I Hope the Eldritch Horror Learns My Name (And Other Good Ideas): Like the Twist of a Plot

Not actually a plot twist, just like one.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: This came from a piece of fan art done by Saltbay, and there are a few lines of dialogue in this that appeared in her artwork and were originally written by her. 

Like the Twist of a Plot

The snap of a shutting laptop.

The slide of an opening glass door.

The click of a pen against a granite countertop.

The cry of distant sea birds.

The short hum of an electric guitar interfacing with a cheap amp.

The afternoon is bright and warm, and a breeze that smells like the sea hisses around the planes of an open glass door, shifting the strands of an intricate shell wind chime, while Dr. Newton Geiszler, his feet improperly propped on a dining table, picks out a sick riff on his electric guitar. And if, if, truth be told (and why not tell the truth in this day and age when his planet has returned to its policy of Splendid [Quantum Mechanical] Isolation), said “riff” is a little bit less a “riff” than, er, nearly identical to the melodic line of Vivaldi’s Concerto Number Four in F minor, aka L’inverno, aka Winter? Well then that’s fine; that’s not weird, that’s not weird at all, it’s just a little bit of a capitulation to the parties in his head who enjoy classical music and who need to start cautiously engaging with their inappropriate obsession with Bach if for no other reason than the collective safety of the whole cognitive home team because, for better or worse, Dr. Newton Geiszler of the upper level seminars and gift for perfect metaphors has become a little bit of a Prince of Post-Apocalyptic Academia, and it’s difficult to avoid Bach whilst traipsing around the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department; frankly it’s just risky—so he needs to teach the local cut-up kaiju kids to be cool with the musical form of the fugue; it’s just a thing that needs to happen.

Newt tips his chair back onto two of its four legs and shuts his eyes behind polarized lenses.

Fugue, the kids seethe. Contrapuntal.

Maybe later, Newt replies magnanimously. If you’re good. And also? If you don’t use your hivemind mojo to incapacitate me. Remember last time? In the hallway? With the snappy save courtesy of headphones, heavy metal, and Hermann? That was not a good time. That was a poor, poor showing.

 

The kids hiss restively but content themselves with Newt’s offering of Vivaldi for solo electric guitar.

Winter is respectably badass. So badass that it could be adapted into something semi-hard rock and, sure, even though he’s not doing that right now—the point is, technically? It could be done. That’s the important part. The defensible part. The way he’ll explain this, should he ever be called to account.

 

You are so awesome, Newt’s brain says admiringly as Newt navigates himself through some particularly virtuosic fingering.

I know. Newt tips his head back.

He’s halfway through the second movement, or he would be, if he were a nerd and cared about the “movements” of bastardized violin concertos, which he is not and does not, thank you, when some subtle environmental cue—maybe the feel of the air, maybe the little stones in his inner ear, maybe some self-limited, local, over-the-air, hive mind-derived EM signal—causes him to tense in a way that’s incompatible with the precariousness of his position.

The resulting sequence of events occurs predictably. The slip of a hand, the dissonant chord, the outflung arm, the contraction of hip flexors, the opening of eyelids, but nope, reflexive responsiveness aside—it’s too late, he can’t save it; his chair is, for sure going over and definitely taking Newt and his guitar with it—

Or.

Not?

Newt stares at the ground, which seems to be nicely and improbably stationary relative to his current position.

?!?!?!, the kids hiss.

Hmm, Newt thinks.

He makes an attempt to jump-start his arrested cognitive processes.

Hypothesis 1. Newt has developed telekinetic powers to go with his lame-ass, finger-to-face telepathic ones, and these have saved him from falling. Awesome, but unlikely.

Hypothesis 2. He arches his back to look up and behind him, and his head runs into someone’s forearm. He angles his neck to get a better view.

“Hi,” Newt says weakly.

“Hello.” Hermann’s hand is closed around the upper crossbar of the chair Newt occupies.

“You’re home early.” Newt suavely rests his head against Hermann’s forearm. He picks out the theme to Bolero on his guitar to ironically punctuate his unmitigated suavitude.

“Yes.” Hermann drags Newt’s chair back by about six inches, presumably so he doesn’t tear Newt’s hamstrings when he inevitably decides to re-ground all four legs.

“Thank you?” Newt says, re: everything.

“You do this on purpose, Newton.” Hermann sounds simultaneously irritated and dangerous and appreciative in a bizarre and paraesthetic blend.

“Nah,” Newt replies to whatever Hermann thinks he means by his statement.

He re-tips his chair and continues his rendition of Bolero, giving Hermann a brief and crooked smile that hopefully doesn’t reflect that he knows that Hermann knows that he knows just how close his current outfit, demeanor, eyewear, choice of leisure activity, tone of voice, and display of manual dexterity come to the prototypical Gottliebian romantic ideal because there’s something risky in this course he’s choosing, meaning that it’s not impossible Hermann might do something like save his guitar while tipping Newt right onto the hardwood floor in the making of a durable point; it’s not likely either, but it’s not impossible, not these days when Hermann has loosened up on his native badassery in a little bit of a Geiszlerian way because after the apocalypse and post the Drift it turns out that Dr. Gottlieb is slightly (just slightly) more in touch with his edgier side if: a) sports car purchasing, b) a more liberal haircut, c) a less stringent rise-with-the-dawn ethos, d) assorted wall-leaning, and e) occasional anti-authoritarian sentiments collectively create any kind of global metric by which such a thing might be assessed, which of course they do, and Newt finds it about eight kinds of ironic that, in the long run, their collective poise in the post-drift state looks like it’s increasing rather than decreasing, but maybe it’s not related to the Drift at all, not really; maybe this is what their relationship would have been, should have been all along, if only they hadn’t polarized one another so completely and aggressively in an Alaskan Shatterdome that now lies abandoned, lines and lines of latitude away.

Hermann, not in the mood to back down in the face of provocative melodic progression, grabs the back of Newt’s chair and his guitar, then ruins Newt’s musical build by pulling the instrument out of his grip and regrounding the chair at the same time.

Newt graciously surrenders his guitar but declines to remove his feet from the table.

He re-tips his chair.

 

“No Ravel?” He tracks the blur of Hermann’s outline as the guy leans Newt’s instrument against the nearest wall. “Too modern for you? Too bleeding-edge? Too turn of the century (ago)? I can backtrack to something more Baroque. I’d do it for you. I, in fact, have done it for you. I—”

Hermann hooks his cane around Newt’s crossed ankles and drags them laterally off the table, which, yes, alas, Newt finds tragically hot, especially when it is followed up by his pen-pal, colleague, drift-partner, life-partner roommate deciding that he’d also like to be sitting in Newt’s chair, but he’d like to be doing it antiparallel style, also known as straddling Newt’s lap.

“Yes,” Dr. Geiszler says magnanimously, as he’s appropriated as furniture. “You may share my chair.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Gottlieb replies with admirably arid courtesy, resting an elbow on Newt’s shoulder as though he’s made a down-payment on the thing. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” Newt says, and it isn’t even a lie.

“Yes?” Hermann counters, not quite skeptical but not quite not, tapping delicately on the left earpiece of the shades that Newt wears.

“Mmm hmm,” Newt replies. “Reading faux grants penned by enterprising young people, which is, y’know, how I always aspire to spend my days. Training up the new guard to engineer my own eventual obsolescence, circle-of-life style. How are those Riemann Zeros?” he counters.

“Persistent.” Hermann slides two fingers under Newt’s jaw.

Newt tilts his head in an accommodating way and Hermann cashes in years and years of lies about how “irritating” he found Newt’s guitar playing by kissing him in genuinely Gottliebian fashion, which turns out to be something like the way that test pilots get to know experimental aircraft: kind of slowly, kind of thoroughly, kind of working through every speed, kind of inviting a high-output performance failure, kind of courting the juncture where critical structures rattle apart, at which point there is the requisite bolting of bolts, soldering of circuits, and of course, of course, the screwing of screws.

“What are you thinking about?” Hermann asks.

“Screwing,” Newt says, quite truthfully.

“Charming.” Hermann puts a genuinely, physically pained torque on the word that makes Newt lift a hand and back off to prevent kissing recommencement.

Newt angles his head and considers Hermann in his signature sweater-vest and jacket one-two combo, backed by the light of a descending sun, his hair lifted by the salt wind that blows off a radioactive bay.

Newt very nearly says something along the lines of, “What the hell are you doing, dude?” but catches himself before that disaster comes out of his mouth, because there’s a right thing to do here, which is to just shut up and remedy the fact that his uber-sensitive, semi-stoic life partner is rating something like a seven point five on a zero-to-eight Pain Scale right about now. This isn’t a good series of angles for Dr. Gottlieb’s ankle, knee, hip, and back. Nope. But Newt is sensitive to the fact that sometimes a guy just wants to come home and harass the anachronistic rockstar-in-residence and if that involves sitting in a chair a la Commander Riker and doing said sitting on top of the moderately good looking intellectual rockstar in question, well, that’s fine.

Hermann seems like he’s rapidly approaching the system state of “weirded out” thanks to whatever expression is currently on Newt’s face; it’s probably pretty unparsable because of the sunglasses and it’s probably also unusual because Newt, tragically, does not have a great track record for on-the-fly, interpersonal analysis—he’s usually an idiot first and thoughtful later—but this time he wins because before Hermann gets to the point he’s decided something’s wrong with Newt, Newt just stands under the weight of two people, steadies his adorkable life partner, and says, “We have a bedroom,” in a tone that implies Hermann isn’t using the whole of his available cerebral cortex, which is, frankly, ideal Geiszlerian comportment as evidenced by the uber classy temple kiss that he gets in response to his problem solving.

Even the kids simmer quietly in respectful admiration.

Oh, you are having a good day, aren’t you, his brain says, impersonating the guy who’s currently making up for a decade of respecting Newt’s personal space by applying a bedroomwise vector to Newt’s lower back. There will never be a time when this won’t be weird—the guy in his head, even now, doesn’t quite match the guy in his bed, and the disparity between them will only increase with time as Dr. Gottlieb in the flesh gets a little less regulation about his haircut and a little more expansive in his clothing choices and his musical tastes in a slow-motion capitulation to longstanding Geiszlerian influence—but there is no question who’s gotten the better half of this colleague-in-amber vibe they’ll both be rocking until the day they die.

For sure it’s Newt.

Yes, his brain says dryly, being Newt again instead of someone else, imagine living every day with a version of you. Oh wait.

I think you’re confused, Newt informs his brain solicitously.

They pass from the living room down a dim hall, while Newt peels Dr. Gottlieb’s jacket off his shoulders and Hermann tries to kiss Newt’s neck like a cheater because that’s not a fair exchange rate for blazer removal; it kinda makes Newt want to devolve into a collection of poorly cohesive primordial ooze and glop on the floor like a biomolecular condensate of overstimulated amino acids because of a complicated list of reasons, only one of which has anything to do with chemical transmission and transduction of sensory input.

It’s just hot a little bit, the neck-kissing thing? And also kind of thoughtful in a weirdly voyeuristic way? 

Because Hermann’s never asked Newt what he liked, Hermann just knows what he likes in the same way Newt knows what Hermann likes, which makes for a weird, blazingly intimate dynamic they both pretend to think is strange but that they both secretly love, because they must, because otherwise they wouldn’t do this kind of thing so much, where by “kind of thing” he means a wordless demonstration of total simpatico, where by “wordless demonstration of total simpatico” he means a collection of nearly infinite silent actions that demonstrate a hyperacute awareness of one another’s preferences and idiosyncrasies, and where by “preferences” he means, amongst other things, the neck thing going on right now or the way Hermann’s ears are ridiculously sensitive, and by “idiosyncrasies” he means all the complicated reasons why Newt might not be game to look at his own skin and Hermann just prefers some positions to other positions for reasons of physical pain.

The kids, too, have idiosyncrasies. They think neck kissing (plus or minus neck biting) is just suuuper interesting and weird and fun and exciting because of the proximity between the major arteries of their local human and the teeth of another, less cognitively local human.

Newt also finds it a little bit cute that Hermann so clearly enjoys unbalancing him in small increments because it makes Newt feel like he’s got so much under control so much of the time, or at least Hermann seems to think that he does, which has really always been the goal. Well, a goal. One of many goals. Newt’s theory is that Hermann likes unbalancing him partially because of the novelty of a temporarily quiet version of Dr. Geiszler, partially because it highlights Hermann’s personal badass capacity for rapid action when compared with Newt’s propensity to fold like a deck of cards into nothing but a preserved inner monologue, partially because he finds Newt adorkable when Newt is flustered, and probably also because he’d spent years pretending to despise Newt’s grandstanding and showboating and general personal panache but, really, the entire time he’d loved it, loved the whole thing and had wanted to do the thing he’s doing now, which is to reach behind Newt’s snappy exterior and communicate just what he thinks of all Newt is and to get a real response in return, not just a witty, defensive piece of poised innuendo, but the thing that’s happening now, where Newt is, like, breathing in an appreciative way that befits the undone, ironic iconoclast with paradoxical visionary qualities (and, er, a streak of narcissism the width of a nautical mile), that he is now and hopefully will always be.

This propensity of Hermann’s is just a foreign and familiar variant of the exact same tendency Newt also possesses—that urge to perturb the status quo, to interrogate rare system states, to test the extreme case—but it’s harder for him to surprise Hermann than it is for Hermann to surprise him, primarily because Hermann expects Newt to be perpetually surprising, while Newt just can’t hang onto the idea of expecting the unexpected, if only because he so regularly and so reliably expects so expansively and accurately.

It’s who they are, who they’ve made themselves, what they’ll always want to be; the guys that narrow their eyes at Aristotle and throw metaphorical sticks through metaphorical air and into metaphorical water in defiance of ideologies, unsupported.

Newt defends himself from superlative supraclavicular stimulation by dragging a thumb down his drift-partner’s inguinal ligament, which frees him from sensory overdrive and also earns him a good-natured swat in return.

“This?” Newt says, “is a hallway.”

“Is it really,” Hermann replies.

Newt pulls him into the bright box of their bedroom, with its north-facing windows that show the spread of a recovering city not yet shadowed by the Wall that will block the setting sun. He performs a very gentlemanly if somewhat disorganized slow-motion tackle of the local mathematician onto their shared bed before said mathematician has the chance to do the same thing to him, but faster.

They end up in a position where Newt is mostly on top, a conformational quirk that he rapidly secures and consolidates into a hip-straddling victory that doesn’t occur to him could be labeled “missionary style” until Hermann unmistakably and quietly and sort of politely laughs at him a little bit.

“Whaaaat,” Newt says, in a way that bears zero resemblance to whining.

“You are counterintuitively endearing,” Hermann informs him. “It has never been fair.”

Newt gets that but only a little bit, in the same way Hermann both understands and doesn’t understand what Newt likes so much about the way the guy wears his metaphorical heart on his metaphorical sleeve like a weird and horrifying tricked out blood bracelet that leaves smears on all the furniture; it’s the conversation piece everyone talks about behind the guy’s back but not to his face because it takes a certain kind of terrifying badassery to just live like that, so earnest all the time and so rarely pulling your jacket cuff down over your stupid sleeve-heart; how does it even work out there anyway is what Newt would like to know; but Hermann doesn’t really see anything weird about the whole situation and the one time Newt had tried to explain it to him he’d said, “Why must everything be viscera with you, Newton, honestly,” and so Newt is pretty sure that the guy doesn’t have a perfect understanding of what Newt was trying to communicate, but that’s okay because it’s not necessarily a thing Hermann needs to get; it’s fine if only Newt gets it.

So Newt just shrugs, curls his toes beneath the back of Hermann’s calves, and removes a fingerless glove.

That’s an attention magnet if there ever was one.

He wishes he were wearing his glasses rather than sunglasses like a guy with no foresight (ha), but it’s too late now, so he has to mostly imagine the fine details of what Hermann’s face is doing. Fortunately, he’s more than capable of doing just that with scary amounts of accuracy courtesy of EPIC Rapport. Plus? Sub-par vision is only going to help him tolerate what he’s unable and unwilling to change about what he’s spent years rendering on his skin.

One day, in the relative near term, there will be a time when Newt can take off his clothes in his own variety of wholehearted passionate silence, without closing his eyes, without talking himself through ignoring that which he would like to ignore, without, one day, needing to ignore it anymore. It won’t happen all at once, and even when he can do it he doesn’t think it will be a solid skill, but one that comes and goes with the season, with the weather, with the state of his mind and the spin of his planet, with the rise and fall of the distant and invisible tide.

But he can’t do it now. Not exactly. Not in the way he would like to do it, with a little bit of a Gottliebian flair for purity of intent married to a Geiszlerian-flavored fiery conflagration but that’s okay because he can approximate with the resources he has—if he ever had any true gift, it’s that one—the one where he saved the world with a pile of garbage rather than billions and billions of dollars and a coordinated international effort of high stakes high technology. So he’ll do it in the way he’s always done everything, with his scintillating, reassuring gift for discourse that has never failed him, that will never fail him, that will be the last thing to go, the thing that sticks around even after his reflexes and survival instincts have left him alone to die.

“You think you’re so great.” Newt looks down at Hermann, who’s blurred by Newt’s eyes and dimmed by Newt’s shades, but who watches him with a patient fondness that’s carved into the angle of his head, the line of his jaw, the loose, bilateral grip of his hands on Newt’s hips.

Newt peels off his second glove. “Just showing up to grab the back of destabilizing chairs like some off-duty superhero but I am on to you, dude, okay?” He pulls his sweater over his head without displacing his sunglasses. “In order for that whole thing to go down, you had to silently enter the apartment, like a creeper—”

“I entered the apartment in the conventional manner, thank you,” Hermann replies. “You were playing your Vivaldi quite loudly.”

“That was Metallica, Dr. Gottlieb,” Newt says for no reason, unbuttoning the cuffs of his dress shirt with theatrical panache, trying not to writhe around at the press of someone’s thumb against the crest of his hip. “Metallica, played in the style of Hendrix.”

“It most certainly was not,” Hermann replies.

“Furthermore,” Newt continues, switching sleeves, raising his eyebrows, doing a little bit of hip grinding to emphasize and secure his conversational upper hand, “in order to catch my chair, you would’ve had to have been standing directly behind me for an undetermined length of time, definitely like a creeper, before I realized something was weird and accidentally unbalanced myself.”

“It was lamentably clear that there was no way to alert you to my presence without precipitating a catastrophic outcome.” Hermann catches Newt’s hand.

Newt’s pretty sure he understands the wordless question inherent to the finger-trapping, but he’s also pretty sure he knows the answer, so he just drags Hermann’s hand to his mouth and kisses the man’s knuckles.

That, apparently, is the right thing to do because Hermann lets him go, and Newt starts unbuttoning his shirt.

Newt’s uber-sensitive life partner neither interferes nor comments; he’s stayed clear of anything even remotely approaching tearing Newt’s clothes off after that first night when they’d tried and failed to do the thing they’re trying to do now.

Dr. Gottlieb has not so much as touched a Geiszler-owned button for months. He doesn’t comment; he doesn’t complain; he doesn’t press or inquire; in short he does nothing, leaving Newt forever and fully in charge of his own state of undress.

Newt finds this extreme respect vibe that Hermann has consistently been rocking both reassuring and touching and insulting in confusing simultaneity.

Newt is robust enough to tolerate pretty much anything, really, it turns out.

That’s a lie, his brain throws two cents into the collective cognitive pool that no one wants or needs.

“Meh.” Newt shuts his eyes and begins to unbutton his shirt. “I enjoy it when your bizarre collection of hyped-up reflexes saves me from impacting a hard surface. You’re like a really unimpressive variant of a Marvel superhero right down to the emo affect and the cane, while I’m a really uninspired version of a Marvel villain right down to the semi-closeted hubris and the notable hair.”

“I love you,” Hermann says, like the twist of a plot.

“Mmm.” Newt angles his head and continues with his eyes-shut unbuttoning, trying not to ruin his nonchalant delivery by smiling. “Makes a killer origin story.”

“We already have an origin story, you cad,” Hermann murmurs. Gently, he slides Newt’s sunglasses off his face.

Newt feels Hermann shift beneath him, hears the click of plastic against the nightstand. He doesn’t open his eyes. Instead he says, “Well that’s the thing about origin stories. You have to die to make an accurate demarcation regarding origin versus main narrative.”

“I’ll be certain to check in with you at that point so as to cement my conceptual victory,” Hermann replies dryly.

Newt pulls his shirt off and throws it into the lateral dark. “It’s a date,” he says. “And probably? The most morbid date in the history of all dates; you’re so weird, Dr. Gottlieb, genuinely, authentically bizarre. God. Take off your clothes, will you please? I mean really.” Newt makes an uncoordinated and blind attempt to pull Hermann’s sweater vest over his head, which goes about as well as one might expect.

Newt gets dethroned for that maneuver, laterally and not totally unexpectedly or undeservedly pitched sideways onto the bed in a controlled positional flip, in a prototypical display of a delightfully weird example of a Gottliebian paradoxical trait. The guy is a classical-music-loving adrenaline junkie; he places a premium on personal asceticism but has, inexplicably and at least once, fallen for a slovenly, anti-authoritarian neohipster; he’d like to transcend the physical but is deeply unsettled by the idea of self-modification, as though the form he’s dying to escape has some inviolable quality Newt can only guess at; he’s got an unparalleled gift for pure abstraction coupled with the motor skills to have been a terrifying Jaeger pilot and it’s not just Newt who thinks so, because weeks and weeks ago he’d said to Mako, “Is it just me, or is Hermann like—kind of confusingly good at whole sets of things that you wouldn’t think he would be good at?” and Mako had just said, “Newt,” all disappointed kid sister style, and then Newt had said, “What?” and Mako had said, “He was suited best to what he couldn’t have,” and Newt had been a little taken aback and had just said, “Ah,” and Mako had finished with, “And to what you would not want for him,” and Newt had then said, “God, Maks,” and hadn’t asked any follow up questions because it was still too soon for retrospective analysis to really be retrospective; it would still feel too much like the twist of a joint for both of them, even safe as they were, holding their drinks and being the siblings they’d decided to call themselves, out of the sight of their ghost-filled sea.

In summary, yes, unlocking the infinite personal eccentricities of the most Significant Other Newt has ever had sounds like a great life-long hobby to him.

Speaking of which, nothing’s currently happening other than Newt just lying on their bed, so he cracks an eyelid to survey his new relative position.

He’s just in time to see Hermann divesting himself of his own shirt in an adorkably rapid and silent fashion, which is a win, and—

“No,” Hermann says, snapping his gaze to meet Newt’s in a blazing example of EPIC Rapport.

Newt shuts his offending eyelid. “Cruel roommate is cruel,” he annotates, commencing an eyes-shut attempt at a technical decortication of his fashionably tight jeans.

Hermann makes a noise of put-upon aggravation in the style of Ye Olde Gottliebian Tradition.  “I am not your roommate.”

“Well, technically, you are.” Newt tosses his jeans in what he hopes is Hermann’s direction. “You’re just not only my roommate.”

Hermann does not say anything and Newt is pretty sure this is because he is indulging himself in a Category Five eye roll while (ideally) removing his pants—

Or not, because Hermann slides into place atop of him, palm to hip, palm to chest, rapid and warm and surprising.

Newt’s eyes snap open.

Hermann is so close he’s only marginally blurred to glassesless Newt. The guy is looking at him in a way that’s sort of gentle but also sort of like one looks at a pilot experiment yielding up new data, which is, wow, a little bit hot and also a little bit insulting, but insulting in the kind of way where Newt just hopes it keeps happening for years. For years and years and years. For the rest of his life.

  

“You are so predictable.” Hermann kisses the lateral border of Newt’s eyebrow. “At times I find it acutely painful.”

“There are times I find you acutely painful how about,” Newt says, not shutting his eyes on principle and not looking down at the peripherally colorful spread of his own chest. “Also? Really predictable.  Super boring. I’m the unpredictable one, Hermann. Everyone knows that. Literally everyone.”

“Oh certainly,” Hermann agrees with insulting rapidity, doing a whole friction, drag, and finger-catch thing as Newt starts being a little bit handsy, as it were.

“I have self control,” Newt continues, kind of breathily, kind of like a guy who actually does not have quite as much self control as he is professing to have. “You like to think that I don’t but I do.”

“Yes,” Hermann says, starting to get exasperated. Well, that or sexually frustrated—it could go either way really. “I don’t like watching you try quite so hard, Newton.”

 

That’s fair, Newt’s brain decides.

“Don’t you though?” Newt asks in his most lascivious whisper, coming up onto both elbows as Hermann shifts back. “You don’t at all enjoy watching Dr. Newton Geiszler of the manual dexterity and the blazing mental clarity reacquire his old-school virtuosity and global curiosity?”

Newt gets a stiff shove for that one as Hermann vacates the bed, “And stay there,” Hermann adds, punctuating his manhandling with words for once.

“You love it.” Newt mostly reshuts his eyes, but leaves his left eyelid cracked for purposes of watching his colleague turned roommate turned life partner get out of bed to, presumably, return Newt’s shirt to him, because Newt has now failed, again, some kind of Delicate Flower Test and so now he is fated to return to his high energy state of rarely resolved sexual tension because his overly solicitous life partner is of the opinion that—

Or?

Hmm, maybe that’s not what’s happening, because even though his vision is hopelessly blurred it doesn’t seem like—

His own tie hits him in the face.

He doesn’t need EPIC Rapport to get Hermann’s drift, so to speak.

Ha.

“Dear diary,” Newt says, with as much breathy salacity as he can muster, “today I learned Dr. Gottlieb has been harboring a secret affection for my much maligned historical neckwear—”

“Newton, you’re not helping,” Hermann says, frustrated and flustered.

Newt laughs and winds his tie over his eyes. Between the strips of skinny material he glances one more time at Hermann, who’s blushing in spectacular style. Then he shuts his eyes and keeps them shut because he doesn’t want to ruin the killer trend he’s been riding all through the morning he spent reading the practice grants and all through the afternoon he spent with his guitar. He wants to hang onto sets of hours where what’s beyond the Wall seems like unhaunted quantum ruins, where the kids in his head settle into a chorus that’s almost in his corner, where the neural pathways that don’t belong to him are subsumed, as they should be, by what’s actually happening to Newt in the here and the now.

Is all of this strange and atypical and bizarre?

Yes. Yes it is; but it’s also his life and so, sure, he’ll blindfold himself in order to reclaim the parts of the human experience that are his, just by virtue of being a human, which, to be clear, is what he’s always been, what he is, and what he’ll forever remain.

“Okay okay okay. It’s on. Oh my god this is so weird. I love it.”

“You were the one who suggested it,” Hermann says defensively, as Newt tests the knot at his temple. “At least we found a use for that ridiculous tie.”

“Hey,” Newt says, actually blind this time, as Hermann, with a gradualness that hits as extremely polite, slides back into place on top of him. “The tie is great. The tie is fine. The tie’s identity has been expanded, not, like, entirely redefined.” Unable to cheat his way free of his self-imposed darkness, Newt reaches cautiously into empty space.

Hermann catches his hand and kisses Newt’s fingertips. “If you insist.”

And so it turns out that there are some days where Newt’s life takes on the shape of something long and full and ideal, overrun with detail and decorated with repair work that comes, over time, to look ornamental in the best traditions of his complicated little species on his pretty ocean planet with its nice yellow star and its lonely local neighborhood and its quantum mechanical back door that will always be there, under the water, in the back of his mind.