed-off wasteland of continuous, circuitous torture for the foreseeable future, and he really has no desire to reveal to anyone, least of all Hermann, how profoundly crap his current hand of cards is.

“Everything will be fine,” Hermann says, not looking at him, because Hermann is arguably the worst liar on the planet and they both know it.

“Yeah,” Newt says, his fingers wrapped around the shirt cuffs that had better be real, and had better be his, and had better be shirt cuffs. “I know, dude, I just, ah, I was just trying to rationalize our counterintuitive clothing disparity.”

Hermann looks at him, a sharp little changing of lines in the dimness. “I packed an extra outfit for you. There’s nothing counterintuitive about your slovenly track record.”

“Well not when you put it that way,” Newt replies, temporarily relieved. Hermann has a point, in that he’s already managed to bleed on this shirt. Some of his anxiety yields its headspace straight back to his headache and he has the urge to touch his eyes, to sort of press on them and then to maybe sort of claw them out of his head. “Do you think you could tell me,” he breaks off the sentence prematurely, needing to gear himself up for its informative, ending half, needing this moment when it could still turn into something totally reasonable like, ‘what the diameter of the open transdimensional portal is and how it varies with mass of the transported organism,’ or, ‘when you first encountered Descartes did you realize what a magnificent bastard he was going to turn out to be,’ or really anything at all other than what he’s actually going to say, which is, “what happened?”

Hermann is quiet and looking away and breathing unevenly and Newt immediately regrets the request. 

“At a first approximation,” Hermann says finally, “you ceded to a formalized request from the PPDC and spent three days ‘collaborating’ with them regarding drift technology. At some point during those three days you suffered at least one seizure and were subsequently medicated. I forged a letter of resignation and removed you from the medical bay. We boarded a direct flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco while I used what minimal institutional goodwill I possess to prevent the pair of us being detained and taken into military custody. After a three-hour delay, we were released by Customs. I was—concerned that you required hospitalization, and so I arranged for you to be immediately evaluated by a UCSF neurologist. Her opinion on this was equivocal and so I brought us here. You have been sleeping with mixed success for approximately eight hours.”

“Oh,” Newt replies, not really sure what ‘mixed success’ might mean, and hoping it doesn’t mean anything like ‘periodic screaming,’ or ‘choking on blood,’ or ‘occasional talking about horrifying subjects’. He estimates he remembers something like twenty to thirty percent of what Hermann has just described. “You forged a letter of resignation?”  Newt asks, deciding he would prefer to hear about his colleague’s adventures in disingenuousness than his own adventures with synchronized waves of neuronal activity. He has no interest in speculating on the probability of a future or current seizure disorder at this point in time. 

“Yes,” Hermann says, with a crisp primness. “Rest assured, it was atypically professional.”

“You should have written ‘suck it’ on a napkin. That’s what I would have done.” 

“I considered it,” Hermann replies, “but non-standard paper sizes and textures are difficult to force through the high volume scanners upon which modern bureaucracy is built. I wanted this expedited.”

“You’re a little bit of a magnificent badass when the mood strikes you,” Newt says,  “I’ve told you this, right?”

“I am nothing of the kind,” Hermann replies, and there’s a waspish edge to his voice that Newt can’t pin an etiology on in this kind of anonymizing darkness. 

If Hermann wants to be waspish, that is fine by Newt. That is absolutely okay and eight hundred percent reasonable. Newt has dragged the guy into and through a whole tangled mess of legal and logistical and logical barbed wire of the metaphorical variety, and he is sorry about that; maybe if Hermann hadn’t come after him and Hannibal Chau hadn’t been eaten, and had been more of a nice guy, Chau would have been the guy who decided that drifting with dead kaiju was cool, was for winners, and then maybe—maybe what?  Yeah, okay, no, this is a terrible fantasy backup memory Newt’s constructing, because for one—he is pretty sure he wasn’t then and isn’t now interested in seeing the inside of Hannibal Chau’s head, and for two—he had won. He needs no fantasy backup memories because he had been right, and he had done all the right things within his purview, and yeah, sometimes a whole branching tree of the most flawless decision making still dumped one in a pit of total despair, but that was the stochastic sucker punch delivered by the game of life, man, and sometimes you could get around it and shut transdimensional breaches like a baller and sometimes your own neurochemistry would punish you for the rest of your miserable, transient existence, and that’s just the way it was, and is, and would be, and he had signed up for this. He’d read the fine print and he’d scrawled his name in craptacular penmanship on the form and then he’d designed and donned the metaphorical t-shirt; he’d donned it multiple times. Unfortunately, he had let Hermann sign himself up as well, and that was kind of a poor choice on Newt’s part, understandable, arguably a defensible idea at the time it had happened, but still a poor choice. So now, given that Hermann is justifiably upset about a whole set of things that Newt has pretty crap insight into at the present moment, he’s not really sure what to do. Ideally, he would say something that would mitigate any aspect of what’s happening here, but he absolutely does not trust himself to do any such thing. Given the current status of everything, he’ll probably lead with something totally innocuous like ‘I’m sorry?’ or “okay,’ and then things will be awkward and he’ll keep talking and his discourse will end up devolving to the point that something unfortunate happens, because there’s a whole lot brewing in his subconscious mind that he doesn’t particularly care to inventory right now, and he’s not sure he can keep all of it shut up wherever it is that he’s managed to shut it up and he’s also not sure what’s going to happen if it makes an appearance in force, but he thinks that would probably not be the best.

Hermann pats Newt’s knee, either because he feels like he needs to apologize for his thin veneer of waspishness, which says terrible things about his impression of Newt’s mental state, or because he’s picking up on Newt’s train of thought, or because Newt is really having a problem keeping his internal monologue internal. This is a problem that’s been going on for days—his inability to tell whether he’s talking and Hermann is responding to stuff he says verbally, or whether he’s not and Hermann has some kind of intermittent window into Newt’s head when neither one of them is paying attention. Either way, he doesn’t view this as a positive thing. He’s also pretty sure it’s option number two, because he feels like he would have noticed this monologue problem previously had it been going on for a long time. Maybe it’s a post-drift phenomenon, maybe, but he’s pretty sure he knows when he’s talking and when he’s not. Perseverating on this verbally isn’t going to do him any favors at the present moment, since Hermann seems to be worried that he’s not quite mentally intact and has already made his thoughts on the thought-reading pretty clear. So he won’t think about that right now. 

“How do you feel?” Hermann asks.

He feels awful. Unmitigatedly awful. He feels like the guy who’s going to find out whether it’s possible to die of head pain. He feels like he might go blind, probably because it’s dark and his eyes are trying to implode under their own elevated intraocular pressure. He thinks he might throw up again, literally any time, but especially if he has to swallow any more blood. His muscles are sore and overtaxed and not doing a very good job with anything he asks of them. He’s trying to stay calm, because he’s not sure if he can physiologically handle the amount of freaking out that his unsupervised brain is trying to jump-start about every thirty seconds or so. 

“Pretty good,” Newt says. 

It’s getting so dark in the room that Newt really can’t tell whether or not Hermann buys this at all. Probably not, considering the guy dragged him halfway across the planet, flew with him in a plane over the Pacific—they must have passed over or near the place where—

His thoughts turn bright, the room lights up in a haze of blue-violet, all his muscles decide to contract in response to a simultaneous double spike of utter revulsion and raging desire; if the breach still existed there would be no force on this planet that would prevent him from—but it doesn’t, it doesn’t exist anymore he can feel that it doesn’t in some kind of weird and horrible phantom limb phenomenon. His brain chooses this moment to make a vengeful reappearance, riding him down on its warpath of vindictive triumph over whatever part of him feels wronged by that which he has done. I did this, his brain shrieks at him, I was the one who cut them off, the one who destroyed them, the one who sliced into their dead emissaries, the one who submerged still active neural tissue in formalin, and I’d do it again, I’d do it again—

Newt is dry heaving into a trashcan when his thoughts lose their azure edge.

He manages to stop doing that and then to mostly relax.

“Pretty good,” Hermann repeats dryly, still holding the trashcan.

“That was a lie,” Newt whispers. 

“Oh really,” Hermann replies. 

“Believe it or not,” Newt rasps, feeling the warm pressure of an imminent episode of epistaxis.

“I’m going to turn on the light.”

It is only after the bedside lamp comes on with a click that Newt realizes that was a cue to shut his stupid eyes. He gets it done, but not before being stabbed right in the retinas by too many photons. He pulls his glasses off and claps a hand over both eyes right around the time his nose starts bleeding again. He tries to angle his head so that he’s not going to end up swallowing most of it, and manages to get the sleeve he’s dedicated to blood-control under his face, but that’s about all he’s good for. 

He’s done. 

His organ systems have all made a good effort, but there’s not going to be any more sitting or thinking or worrying about blood on bed sheets. There’s just going to be lying here, curled on his side, freezing to death in an overly air-conditioned room in a temperate, maritime region of the world, one hand over his eyes, one sleeve kind of under his face. 

Hermann does some muttering in German, and the parts of it that Newt is getting seem to mainly deal with how much of an unmitigated mess Newt is, bad decisions of all kinds, and stupidity in the abstract.

Privately, Newt agrees with the gestalt of Hermann’s private monologue. Publicly, he decides to disclose, “I threw up earlier and then used your toothbrush.”  He’s not really sure why. It seems like the thing to do. Honesty. Yup.

Hermann makes an aggrieved, disgusted sound and starts deconstructing the pillow ziggurat he built earlier for purposes unclear to Newt.

“Sorry,” Newt slurs. “It seemed really necessary to me at the time.”

“I’m sure,” Hermann replies, doing some blanket yanking and arranging, mostly underneath Newt, who is really not capable of getting out of his way right now. 

“Differential toothbrush benefit to me versus you was, like, really high, dude,” Newt says, trying not to cough. 

“So you felt entitled.”  Hermann drags him up into a seated position, with a slow, deliberate effort that Newt manages to help out with a little bit, while still keeping one hand over his eyes. A tissue gets shoved into his other hand, and Newt uses it to pinch his nose shut.

“I don’t know if ‘entitled’ is the word I would choose,” Newt replies, feeling lightheaded, his eyes streaming behind the shuttered darkness of his hand. “It was more like—given that I’ve ruined your life, what’s a toothbrush, really, in the grand scheme of things?”

“You have not ruined my life,” Hermann says, too unsteadily and way way way way way too nicely for Newt to really sit here and take, “so I will thank you to leave my future toothbrushes alone and not subject them to ill-founded fits of nihilism that you use to justify your unthinking gratification of your immediate material needs. I will, however, cede you this particular toothbrush, if only because you have already contaminated it.”

“Thanks man,” Newt says, cracking his fingers for a brief, painful visual so that when he folds like a bad hand he manages to do it in the direction of Hermann’s bathrobed shoulder because it’s either that or fall out of this sitting position that his core isn’t really up to maintaining for a prolonged period. 

Hermann helps him out with an academic-bro type of manly solidarity that includes being the thing that Newt is leaning against and also some awkward shoulder patting that turns a little less awkward over time when Newt neither pulls away nor says anything about it. Technically, this might even be considered a hug, but Newt has no plans to tag it that way. Not that Newt has anything against embraces in the abstract, in fact, he engages in them frequently. This is not a hug though. Mostly, this is just an expeditious way to keep Newt’s currently bleeding capillary beds above the level of his heart. Mostly. 

His brain is finally starting to feel like a matched set for his body, slowing down, struggling through thought-sludge, powering up and down in a slow strobe of intermittent and inappropriate clarity and he wonders where Mako is right now, what she’s doing, half a world away, her professional cohort mostly dead and her family all dead, again. He flashes back to the public shelter in a venomless, colorless memory of a cracking sound and twitches faintly. Wonders if he’s falling asleep or dying, knows it’s the former when his hearing kicks into something hyperacute and hyperimmediate. Wonders what it is, wonders what does it mean when his thoughts turn blue; he can remember it happening before, can remember his own back arching like it had been someone else’s, which had been weird, he’s not sure he likes that.

Newt pulls the tissue away from his nose and tries to decide if he’s still bleeding.

It seems like no, so he drops his hand, too tired to keep it attached to his face if it doesn’t really need to be there. Like the hand he’s got over his eyes. That one is staying for the duration.       

Hermann does some readjustment and Newt is lying down, mostly flat, and now, topologically under blankets. He’s not sure how that happened; there had been some kind of fancy surface manipulation that had arranged this, but what does one expect when one hangs out with a mathematician?  Lying down makes Newt feel substantially sharper, probably because it helps his autonomic nervous system make better decisions about blood flow. 

“Newton?” Hermann says. 

“Yeah dude,” Newt slurs, “I’m only mostly dead.”

“Good,” Hermann replies. “I will be back shortly.”

He’s pretty sure he’s blown some fuses in his brain, or, maybe he’s still in the process of blowing them. When events occur only within the confines of one’s own cranium it’s hard to be objective about what’s truly taking place. It’s not impossible to be objective, not anymore, because someone could drift with him and say, yep, Geiszler’s slowly or maybe rapidly going nuts, it’s an observable phenomenon, based firmly in the electrochemistry of the guy’s prefrontal cortex, which, let me tell you, friend, is not looking so good at the moment. This observable reality would be corroborated by the fact that literally everyone who’s ever met him could have told him that this was where things were trending, and many of them did, over and over again, and it’s not that he doesn’t listen, it’s just that he set about to create choices for himself, but those choices turned out to be moral imperatives that he then did a bad job framing as such to his peers and superiors. Having poor metaphorical penmanship doesn’t absolve one from the duty to act, though, so he had. Acted. Like a winner.

Please do not be connected to the kaiju anteverse, brain, he thinks in a running glaze of words that seem to only partially form. Please also do not be connected to scattered and formalin-fixed, dead, cloned, alien, war machines who understandably don’t like you that much right now. Please do not be connected to Hermann. Please be an island. Please be part of no main.

You have a lot of nerve to be making requests at this point, don’t you think? His brain asks, deciding to make an appearance.

I see what you did there, Newt replies. It’s nice to know that pun-making will be a skill I retain to the end. Because that’s important.

You are truly insufferable, his brain replies. 

Who replaced you with Hermann? Newt asks vaguely.

You did, his brain snaps. Several days ago. When you drifted.

“What?” Newt says, startled, opening his eyes in a painful haze to see Hermann, blurred and sitting on the bed. “Oh god. I think I’m hallucinating?”

“Well it wouldn’t be the first time,” Hermann replies, putting one hand on Newt’s forehead and managing to get eyedrops into Newt’s right eye before Newt figures out that was his plan. “In fact, it would not even be the first time today.”

“A little warning would be nice,” Newt snarls, pulling away, blinking something that stings out of already stinging eyes, “what is that?”

“Do not move,” Hermann snaps, managing to do the other eye with Newt’s half-hearted cooperation. “These are eyedrops.”

“I know they’re eyedrops, dude,” Newt snaps. “What is in them?  Anything?  Or are you just watering my fried capillary beds?”

“For someone who is ostensibly hallucinating,” Hermann says, opening a pair of sunglasses and putting them on Newt, “allow me to compliment you on your coherency.”

“Noted, dude,” Newt says, identifying the sunglasses thing as a thing that had happened before, and wondering if Hermann had also explained the eyedrop thing to him previously, and if so, how many times. “But—”

“Their purpose is to reduce intraocular pressure,” Hermann says. “You may recall I mentioned that yours was elevated due to inflammatory obstruction of outflow tracts within the eye.” 

This seems extremely reasonable to Newt, unfortunately. It does not necessarily bode well for his already sub-par vision.

“Both the medical team at the PPDC and Dr. McClure have expressed reasonable confidence that your vision will make a full recovery.”

Ah. Good. But— 

“Dr. McClure?” Newt asks. 

“Coral,” Hermann says.

“Hypothetical Rain?” Newt asks.

“Her name is Coral,” Hermann replies. 

“That was real?” Newt asks.

“Yes,” Hermann replies.

“Does she have an eyebrow ring?” Newt asks. 

“Yes,” Hermann replies. 

“Does she look a little bit like me?” Newt asks, still skeptical. 

“Yes,” Hermann replies.

“Have I asked you all these things?  Previously, I mean?” Newt clarifies, because Hermann, from what he can see of the other man’s dim and extremely blurred outline, seems more amused than traumatized.

“No,” Hermann replies. “You are unmistakably vastly improved.”

“Ugh,” Newt says, not in the mood to contemplate the kinds of things that have likely been coming out of his mouth over the course of the past day. “You can see why I might think that I hallucinated Actual Coral, though.” 

“Yes,” Hermann says, twisting the top off a bottle of something that Newt wishes his lenses and retinas were capable of resolving but seems like it might be a bottle of prescription medication. “Entirely reasonable.”  

That’s probably an anti-epileptic, his brain says, startling him with abrupt and useful conjecturing. 

“And this would be the advertised anti-epileptic?” Newt asks, “which I do not need, by the way, probably. I’m pretty sure that I only have seizures when I give them to myself by putting my brain into an overly excitable state, voltage-wise.”

“Yes,” Hermann says, putting the pill in Newt’s hand, “and though I hope you’re correct, let’s not test the veracity of your claim.”

Newt manages to get himself up on one elbow for the span of time required to drink blood-flavored water and swallow some kind of GABAesque agonist or whatever the kids are taking to avoid seizures these days. 

“Try to keep that down,” Hermann advises, totally unhelpfully.

“Yeah okay,” Newt says, with as much eye rolling as he can pack into his uncooperative vocal cords. “Sure. Good idea, man.”

“Shut up,” Hermann replies, with flagrantly outrageous fondness that he’s not even bothering to hide and that’s freaking Newt out a little bit. “Do you think you can—”

“Do not even say it,” Newt says, doing his absolute best not to think about lukewarm soup, attempting to eat it, or the experience of his gastrointestinal tract rejecting it and violently sending it back from whence it had come. “The answer is no. Do not negotiate, do not hedge, do not persist, do not refer even obliquely to that stuff on the table over there.”

Hermann sighs and drags his bad leg onto the bed, elevating it kind of like maybe he’s been walking on it for hours and hours as he drags Newt through walls and over the surfaces of planets, rescuing him from foreign cities and nefarious bureaucracies. Maybe just the one planet. Maybe no wall dragging happened, except for the metaphorical kind.

“You are literally the best, man,” Newt says. “And kind of also the worst.”

Hermann exhales, short and sharp.

Probably, if Newt could actually see his expression, it would be a glare.

“Wait let me qualify,” he says, his tongue not fully cooperating with the signals his brain is sending. “You are probably literally the worst person to be sharing a brain with, if that’s what you’re doing, what we’re doing, what you’re doing to me sometimes, because, look, I know that you don’t believe me but I’m pretty sure that there’s some kind of weirdness going on with you and my inner monologue, and I’m not sure what this periodic blue-edged thing that happens to my brain here and there is, but I don’t think it’s good and I don’t want it spreading, not to you, not like some kind of horrible neural net thing and this really creeps me out, okay, right?  Listen to this. Kaiju, like terrestrial cephalopods, have some element of neural decentralization, it’s part of why the drifting with fixed tissue even works at all, it’s also what makes them so fast, can you imagine if all those motor programs were centralized?  That would be ridiculous. But my point is that whole networks operate with relative independence and so, crap, what if they have this whole thing going, those guys in the jars, and me, sometimes, or not, I don’t know, I don’t get it, but what if they, what if they can, what if—"

Hermann decides to lie down next to him, and this makes Newt stop talking, shift laterally in a poor show of coordination, and then say, “are you okay?” in that order.

“Yes,” Hermann says, most definitely meaning ‘no’, because, hi, the guy is wearing a bathrobe and pretty much just collapsed into total defeat next to Newt on a hotel room bed. This night just keeps getting weirder and more alarming and it occurs to Newt that now is maybe not the best or most tactful time to think aloud about the various ways that he may be losing himself to a disembodied hive mind and/or infecting Hermann with his own problems.

Hermann has had hours to think about these things already and is probably light years ahead of Newt when it comes to a) insight into problems possessed by himself, Newt, or both, and b) the implications thereof. 

“I’m pretty sure I’ve still got my genius-level IQ,” Newt whispers, “and most of my charming personality—“

He breaks off again as Hermann brings his hands to his face.

“And so do you,” Newt continues, with all the valiance his borrowed shades and blurring diction and exhausted brain will allow, “so we’ve got a good chance of making things turn the way we’d like them to turn.” 

“Go to sleep,” Hermann says, sounding like he underestimated the amount of air he was going to need to complete his sentence, “you atrocious man.”

“You’re the atrocious one,” Newt replies. “You’re not even wearing any clothes, by Jove. How uncouth. How offensively irregular. Is that blood on your bathrobe, sir?  How dare you. Remove yourself from my personal space, if you would be so good, I simply cannot countenance such— 

“I will smother you with this pillow,” Hermann breaks in, conjuring one of the things up from somewhere, maybe from the graveyard of Newt’s dismantled bedroom ziggurat.

“I am not even worried,” Newt says, shifting laterally again with the poor coordination of a musculoskeletal system on furlough. “I bet, post-drift, meaning now, meaning today, meaning any time, we could have a British-off, and I would win." 

“You would not win. There is also nothing more antithetical to the concept of Britishness than a ‘British-off’.”

“Myeah,” Newt says slowly. “Either you’re correct about that, or you’re so correct that you’ve flipped your correctness pendulum right over the bar and into the territory of very much wrong.”

“That makes no sense,” Hermann replies.

“Yes it does,” Newt says. “Think French Revolution man, you know, Thermidorian Reaction post Reign of Terror, except for where the Reign of Terror is your statement about British-offs, and—okay, fine, not my best work analogy-wise but you expected what, dude?” Newt lets his eyes fall closed behind borrowed shades. “Last week someone drugged me into this week, which I’m thankful for, I guess, depending on their motivations, which I’ll probably never discover, and the metaphor still works, man, I don’t even get the Anglophile thing you’ve got going, I mean you’re from the Continent; culturally you’re supposed to look askance at the guys across the channel.”

“I look askance at no one,” Hermann says.

“More like everyone,” Newt replies, nearly able to hear the sound of Hermann rolling his eyes, watching his own inner landscape begin to fire randomly, trying like a champ to integrate whole swaths of memory and experience that aren’t its own in terrifying and glorious detail. He can hear the slide of chalk over an accommodating surface, the sound of wings beating against thinning atmospheric pressure, and stranger things, the twang of snapping catenaries the rhythm of his voice from a perspective not his own—is that really what he sounds like?  Behind his closed eyelids he sees the sea in triplicate perspective, different piers and different ports, over water and beneath it—a random, synaptic, kaleidoscopic, ocean-colored collage of a decade spent attacking and defending the Pacific Ring of Fire. 

It’s going to be a rough night.

This and all the rest.

“I’m going to apologize,” Newt says. “In advance and, also, retrospectively.”

“Please do not apologize,” Hermann whispers, not turning out the light, not saying anything else.