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The email Newt sent Hermann on March 25, 2016, at 5:22 PM, which contained a hilarious Lolcat for which Newt mentally high-fived himself whenever he thought about it, was not their first piece of correspondence.
That was a letter, typed, printed, sealed in an envelope, and sent to Newt’s office at MIT in October of 2013. When he finally discovered it at the bottom of a pile of mail, he found an envelope containing several sheets of nice stationary dated five days earlier from one Hermann Gottlieb, PhD, who had signed the last page in blue ink with what he was pretty sure was the classiest signature he had ever seen.
Newt skipped the lecture he was supposed to be giving that afternoon, traveled half an hour to the nearest office supply store, and bought the thickest stationary they had. He responded to Hermann’s four single-sided pages with six double-sided of his own, sent his class a belated email apologizing for never showing up, and spent the rest of his evening reading the abstracts of every paper Hermann had ever published.
Eleven years and three months later, Hermann and Newt drifted with the kaiju hive mind.
It was a Tuesday, the world had been saved, and Newt’s birthday was in three days.
“Do you think the Shatterdome’s gonna throw a party for me?” Newt asked Tendo over lunch.
Tendo snorted. “We love you, but everyone is way too busy. I’m sure your drift partner will rustle something up.”
The thing was.
The thing was that Newt and Hermann hadn’t really talkedsince the day the world wasn’t ending anymore. For the first twenty-four hours after the clock flipped over to zero, it had been because they hadn’t needed to. Now, it was maybe, maybe a little bit because Newt was avoiding it.
“I dunno, man,” Newt said, pushing the gelatinous mac ‘n’ cheese around on his plate. “I’m kind of thinking.” He poked a bit of errant pasta back into place.
“Yes?” Tendo prompted him.
“I’m thinking it might be a good idea for me to do something for him,” Newt said. “To, like. Clarify some things.”
Tendo narrowed his eyes. “What kind of things?”
“Things,” Newt said, jabbing the air with his fork to emphasize his point. “Anyway, you had better at least smuggle a couple of beers in here by Friday, because as far as years to survive go, this was a big one.”
The thing was that drifting hadn’t been exactly what Newt had thought it would be. There had been no sudden revelation, no clarification of what, exactly, their relationship had been or was. He had a hypothesis (one which he suspected was doomed to remain untested) that the memories that came through strongest in the drift were the ones which were the most different. With the kaiju, that had been unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly everything; with Hermann, the overlap was so complete in certain areas, Newt had no idea how anyone could ever have thought they weren’t drift compatible.
Newt knew more about how Hermann had come to be the person he was today than he had ever expected to find out. He could recount Hermann’s life story backwards and forwards and name every star visible by the naked eye from their tiny little planet. He could not determine how much of the irritated fondness he felt was how Hermann felt about him or how he felt about Hermann, he did not know what Hermann thought about a particular e-card he had received approximately one year before, and he could not figure out what would happen if he tried to act on a suggestion made over a bottle of Merlot in an alley behind the Hong Kong Shatterdome, because all he got when he thought about trying to wine-and-dine Hermann was the faint smell of flowers.
“Whatever you say,” said Tendo, “but if you want to do something nice for Hermann, you’d be the one to know what to do.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Newt, and gave up on the mac ‘n’ cheese.
It had been a long four days for everyone.
Newt and Hermann had missed the worst of it during the night and better part of a day they spent in medical, but the after the partying had died down, the Shatterdome had gone into overdrive. The scariest thing about bureaucracy was how fast it could move when it wanted to. Newt dodged two separate people wielding trollies stacked with boxes of files and reports on his way to the lab, more than a few of them marked with what looked suspiciously like CLASSIFIED.
He wasn’t surprised to find the lab empty. After the first group of movers had shown up the morning before and gotten a good look at exactly how much stuff was in the lab, he and Hermann had pretty much been left to their own devices. They had been told they had until the end of the week to pack up everything themselves unless they wanted it all shipped off to a storage facility somewhere — like that was going to happen.
As for Hermann . . . well. He and Newt dealt with grief in different ways. The PPDC had lots of hoops for Hermann to jump through if he needed something to do. If Hermann wanted some company, he knew where Newt would be.
Newt sat down at Hermann’s desk and put up his feet, silently thankful that Hermann hadn’t returned from wherever errand he was running for the new Marshal. It wasn’t that Newt didn’t like being around Hermann; he really, really did. He kind of forgot, sometimes, that it hadn’t always been acceptable for him to bump into Hermann, just a little, when they stood next to each other, or for Hermann to absently put his hand on Newt’s shoulder when he wanted to see what Newt was working on. But Newt still hadn’t figured out the specifics of how extensive their ghost drift was, and if it was exacerbated by physical proximity (which experimental evidence was pointing to so far), being around Hermann wasn’t exactly the best idea right now.
What do you think of Newton? he asked the part of his brain he thought belonged to Hermann.
Newton, it sighed, irritated and fond, which was pretty much how Newt felt about himself most of the time. The fondness was more pronounced, true, but Newt had always known that they had never hated each other. (Sure, sometimes it felt like it, but Newt was well acquainted with the difference between bitter disappointment and actual hatred.) The degree of fondness, though, was a bit difficult to quantify.
How fond? he prompted. All he got was a wave of memories of watching himself dissect segments of kaiju gut, which, while interesting, was not exactly what he was looking for, Hermann.
“Newton,” said Hermann, and Newt gave a full-body start. He looked up to see Hermann in the doorway of the lab, giving him a look that said, Did I scare you?
“No,” said Newt, taking his feet off Hermann’s desk.
Apparently giving up on trying to communicate via body-language-so-subtle-it-might-have-been-ghost-drifting, Hermann lifted up the clipboard that he was holding and glanced at it. “Did you know that the PPDC has kept a record of everything we have ever had brought into the lab?”
“Really?” Newt went over to Hermann. Hermann obligingly tilted the clipboard towards him so he could read it.
“Yes. It says I have a backgammon set buried in here somewhere.”
“Oh, this is way out of date.” Newt took the clipboard and flipped to the next page. “This says I still have that piece of Ceramander that disintegrated circa three years ago. It doesn’t look like they bothered to keep track of what left the lab.”
“I think that was supposed to be our job,” Hermann said dryly. He went over to his desk and woke up his computer. “We’re supposed to cross everything off the list as we pack it up, or fill in the date when we got rid of it.”
Newt groaned. “That’s going to take ages. I don’t have time for this.”
Hermann, who had put on his glasses, peered at Newt over the top of them. “What else are we going to be doing?”
Trying to learn how to navigate memory pathways that aren’t my own to figure out whether you, in any way, shape, or form, return my confused and complicated feelings? “For one thing, we should probably start on that detailed report Herc wanted, I don’t know, yesterday?”
“Yes, well,” Hermann muttered as he turned back to his computer.
Newt prepared to toss the clipboard onto the lab table, then hesitated. Neither of them wanted to do any work, and if Hermann was procrastinating on writing formal documentation, it was bad. But when they finally did get around to writing the report, Hermann was going to end up doing the whole thing because he was so particular about everything, and Newt really didn’t want Hermann to think he didn’t appreciate absolutely everything he had ever done for him, and.
Newt gently set down the clipboard on his lab table and went to find a pen.
Half an hour later, Newt was so tired of wrapping test tubes in bubble wrap and packing them in boxes he wanted to scream.
“It’s not like they’re going to use this space for anything,” Newt said, not bothering to keep his voice down. “I don’t see why we have to do this now.”
“They have to find something for us to do,” Hermann said absentmindedly.
“If there isn’t anything for us to do, they could just give us a break.”
“Mmm.”
“Do you think we could petition for one? Petition by the undersigned, quantity two, for leave starting immediately. It doesn’t even need to be paid. Can we quit?”
Hermann sighed and turned away from the computer. “I think I am going to get some lunch. Would you like anything?”
Newt looked up guiltily, but Hermann was preoccupied with cleaning his glasses on the hem of his sweater vest. “No thanks. I already ate.”
Hermann nodded and left without another word. All Newt got from the drift was . . . distraction. Hermann wasn’t irritated, even though he should have been. Newt sat back on his heels, took off his own glasses, and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand.
He got a brief feeling from Hermann that might have been, Don’t, and he dropped his hand. The feeling was already fading, and after a moment, Hermann’s presence disappeared from his mind.
Newt pulled over the list to examine what he had checked off so far. He had started on the first page because that had seemed like the logical thing to do, but the list seemed to be roughly in reverse chronological order. He flipped to the next page, which put him at what—last year? He skimmed the list of items and paused at, June 12. Cardboard box, small. Contents: personal effects. A slight memory that wasn’t his own stirred at the back of his mind. Curious, he checked its last recorded location (Dr. Gottlieb’s side of the lab, back cabinets) and went over to check it out.
He had to dig through a couple piles of dusty paperwork, but he finally found it hidden at the bottom of a drawer of one of Hermann’s filing cabinets. It was a little longer and thinner than a shoebox, and before he opened it, he already knew what was inside.
“Bastard,” Newt breathed. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pinned it between his shoulder and his ear. As he waited for the call to go through, he gingerly drew the wine bottle out of its tissue paper nest and cradled it in his hands.
Hermann had meant every word he had said when Newt had gotten him tipsy on cheap Merlot, and he had intended to return the favor the next time February came around.
“Y’ello?”
“Tendo, I need you to do me a favor.”
Newt did not make grand, romantic gestures.
The main reason for this was that he did not, in general, have any reason to make grand, romantic gestures. That kind of thing was generally not encouraged by your casual sex partner, which had been the only kind of partner besides lab partner that Newt had had for almost his entire adult life.
However, he got the general feeling that Hermann liked grand, romantic gestures, or thought Newt did, or thought Newt thought Hermann did. And rather than trying to figure out exactly who thought what about that particular issue, Newt was going to run with it, because he had almost lost Hermann (Hermann had almost lost Newton) when the world had almost ended the first time, and he wasn’t going to give it the chance to try to end a second time.
On the morning of Friday, January 19, 2025, Hermann was woken by an urgent message informing him that he absolutely had to go to LOCCENT to oversee a very sensitive adjustment to the controls, that he had to stay there for the entire morning, and he had to go right now. Hermann struggled into his clothes, cursing whoever had decided that the weekend couldn’t have started one day earlier, and made his way down to LOCCENT as quickly as possible.
“Hey, Hermann,” said Tendo with an easy grin. “No one else is here yet, but they should get here any minute, so just sit tight, okay? This is going to take awhile.”
When Hermann finally was allowed to leave the impossibly tedious recalibration of the PA system, something which he clearly was not required for, he went looking for Newton.
The drift had made things . . . different between them. Feeling the last five years in double had only made him realize exactly how much time they had spent together, and how much more of it had been out of affection than he had thought. Seeing himself from Newton’s perspective was . . . strange. And painful. It was disconcerting, realizing how clearly and how long Newton had seen him for an approximation of who he was that was so much better, sometimes, than Hermann’s own. Hermann understood completely why Newton had been avoiding him; it would take time to get used to. Still, the least Newton could do was bother to eat lunch with him once in a while.
Hermann walked into their lab to find every available surface covered in flowers.
His breath caught in his chest. There were azaleas and lilies cascading out of vases, pots of orchids and violets crowded next to bouquets of carnations and daisies. He put out a hand to steady himself on the lab table. He had not dreamed that Newton would actually—
“Hermann?” said a voice, and Newton appeared from behind a towering vase of bird of paradise carrying a cardboard box. When Newton caught sight of him, he froze. Hermann could only watch helplessly as Newton dropped the box and rushed over to him. “Before you say anything, I know that today’s my birthday—”
“Of course,” he said, removing his hand from the table and struggling to disguise his disappointment. “It’s your birthday.”
“Yeah, I mean, that’s what I said, but.” Hermann watched in astonishment as Newton dropped to his knees in front of him and clasped his hands together. “Please just forget it’s my birthday. Pretend it was, like, last week or something, because asking someone out on your birthday is such a dick move, trust me, I know, but I am so done with this not-talking thing, which is my fault, I get that, and this was the only way I could think of to get this many flowers that fast. I was going to tell everyone my birthday was next week, but it turns out we’re kind of famous and the date of my birth stopped being private knowledge, like, two seconds after I was born, so.” Newton shrugged.
Hermann sagged sideways. “You . . . released a notice to the general public asking for flowers for your birthday.”
“Yup. It turns out people still read my Facebook page, which is five kinds of hilarious, by the way. And FYI, your your memory pathways make no sense. It took me way too long to figure out what the flowers were about.” Newton grinned. And there it was: a slight shift in the way he was kneeling, a hand reaching over to pluck at the leather bracelets tied around his wrist. It was a sign of nerves Newton displayed so rarely, and one which Hermann now felt so acutely, it hurt to watch.
Hermann closed his eyes briefly. “Newton, you didn’t have to do this.”
“Actually, I kind of did.” Newton stood up. Hermann could feel the determination through the remnants of their drift, and it was impossible not to meet Newton’s eyes as he stood there with every muscle tense. “The thing is, Hermann, my first impression of you? It was pretty amazing. You signed your letter with an actual fountain pen. I had to borrow a ballpoint pen from the guy I was sharing my office with. It took me half an hour just to load the paper I got into the printer correctly. I don’t do suave, I don’t do . . .” He waved a hand at the flowers around them. “I want to, but I’m no good at it. Decade-old e-cards are the best I can do for you, man.”
“Newton,” Hermann said quietly. He swallowed. “Where is that list of the contents of the lab?”
Newton blinked at him, then disappeared behind a bouquet of two dozen yellow roses. He reappeared a moment later with the clipboard in hand. Hermann took it and flipped to the last page—the page containing the earliest items they had each had shipped over. He found the appropriate item, noted its location, and walked into the back of the lab, where his piles of books and folders were almost all untouched. He hooked open a cabinet with his cane, revealing a series of cardboard boxes that hadn’t been opened for almost five years. He eyed them, then pulled out one from the back, placed it on the counter, and opened it.
“Are those what I think they are?” Newton asked, standing a respectful distance away as Hermann flipped through the pages and pages of correspondence—most of it typed, but some of it written in Newton’s familiar scrawl.
“Since you must remember me putting them here, undoubtedly.”
Newton stepped close enough to peer over Hermann’s shoulder. “Yeah, but I also remember you scanning them. I thought you were going to leave the originals in storage.”
“I did.” Hermann found what he was looking for and pulled six thin, fragile sheets of paper out of the box. “I changed my mind.”
“But what if a kaiju had destroyed the lab? Those letters must be priceless now,” Newton said, his voice catching a little. “We’re probably under a moral obligation to donate them to a museum.”
“If a kaiju had ever reached the Shatterdome, I consider it highly unlikely either of us would be alive to care.” After carefully closing the box, Hermann turned to Newton and handed him the stack of paper. “While I don’t have an e-card to give you, would a decade-old letter suffice?”
Newton looked at the letter in his hands in confusion. “I wrote this.”
“Yes, you did.”
Newton squinted at him like this was a trick. “This is the first letter I sent you. I know what it says. It has my name on it.”
Hermann rolled his eyes and prayed for patience. “Read it, Newton.”
Muttering something that sounded like, “And you call me illogical,” Newton did.
And took a breath.
“Oh,” he breathed, only halfway down the first page. He looked up. “Hermann. You never—”
“That letter is the most precious thing in my possession,” Hermann said firmly. He took it back from Newton, who let it go without any resistance. “I would appreciate it if you did not speak unkindly about your own ‘suaveness,’ as you called it, because I assure you that I have never found it lacking. I would have felt the same way if your response had consisted of an envelope full of Post-It Notes.” He tucked the letter back in its place and put it away. “The flowers, while appreciated, were unnecessary. I would happily go out to dinner with you.” He turned and looked at Newton.
Newton was holding a bottle of 2015 Fattoria Petrolo Galatrona Toscana. “Actually,” he said, and Hermann could feel his smugness as he smiled, “I was thinking we might eat in.”
“Newton,” Hermann said, automatically taking a step towards him. “I—we can’t.”
“I know,” Newton said, glancing at the bottle. “Alcohol and health stuff don’t mix. As soon as we get the okay, though, what do you say? You have good taste, as far as Merlot goes.”
“Of course.”
Newton looked up at Hermann hopefully. “And we’re still on for dinner?”
“No,” said Hermann.
Newton stared at him. “What?”
Hermann frowned down at his cane. “I am not supposed to tell you this, but the technicians have organized cake in the mess hall this evening, and I would never be forgiven if I was the cause of you being late.” He smiled at Newton apologetically. “I would, however, not be horribly opposed to dinner tomorrow evening.”
“Well, if you wouldn’t be horribly opposed,” said Newton, and when he smiled, Hermann couldn’t help but return it.
“Good god,” said a voice, and they both turned to look to the door. Herc Hansen was standing in the doorway, open-mouthed, a clipboard in hand. “I thought I told you to have the lab cleared by this morning!”
“Eh,” said Newton, wincing. “It was?”
“Marshal,” said Hermann, taking the few steps into the lab proper, “I hope you will forgive Dr. Geiszler. As you can see,” he said, sweeping over to a bouquet of sunflowers and plucking off the card that was tied to them, “these flowers were sent to the lab for his birthday. While I would not put it past him to be just that pathetic under other circumstances, surely you are not accusing him of sending flowers to himself.”
Herc looked at the note, then at Hermann, then at Newton. He pointed at both of them. “I expect this lab to be spotless in an hour,” he barked.
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.
(They did, technically, remove the flowers from the lab. For the next week, LOCCENT was the prettiest it had ever been.)
“I find it difficult to believe that every single kaiju sample and approximately half of the lab equipment miraculously teleported out of the lab on January 1, 2024,” Herc said three hours later, skimming the contents of the clipboard. “However, I commend you for getting this to me in a timely manner, gentlemen. I deem the lab as clean as it is going to get. You’re clear to leave.”
Hermann visibly relaxed and muttered something that sounded like, “Thank god.”
“Wait,” said Newton. “Leave?”
“Yes,” Herc said. “Dr. Gottlieb has submitted all the appropriate paperwork for the two of you to have a week’s paid leave while we decide what to do with you. If I see you anywhere near the lab beginning tomorrow morning, I will eject you from the premises myself. Enjoy yourselves.”
Newton turned to Hermann, open-mouthed. Hermann half-bowed to the Marshal, then secured Newton by the elbow. “Thank you, sir. We will see you in one week.” The Marshal nodded, and Hermann dragged Newt away.
“But, the report,” said Newton, looking anxiously at the Marshal over his shoulder. “We still need to—”
“It’s complete,” Hermann said firmly. “What do you think I’ve been doing all this time?”
“You are amazing.”
When they were out of sight, Hermann released Newton’s elbow and intertwined his fingers with Newton’s. Newton leaned into him, and Hermann murmured in his ear, “Happy birthday, Newton.”