[Newt's glasses go flying as some idiot shoves him to the floor of the Kaiju shelter. His head smacks concrete and the room goes blurry and he can't tell if it's because of his missing glasses or possible head trauma. Great. Thanks, guy, Newt definitely need a concussion to deal with right now.
Something massive thuds against the ceiling, showering dirt and debris over the crowd as they scatter to the walls of the shelter. Otachi. Newt won't learn her name until after the fact. Category IV, the second Kaiju ever to have wings and the first to actually achieve flight, standing at just over 63 meters tall and weighing 2,690 tons, equipped with an acid sac in her throat which allows her to spit toxic liquid hundreds of feet away... He'll spend the night reading up on her, absorbing all of her specs, though some of it he knows in the moment. From the Drift. He saw her birth just hours before she swam through the Breach and made landfall in Hong Kong, looking for him.
He hasn't see her though, not yet. For now, he's scrambling blinding for his glasses. His head hurts, and so does his wrist from when that jerk shoved him into a parked car... He's filthy and exhausted and his head is still all messed up from neural overload. There was no time to stop by the medical bay before heading out to find Hannibal Chau even though he's still recovering from a seizure. Ugh.
"This is the worst..." He mutters it under his breath as he locates his glasses and—there's another thud topside, this time strong enough to flicker the lights. Newt starts, his glasses forgotten again as he listens.
It's quiet for a long, long moment, and then it's not, the bricks overhead giving way as Otachi crashes her full weight into the street above. The shelter roof caves in and there she is, a blur of hard carapace and shimmering blue. He's on his knees in front of her because he can't bring himself to move, save for a trmbling hand finally returning his glasses to his face. They don't help much—they're cracked and splattered with rainwater—but he can see her properly now, two thick claws stabbing into the shelter, scratching straight through concrete as she digs for him.
And then she pulls away. Still shaking, he manages to stand, though he's still too scared to retreat into the crowd. What's the point? She'll find him. They've got something of a connection now, having been inside each other's heads.
Jaeger pilots call it ghost Drifting. The neural bridge doesn't always collapse the moment the Drift is disengaged. Sometimes, somewhat rarely, there's a link left over. Newt can feel something beyond himself lurking out on the streets of Hong Kong, beyond the sheets of rain and the crumpled streetlight swaying over the hole she's left in the ground. He edges forward an inch or two to peer out of the hole.
Ah, there she is.
Otachi rams her snout into the shelter, but though she's ripped away a good portion of the ceiling, she's too big to fit. She reels back, howling and stomping in a tantrum, and then dives in again, this time extending her tongue into the opening she's made.
Newt can see himself, somehow. His mind is split between himself and her, her and all the Kaiju, the Precursors, the whole hivemind that he has forced his way into. If he had known what this would come to, he would've reconsidered his plan to Drift with Mutavore's brain. He can see himself frozen as Otachi's flicking tongue reaches for him, its bioluminescence nodules lit up like a carnival. It's oddly inviting, the effect they have. If his life weren't likely about to end, he would probably find the whole display rather calming.
Should he give himself up? It's possible, maybe even likely, that Otachi isn't planning to kill him. Maybe she'll just capture him, bring him back to the Precursors somehow. After all, he is the only human who's ever gotten close to them. He's valuable. A worthy specimen, if nothing else. It wouldn't be an ideal scenario, but it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to him in this moment, either.
Besides, giving himself up would be the noble thing to do. It would likely spare everyone in this shelter, at the very least. Otachi could give up entirely, and with the second Kaiju already dispatched by Gipsy Danger—another thing he learned via ghost Drift—he could save what's left of Hong Kong. That would be a worth sacrifice, wouldn't it? People would remember him as a hero.
He takes a tentative step forward as Otachi pulls back to hunch over her mark. She knows he's here, but she can't quite get to him. That, or she's waiting.
Yeah. Giving himself up is the right thing to do. He doesn't want to die, god does he not want to die, but...
A set of heavy footfalls draws her attention away from Newt, and then a searchlight cuts through the rain. Otachi swivels her head and through her eyes, Newt can see a Jaeger approaching, wielding an oil tanker like a baseball bat.
He sucks in a breath, and then starts for the exit she's left for him. He can reckon with his brush with death tomorrow, after he saves the fucking world.]
Edited 2018-11-29 08:59 (UTC)
2. Newt Drifing with a) Mutavore's brain, or b) Baby Otachi and Hermann
[It doesn't hurt as bad as he thought it would. His coworkers at the Shatterdome had psyched him out, citing how he'd moaned for days over accidentally slicing his finger open with a scalpel in their first week in Tokyo, how before that he couldn't handle the chill of an Alaskan spring. Someone stabbing a needle into his skin on repeat for hours would surely kill him. They suggested he start with a smaller, simpler design. Maybe something that isn't a Kaiju, too.
He'd told them all to go to hell and insisted he'd be fine, and look at that, he is. It hurts, yes, but that's part of the appeal. He wants everyone to stop treating him like some brittle nerd. He's more than glasses and a lab coat. He can handle the pain.
The most difficult part is actually sitting still. He alternates chatting with the artist—she was delighted to learn that he speaks Japanese—chatting with her about techniques and tools, and just watching her work in fascinated silence. Even for him, it's difficult to carry a conversation for five hours straight.
Hundun's outline starts to take shape on his forearm, and then Reckoner hugging his bicep, and she manages to start on the colors before they're done. Swirls of yellow and red fill in the blank spaces between aliens, overtaking his freckles and pale skin. Working in the lab with his arm all wrapped up is going to be annoying, but it'll be worth it, just like the hours of fighting the urge to fidget and the sharp burning in his skin have been worth it. He tells her about his plans for his other arm and then maybe his back, he's not sure, while she scrolls through a calendar to schedule his next session.
"Kaiceph would look good up here," he says, pointing at his left shoulder. "Then, I don't know... Maybe Onibaba. He was new, you know? We'd never seen anything like him when he breached. Still haven't since. I'd kill to get my hands on, like, even a junk specimen of his exoskeleton."
She glances up at him over the computer, and then at her next appointment waiting in the lobby. His eyes follow, though he's not sure what she's looking at.
"Onibaba attacked here," she whispers.
A small flare of annoyance lights up in his chest. "Yeah, I know. I study the things." Had he not made that clear? Maybe his Japanese isn't as good as he thought it was. "I'm K-Science at the Shatterdome?"
She just shrugs, swiveling the screen so he can pick a timeslot. Her lips are pursed and he can't tell if she's offended or concentrating.
"I could just wait for something cooler to breach, too." There, a compromise.
She snorts. "I'm sure you won't be waiting long."]
Edited 2018-11-28 15:31 (UTC)
5. Newt building a Pons system out of garbage and then stealing Hermann's lunch out of the fridge
[Newt isn't sure what he'd been expecting. It's 2017 and he's 27 and he's less than a year into his run with PPDC, recently assigned to the Tokyo Shatterdome. He's out on the flight deck, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket, watching Hermann hobble through the heavy spring rain and into a helicopter. They haven't said goodbye. They haven't spoken since Hermann's arrival four days ago.
The memory folds in on itself, a memory of thinking about other memories: Newt sneaking out of the lab to meet Hermann and his father at the helipad, against the Marshal's orders; waiting with his hand outstretched as Hermann fumbled with the cane he didn't mention in his emails; touring the lab, Hermann's nose wrinkling in poorly-contained disgust at the Kaiju viscera, a sprawling mess Newt managed to make in just a few short months; Newt studying the lines of Hermann's three-piece suit from across the mess hall table, Hermann's shirt buttoned up to his Adam's apple, the same bad haircut featuring in the PPDC badge clipped to his breast pocket.
Hermann had greeted him with a forced, tight-lipped smile, his jaw jutting forward, spine straight despite his leg. He sounds just like he writes, Newt thought when Hermann issued a curt "pleasure to finally meet you, Dr. Geiszler." Newt had seen pictures of him before, had watched videos of his presentations on Mark-1 Jaeger code. Maybe it was his fault for assuming Hermann had just been putting on a professional air. The thought crossed his mind in the moment, even as he continued the assumption given that Hermann's father, the founder of the Jaeger program, stood within arm's reach. He's keeping up appearances. He'll soften once they're alone in the lab.
Alone in the lab, Hermann stiffened, the color draining from his face as the heavy stench of ammonia met him at the door. Newt's unorthodox methods aside, there's nothing neat about working with Kaiju remains. That one was on Hermann. He should've known better. A pristine lab is a sign of staticity, stagnation, and why would Hermann understand that? His science is all numbers and flashy technology. Newt built his brand of biology from the ground up. He built it with his hands, with his body, so of course he would have grime under his fingernails and stains on his shirt. Hermann should've known better.
Hermann expected to find something clean and polite and boring when he stepped off that helicopter, and the fight was his fault. He sounds just like he writes, but so much meaner, his bizarre accent clipping words while his chin tips upwards. His writing wasn't accompanied by the sour angularity of his face. He scoffs constantly, drilling Newt about numbers and facts and, my god, Newton, you might have informed me that you were a walking biohazard, what manner of toxic waste had your hand been doused in when I shook it? They had argued over email before, but this was different. In writing, they stuck to hard science. They backed their theories with copious citations and diagrams, and Newt had time to privately seethe over Hermann's latest idiotic suggestion before drafting a calmer, rational response, his insults flung at Hermann's research instead of at Hermann himself. Computer screens tempered them, played mediator, hid the disgust twisting in Hermann's lips at the half-colored Hundun tattoo on Newt's forearm.
Truth be told, Newt can't even remember what the fight was about, not specifically. It started with something related to his research methods and the state of his lab and wasting PPDC funding, against which Newt argued by pointing out that at least he had a lab, unlike Hermann who spent his time chasing his father's shadow around the globe. He remembers that line and only that line, the one thing he regrets saying during their meeting. He remembers the way Hermann reeled back sputtering because they weren't arguing about the science anymore—or, rather, they had never been arguing about the science, but had been pretending in order to prevent their friendship from buckling under the weight of too much too soon. Newt, of course, was the one to break that illusion, but it was a stupid illusion in the first place. It's not his fault that Hermann couldn't handle it.
Newt skipped dinner with the Marshal and both Dr. Gottliebs, and instead called his dad, who mercifully chose not to acknowledge the tears in his voice. After Hermann left Japan, Newt's dad asked about him just once more, and must've thought better of bringing him up again. No, Dad, why the hell would I have talked to him? Uncle Illia stopped asking about him too and instead spent his weekly phonecall telling the story of the aunt Newt almost had, Newt's end of the call muted as he tore through a Kaiju's left ventricle and tried not to listen.
Standing on the flight deck watching the helicopter disappear into the gray sheets of rain, Newt drafts an email in his head. Hermann's father was due to return in six months to check in on the new Shatterdome's progress. Maybe we could try again? Start over? Pretend this never happened? I'm so—
Trespasser, the first Kaiju, breached in August of 2013. It leveled San Francisco before they brought it down with three nukes in Oakland, rendering the city uninhabitable. Humanity wrote this off as a fluke, a single tragedy now in the past, a blow to the knees that sent the world sprawling but didn't do enough permanent damage to prevent recovery. We can come back from this.
Six months later, Hundun destroyed Manila, and then Kaiceph hit land in Mexico, and then Scissure... Newt can name them all in order. He knows their precise statistics, the dates of their breaches, the cities they destroyed, kill counts, categories determined by relative danger rating. He knows what kind of message it sends to start tattooing them on himself, but then, he knows what kind of message it sends that he's hellbent on studying them. He dresses it up for PPDC so they'll continue his funding, arguing for Know Thy Enemy and framing his research around finding weaknesses upon which the Jaeger pilots stake their heroism. Sure, he has a vested interest in preventing the apocalypse, but the Kaiju are something magnificent. Something beyond anything he's ever known. They're terrible things, but they leave him in awe of what is possible in this universe.
A thing can be flawed and monstrous and still worth loving. The Kaiju aren't malicious, just circumstantially in opposition to humanity. He's explained this to Hermann in countless emails, and yes, they argue every time it comes up, but those arguments had been because their opinions differed, not because of a lack of understanding. Newt could always count on Hermann to understand him. Hermann was the only one who could.
Newt ducks back into the Shatterdome elevator, his glasses speckled with rainwater. If he had known in this moment that a rift was forming over this single stupid misstep, a vast expanse of three years before they would speak again, and five years after that before they would even brush fingertips against something akin to mutual understanding, Newt would have sent the email. He could stand to swallow some pride and make first contact again in the aftermath.
But in 2017, he is 27 and he is less than a year into his run with PPDC, and the apocalypse is looming but under control, and three new Shatterdomes just began operation and there's talk of another in Sydney, and Hermann will call him, he's sure. He'll call from the Pitcairn Islands or Anchorage or Hong Kong, wherever he said he was going next, Newt can't remember. He'll apologize, and Newt will too, and Newt will tell him the three-piece suit look is something he could get used to, though he's going to need to experiment with some new hairstyles if this thing is going to work. The apocalypse is looming but under control, and surely it's not going to stay as bad as it feels now. He presses his shoulders against the cold metal of the elevator and lets it carry him back into his mess of blue blood and torn up organs.]
Edited 2018-11-28 06:08 (UTC)
7. Newt as a kid seeing his mom in person for the first time
[Newt is small for a fourteen-year-old, a thin little thing trying his best to look cool in a leather jacket despite the summer heat. He's got the Sex Pistols blaring in his ears, his headphones lopsided as they fight the stems of his too-big glasses, and the U-Bahn platform is busy. He leans against a graffiti-smattered pillar to stay out of the way, thankful for the occasional gust of a yellow train blowing by. These tunnels get stuffy.
Finally, his connection rolls up. He pushes off the pillar with one shoulder and scans the doors, deciding which car will give him the best chance of grabbing a seat, but then his eyes catch. He's not sure why at first—there's something familiar about that tumble of brown hair gliding through the crowd, though he can't place it, and then she turns.
He's seen pictures of Monica Schwartz on the internet, on commercials and posters around town announcing her return to Berlin after a year of global tours. She's an opera singer, something they call a coloratura soprano. Totally not his thing. He's never heard her voice. He's never seen her in person before. Not that he can remember, anyway. Dad says she stayed for a few days after Newt was born, just to make sure he was healthy, and then she left again, back to her husband and her career. Newt's never been sure how she was able to have a baby with another man and then flit back to her life as if nothing had changed, but she did, somehow. He thinks he's probably inherited a similar quality of pulling off the unusual.
She stops on the platform to crane her neck over the masses and he yanks his headphones down to his neck like she might... Well, he's not sure what he's expecting. She's too far down the tunnel for him to hear her anyway, unless she decided to give an impromptu performance. Her eyes search the crowd, and he wants to believe she's looking for him.
She's not, though. Of course. Her eyes settle on him for the briefest moment, just long enough for his breath to hitch, and then she moves on. Why would she recognize him? He only recognizes her because she's famous enough to Google. Dad doesn't keep pictures in the house. He says there's no point. She's not part of their life anymore.
The train doors shut and Newt will have to wait for the next one. That's fine. Maybe he should go talk to her, claim to be a fan just to see what she's like close up. No one else on the platform seems to recognize her, save for the woman darting up to slide a hand through her arm. Monica smiles, having found who she was looking for, and they head for the stairs together. Newt shifts his weight. She probably has his eyes since he doesn't have his dad's, but he wasn't close enough to see.
He drops himself against the pillar again. He's moving to the United States soon. Massachusetts, because he likes MIT's biomedical engineering program better than Stanford's or Cornell's. She doesn't tour in the States very often, and even if she did, it's a much bigger country than Germany. The chances of their paths crossing again are slim.
But maybe in a few years, when he's visiting Dad and Uncle Illia for the holidays or running his own laboratory in some other part of the world, he'll buy a ticket to one of her shows just so he can look bored in the audience. He'll let all the operatic wailing sour his mood and he'll sit with his arms folded during the standing ovation. She'll see him and think he looks familiar, but won't be able to place his face. Then he'll pay off an usher to let him backstage, into her dressing room, where he'll introduce himself as Dr. Geiszler and, oh, yes, that Dr. Geiszler, the one who pioneered this groundbreaking bioengineering such-and-such, and Dr. Geiszler is fine, actually, because Dad was the one who named me Newton.
Or maybe, he thinks as another train rolls up, maybe he won't bother. It's not like she ever went through that kind of trouble for him.]
Edited 2018-11-28 17:57 (UTC)
8. Newt watching the news during the first Kaiju attack
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
completelycrazy) wrote2018-11-26 09:33 am
1. Newt meets Otachi face-to-face
Something massive thuds against the ceiling, showering dirt and debris over the crowd as they scatter to the walls of the shelter. Otachi. Newt won't learn her name until after the fact. Category IV, the second Kaiju ever to have wings and the first to actually achieve flight, standing at just over 63 meters tall and weighing 2,690 tons, equipped with an acid sac in her throat which allows her to spit toxic liquid hundreds of feet away... He'll spend the night reading up on her, absorbing all of her specs, though some of it he knows in the moment. From the Drift. He saw her birth just hours before she swam through the Breach and made landfall in Hong Kong, looking for him.
He hasn't see her though, not yet. For now, he's scrambling blinding for his glasses. His head hurts, and so does his wrist from when that jerk shoved him into a parked car... He's filthy and exhausted and his head is still all messed up from neural overload. There was no time to stop by the medical bay before heading out to find Hannibal Chau even though he's still recovering from a seizure. Ugh.
"This is the worst..." He mutters it under his breath as he locates his glasses and—there's another thud topside, this time strong enough to flicker the lights. Newt starts, his glasses forgotten again as he listens.
It's quiet for a long, long moment, and then it's not, the bricks overhead giving way as Otachi crashes her full weight into the street above. The shelter roof caves in and there she is, a blur of hard carapace and shimmering blue. He's on his knees in front of her because he can't bring himself to move, save for a trmbling hand finally returning his glasses to his face. They don't help much—they're cracked and splattered with rainwater—but he can see her properly now, two thick claws stabbing into the shelter, scratching straight through concrete as she digs for him.
And then she pulls away. Still shaking, he manages to stand, though he's still too scared to retreat into the crowd. What's the point? She'll find him. They've got something of a connection now, having been inside each other's heads.
Jaeger pilots call it ghost Drifting. The neural bridge doesn't always collapse the moment the Drift is disengaged. Sometimes, somewhat rarely, there's a link left over. Newt can feel something beyond himself lurking out on the streets of Hong Kong, beyond the sheets of rain and the crumpled streetlight swaying over the hole she's left in the ground. He edges forward an inch or two to peer out of the hole.
Ah, there she is.
Otachi rams her snout into the shelter, but though she's ripped away a good portion of the ceiling, she's too big to fit. She reels back, howling and stomping in a tantrum, and then dives in again, this time extending her tongue into the opening she's made.
Newt can see himself, somehow. His mind is split between himself and her, her and all the Kaiju, the Precursors, the whole hivemind that he has forced his way into. If he had known what this would come to, he would've reconsidered his plan to Drift with Mutavore's brain. He can see himself frozen as Otachi's flicking tongue reaches for him, its bioluminescence nodules lit up like a carnival. It's oddly inviting, the effect they have. If his life weren't likely about to end, he would probably find the whole display rather calming.
Should he give himself up? It's possible, maybe even likely, that Otachi isn't planning to kill him. Maybe she'll just capture him, bring him back to the Precursors somehow. After all, he is the only human who's ever gotten close to them. He's valuable. A worthy specimen, if nothing else. It wouldn't be an ideal scenario, but it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to him in this moment, either.
Besides, giving himself up would be the noble thing to do. It would likely spare everyone in this shelter, at the very least. Otachi could give up entirely, and with the second Kaiju already dispatched by Gipsy Danger—another thing he learned via ghost Drift—he could save what's left of Hong Kong. That would be a worth sacrifice, wouldn't it? People would remember him as a hero.
He takes a tentative step forward as Otachi pulls back to hunch over her mark. She knows he's here, but she can't quite get to him. That, or she's waiting.
Yeah. Giving himself up is the right thing to do. He doesn't want to die, god does he not want to die, but...
A set of heavy footfalls draws her attention away from Newt, and then a searchlight cuts through the rain. Otachi swivels her head and through her eyes, Newt can see a Jaeger approaching, wielding an oil tanker like a baseball bat.
He sucks in a breath, and then starts for the exit she's left for him. He can reckon with his brush with death tomorrow, after he saves the fucking world.]
2. Newt Drifing with a) Mutavore's brain, or b) Baby Otachi and Hermann
3. Newt as a kid fishing with his uncle
4. Newt getting his first tattoo
He'd told them all to go to hell and insisted he'd be fine, and look at that, he is. It hurts, yes, but that's part of the appeal. He wants everyone to stop treating him like some brittle nerd. He's more than glasses and a lab coat. He can handle the pain.
The most difficult part is actually sitting still. He alternates chatting with the artist—she was delighted to learn that he speaks Japanese—chatting with her about techniques and tools, and just watching her work in fascinated silence. Even for him, it's difficult to carry a conversation for five hours straight.
Hundun's outline starts to take shape on his forearm, and then Reckoner hugging his bicep, and she manages to start on the colors before they're done. Swirls of yellow and red fill in the blank spaces between aliens, overtaking his freckles and pale skin. Working in the lab with his arm all wrapped up is going to be annoying, but it'll be worth it, just like the hours of fighting the urge to fidget and the sharp burning in his skin have been worth it. He tells her about his plans for his other arm and then maybe his back, he's not sure, while she scrolls through a calendar to schedule his next session.
"Kaiceph would look good up here," he says, pointing at his left shoulder. "Then, I don't know... Maybe Onibaba. He was new, you know? We'd never seen anything like him when he breached. Still haven't since. I'd kill to get my hands on, like, even a junk specimen of his exoskeleton."
She glances up at him over the computer, and then at her next appointment waiting in the lobby. His eyes follow, though he's not sure what she's looking at.
"Onibaba attacked here," she whispers.
A small flare of annoyance lights up in his chest. "Yeah, I know. I study the things." Had he not made that clear? Maybe his Japanese isn't as good as he thought it was. "I'm K-Science at the Shatterdome?"
She just shrugs, swiveling the screen so he can pick a timeslot. Her lips are pursed and he can't tell if she's offended or concentrating.
"I could just wait for something cooler to breach, too." There, a compromise.
She snorts. "I'm sure you won't be waiting long."]
5. Newt building a Pons system out of garbage and then stealing Hermann's lunch out of the fridge
6. Newt and Hermann meeting for the first time
The memory folds in on itself, a memory of thinking about other memories: Newt sneaking out of the lab to meet Hermann and his father at the helipad, against the Marshal's orders; waiting with his hand outstretched as Hermann fumbled with the cane he didn't mention in his emails; touring the lab, Hermann's nose wrinkling in poorly-contained disgust at the Kaiju viscera, a sprawling mess Newt managed to make in just a few short months; Newt studying the lines of Hermann's three-piece suit from across the mess hall table, Hermann's shirt buttoned up to his Adam's apple, the same bad haircut featuring in the PPDC badge clipped to his breast pocket.
Hermann had greeted him with a forced, tight-lipped smile, his jaw jutting forward, spine straight despite his leg. He sounds just like he writes, Newt thought when Hermann issued a curt "pleasure to finally meet you, Dr. Geiszler." Newt had seen pictures of him before, had watched videos of his presentations on Mark-1 Jaeger code. Maybe it was his fault for assuming Hermann had just been putting on a professional air. The thought crossed his mind in the moment, even as he continued the assumption given that Hermann's father, the founder of the Jaeger program, stood within arm's reach. He's keeping up appearances. He'll soften once they're alone in the lab.
Alone in the lab, Hermann stiffened, the color draining from his face as the heavy stench of ammonia met him at the door. Newt's unorthodox methods aside, there's nothing neat about working with Kaiju remains. That one was on Hermann. He should've known better. A pristine lab is a sign of staticity, stagnation, and why would Hermann understand that? His science is all numbers and flashy technology. Newt built his brand of biology from the ground up. He built it with his hands, with his body, so of course he would have grime under his fingernails and stains on his shirt. Hermann should've known better.
Hermann expected to find something clean and polite and boring when he stepped off that helicopter, and the fight was his fault. He sounds just like he writes, but so much meaner, his bizarre accent clipping words while his chin tips upwards. His writing wasn't accompanied by the sour angularity of his face. He scoffs constantly, drilling Newt about numbers and facts and, my god, Newton, you might have informed me that you were a walking biohazard, what manner of toxic waste had your hand been doused in when I shook it? They had argued over email before, but this was different. In writing, they stuck to hard science. They backed their theories with copious citations and diagrams, and Newt had time to privately seethe over Hermann's latest idiotic suggestion before drafting a calmer, rational response, his insults flung at Hermann's research instead of at Hermann himself. Computer screens tempered them, played mediator, hid the disgust twisting in Hermann's lips at the half-colored Hundun tattoo on Newt's forearm.
Truth be told, Newt can't even remember what the fight was about, not specifically. It started with something related to his research methods and the state of his lab and wasting PPDC funding, against which Newt argued by pointing out that at least he had a lab, unlike Hermann who spent his time chasing his father's shadow around the globe. He remembers that line and only that line, the one thing he regrets saying during their meeting. He remembers the way Hermann reeled back sputtering because they weren't arguing about the science anymore—or, rather, they had never been arguing about the science, but had been pretending in order to prevent their friendship from buckling under the weight of too much too soon. Newt, of course, was the one to break that illusion, but it was a stupid illusion in the first place. It's not his fault that Hermann couldn't handle it.
Newt skipped dinner with the Marshal and both Dr. Gottliebs, and instead called his dad, who mercifully chose not to acknowledge the tears in his voice. After Hermann left Japan, Newt's dad asked about him just once more, and must've thought better of bringing him up again. No, Dad, why the hell would I have talked to him? Uncle Illia stopped asking about him too and instead spent his weekly phonecall telling the story of the aunt Newt almost had, Newt's end of the call muted as he tore through a Kaiju's left ventricle and tried not to listen.
Standing on the flight deck watching the helicopter disappear into the gray sheets of rain, Newt drafts an email in his head. Hermann's father was due to return in six months to check in on the new Shatterdome's progress. Maybe we could try again? Start over? Pretend this never happened? I'm so—
Trespasser, the first Kaiju, breached in August of 2013. It leveled San Francisco before they brought it down with three nukes in Oakland, rendering the city uninhabitable. Humanity wrote this off as a fluke, a single tragedy now in the past, a blow to the knees that sent the world sprawling but didn't do enough permanent damage to prevent recovery. We can come back from this.
Six months later, Hundun destroyed Manila, and then Kaiceph hit land in Mexico, and then Scissure... Newt can name them all in order. He knows their precise statistics, the dates of their breaches, the cities they destroyed, kill counts, categories determined by relative danger rating. He knows what kind of message it sends to start tattooing them on himself, but then, he knows what kind of message it sends that he's hellbent on studying them. He dresses it up for PPDC so they'll continue his funding, arguing for Know Thy Enemy and framing his research around finding weaknesses upon which the Jaeger pilots stake their heroism. Sure, he has a vested interest in preventing the apocalypse, but the Kaiju are something magnificent. Something beyond anything he's ever known. They're terrible things, but they leave him in awe of what is possible in this universe.
A thing can be flawed and monstrous and still worth loving. The Kaiju aren't malicious, just circumstantially in opposition to humanity. He's explained this to Hermann in countless emails, and yes, they argue every time it comes up, but those arguments had been because their opinions differed, not because of a lack of understanding. Newt could always count on Hermann to understand him. Hermann was the only one who could.
Newt ducks back into the Shatterdome elevator, his glasses speckled with rainwater. If he had known in this moment that a rift was forming over this single stupid misstep, a vast expanse of three years before they would speak again, and five years after that before they would even brush fingertips against something akin to mutual understanding, Newt would have sent the email. He could stand to swallow some pride and make first contact again in the aftermath.
But in 2017, he is 27 and he is less than a year into his run with PPDC, and the apocalypse is looming but under control, and three new Shatterdomes just began operation and there's talk of another in Sydney, and Hermann will call him, he's sure. He'll call from the Pitcairn Islands or Anchorage or Hong Kong, wherever he said he was going next, Newt can't remember. He'll apologize, and Newt will too, and Newt will tell him the three-piece suit look is something he could get used to, though he's going to need to experiment with some new hairstyles if this thing is going to work. The apocalypse is looming but under control, and surely it's not going to stay as bad as it feels now. He presses his shoulders against the cold metal of the elevator and lets it carry him back into his mess of blue blood and torn up organs.]
7. Newt as a kid seeing his mom in person for the first time
Finally, his connection rolls up. He pushes off the pillar with one shoulder and scans the doors, deciding which car will give him the best chance of grabbing a seat, but then his eyes catch. He's not sure why at first—there's something familiar about that tumble of brown hair gliding through the crowd, though he can't place it, and then she turns.
He's seen pictures of Monica Schwartz on the internet, on commercials and posters around town announcing her return to Berlin after a year of global tours. She's an opera singer, something they call a coloratura soprano. Totally not his thing. He's never heard her voice. He's never seen her in person before. Not that he can remember, anyway. Dad says she stayed for a few days after Newt was born, just to make sure he was healthy, and then she left again, back to her husband and her career. Newt's never been sure how she was able to have a baby with another man and then flit back to her life as if nothing had changed, but she did, somehow. He thinks he's probably inherited a similar quality of pulling off the unusual.
She stops on the platform to crane her neck over the masses and he yanks his headphones down to his neck like she might... Well, he's not sure what he's expecting. She's too far down the tunnel for him to hear her anyway, unless she decided to give an impromptu performance. Her eyes search the crowd, and he wants to believe she's looking for him.
She's not, though. Of course. Her eyes settle on him for the briefest moment, just long enough for his breath to hitch, and then she moves on. Why would she recognize him? He only recognizes her because she's famous enough to Google. Dad doesn't keep pictures in the house. He says there's no point. She's not part of their life anymore.
The train doors shut and Newt will have to wait for the next one. That's fine. Maybe he should go talk to her, claim to be a fan just to see what she's like close up. No one else on the platform seems to recognize her, save for the woman darting up to slide a hand through her arm. Monica smiles, having found who she was looking for, and they head for the stairs together. Newt shifts his weight. She probably has his eyes since he doesn't have his dad's, but he wasn't close enough to see.
He drops himself against the pillar again. He's moving to the United States soon. Massachusetts, because he likes MIT's biomedical engineering program better than Stanford's or Cornell's. She doesn't tour in the States very often, and even if she did, it's a much bigger country than Germany. The chances of their paths crossing again are slim.
But maybe in a few years, when he's visiting Dad and Uncle Illia for the holidays or running his own laboratory in some other part of the world, he'll buy a ticket to one of her shows just so he can look bored in the audience. He'll let all the operatic wailing sour his mood and he'll sit with his arms folded during the standing ovation. She'll see him and think he looks familiar, but won't be able to place his face. Then he'll pay off an usher to let him backstage, into her dressing room, where he'll introduce himself as Dr. Geiszler and, oh, yes, that Dr. Geiszler, the one who pioneered this groundbreaking bioengineering such-and-such, and Dr. Geiszler is fine, actually, because Dad was the one who named me Newton.
Or maybe, he thinks as another train rolls up, maybe he won't bother. It's not like she ever went through that kind of trouble for him.]
8. Newt watching the news during the first Kaiju attack
9. Newt experimenting on the Door with Sorrow and co