Work Text:
When Marshall Stacker Pentecost introduced him to Dr. Newton Geiszler, Hermann wanted to be polite. He wanted to make a good impression. He wanted, even, for the man to like him — something he’d long given up on from colleagues who tolerated him at best. He admired Dr. Geiszler, and, in the quietest parts of himself in which embers of hope had not yet been smothered by years of being tolerated, he could admit that he wanted to be admired back. After all, Dr. Geiszler was the foremost expert on kaiju biology — the only scientist writing up findings that might lead to any understanding of the beasts, findings beyond the revelation of them as silicone-based lifeforms, about which any grade schooler could have educated the public. Hermann had read everything Dr. Geiszler had published, and he thought they might have suited each other as platonic companions as well as lab partners.
The Dr. Geiszler Hermann had found in the publications — printed pages worn with constant handling and tucked into his briefcase for easy access — was an eloquent scientist whose work functioned at a level far above almost anyone else Hermann had ever encountered in the field, and yet he neither patronized his readers nor expressed himself in the inexplicable jargon which so infected much academic work. He was singular in his intelligence. Hermann thought this was a man he could understand — and who could understand him in turn.
More fool he.
The Dr. Geiszler who shook his hand too long and too vigorously on a sweltering April day in Manila, 2015, was not the man in the publications. He was screechy and he dressed like a starving graduate student and he fair vibrated with a potent combination of natural manic energy and a cocktail of caffeine. If any substance harder than that was what kept him turned up to his highest setting, Hermann did not wish to know about it.
All the things Hermann wanted dropped like twenty thousand tons of kaiju corpse when Dr. Geiszler gripped his hand too hard but didn’t even look at him and said, “Newton, call me Newt, but look man, I’m sure your math is fancy and all, but I’m failing to see how it can help us learn anything about the kaiju. What’s your bright idea, throwing calculators at them?”
Hermann’s lip pinched in an involuntary sneer and he yanked his hand out of Geiszler’s grip. He wiped the grubby dampness on his trouser leg and opened his mouth for a rebuttal about ridiculous tattoos and possible sexual attraction to kaijus, but Marshall Pentecost spoke before Hermann could.
“Dr. Gottlieb is the reason the first jaegers were functional. Besides that, he has developed a means of predicting the frequency and location of the attacks. It is because of him that we were able to have teams intercept the kaijus that attacked in Acapulco, Honolulu, and Anadyr. He is what we talk about when we say the PPDC has the best and brightest. You will work with him, Dr. Geiszler, and you will like it.”
With that, the Marshall left, and Hermann was alone with the rubble of his esteem and the extremely disappointing figure who’d both inspired and razed it.
—
Gottlieb shrieked. His expression was priceless: eyes bulging, mouth somehow flat and arched at once, like a frog’s, hollowed cheeks stained dark pink. He took a swipe at Newt with his cane, but Newt hopped back quick.
“Too slow old man!” Newt said, cackling. Gottlieb huffed and stood to make his stumping way to the supply closet, where he unearthed a bright blue roll of duct tape. “Oh my God, are you somehow both ninety and twelve, Herms?
“These conditions are unlivable, Doctor. I will make them somewhat tolerable by demarcating sides, and there will be no kaiju bits on my side, is that clear?”
“You were swirlied every single day in middle school weren’t you?” Newt was swirlied once a week, tops.
Gottlieb stood up tall and…not straight, because he was kinda lopsided at all times, but the point was, he stood up as tall as he could get and looked down his narrow little nose with what meager height he might have on Newt and said, cold and even as a slab of fucking bologna, “At least I did not make a nuisance of myself by lingering in the shadows of the beautiful and popular only to be humiliated at every turn, don’t you think?” And damn him it was a direct hit, a you-sunk-my-battleship hit and how the hell did he know that?
“You’re a prick with stupid hair,” was all Newt could say as Gottlieb rolled his sharp little eyes and eased himself to the floor to begin the demarcation.
“Your wit astounds, Dr. Geiszler,” he said, inching himself along the floor, tape in hand.
“And who dresses you, your blind grandma? In her father’s clothes?”
No response, continued floor-scuttling.
“Hey! Hey math genius! No fair making your side bigger, I was here first.”
A nasty, filthy sort of smirk, and Newt couldn’t believe Gottlieb even had that flavor of look in him. Gottlieb was a kind of asexual pseudopod-type, if Newt had to think about it, but that sudden twist of his lips and spark in his eye combined with his position at Newt’s feet had Newt flashing to thoughts of painting that sharp-boned face with a load of spunk. He shook himself.
“You realize by your own rules you’ll have to start keeping your damn equations on your side? All my walls will be mine again, hallelujah!”
“I didn’t want your walls anyway!” Gottlieb said. “They have a layer of disgusting kaiju effluvia on them! It makes writing impossible!”
“Hey, pal, that effluvia is prime biological data and it’s gonna blow this whole thing wide open!”
“Oh ‘this whole thing,’ is it? Tell me, Dr. Geiszler, how do you expect the fine mist of kaiju bile that accompanies your person at all times to do anything but make this lab a fire hazard?”
“I don’t think you can be throwing stones about how I smell, chalk-boy. Did your last lab partner asphyxiate when he got too close?”
“Yes, because clean chalk is the same as the rotting bodily fluids of alien lifeforms, I’m so wounded.”
“I’m actually surprised you can unbend to get all the way down there, you know,” Newt said, tone conversational. “I would have thought that gigantic stick up your ass would have kept you upright all the time, kind of like a mannequin.”
“I do realize you are preoccupied by the adolescent and the puerile, Dr. Geiszler, and you have managed to survive until now with no concept of professionalism, but all thoughts about what may or may not be occupying my arse should be kept to your alone time.”
That startled a laugh out of him that resounded between the reinforced lab walls and made Gottlieb look up at him like an offended owl. He froze and, to Newt’s delight, began to turn colors.
“Holy shit you didn’t even mean to say that, did you?” Newt said. “You are so legit right now, man, I can’t even believe it.”
“Legit?” Gottlieb echoed faintly, like he forgot they were hip-deep in an insult storm right now.
“Like a legit actual dude and not like this, this—” Newt gestured frenetically at all of Gottlieb’s… everything. “—this caricature of a professor emeritus you’ve got going on with the thrift-store neutrals in sizes that manage to be too big and too short at the same time, and the three-year-old’s grandma haircut and the public school vowels and the more proper than the queen thing. Legit with a dick in your pants and a foot in your mouth, legit.”
The pink tip of a tongue darted out to wet dry lips. Newt felt that razor gaze flick up and down the length of his body, and his skin buzzed, suddenly electrified.
“Thinking about what’s in my pants, Dr. Geiszler?” Gottlieb said in a low, silken tone. His eyes flashed.
Newt wasn’t exactly a hit with the ladies, or the dudes, or anyone really, but he’d managed to learn enough in his grad school fumblings to realize saying, “It only just occurred to me that you might be a sexual being when I saw your mouth form the words to insult me in the past thirty seconds,” would be a mistake. So instead, he said, “Fucking constantly.”
It wasn’t actually a lie. It would become the truth soon enough, anyway.
—
They didn’t fuck when the work was flowing freely enough to stopper their bickering, they didn’t fuck anytime a kaiju blasted through the breach, they didn’t fuck whenever they lost a jaeger team.
Once, early on, Hermann had discreetly slipped the results of his recent STI panels under Geiszler’s keyboard only to discover that Geiszler had left his own folded up and tucked in that day’s box of chalk. That was as close as either of them ever got to speaking about this development. And it went without saying that neither of them were involved with anyone else. Not out of any sentiment, because they still spent significant amounts of time screaming at each other, mostly about how wrong the other was, or how maladjusted, but because they spent almost every single waking moment together. When would either of them have the time for someone else?
Hermann was capable of being philosophical about it. Geiszler was, irritatingly, an attractive man — of a stocky, solid build capable of lifting Hermann bodily, but with a touch of office softness around the stomach and arse, and possessed of a face people who were not Hermann might call “cute,” and, damn him, Hermann was even attracted to his disarray: the hair standing on end, the careless stubble, the crooked glasses. The brilliance, of course. The maddening, spiteful, undeniable brilliance. If viewed from arm’s length with his mouth closed, Geiszler was exactly the type of male specimen Hermann might once have got his blood up for — and done nothing about. Hermann was not accustomed to getting what he wanted, or, in matters of the lustful, grasping at the same. He was accustomed to pining, or wanking alone in his bunk. He was good at that. He considered this scratching of an itch his due for not being able to stand the man. He couldn’t stand him, but he could come all over him all he liked, and that eased the sting a bit. It was convenient, fit into his schedule, and sometimes even knocked loose a good idea or two.
Over the next several years, they moved from Manila to Anchorage, Anchorage to Sydney, Sydney to Tokyo, always together, always with Pentecost. Hermann had stopped putting in for his own lab, and started having to push down the heat that swelled in his chest every time Newton smiled at him, big and unselfconscious, or when someone said something profoundly stupid and their eyes met and understanding passed between them. That was not convenient, and did not fit into his schedule, and had never once inspired a wonderful idea. Artists and poets — they had it all wrong.
It was a year into their time in the Tokyo Shatterdome that Hermann finally gave in to the urge to touch one of Newton’s tattoos when they weren’t engaged in a rough coupling. It was directly afterward, in fact, and they were panting side by side on the floor of the lab as the sweat cooled and the come congealed on Newton’s shirt. It had rucked up enough for Hermann to see the outline of a new kaiju on his ribs, and Hermann gathered all his gumption to run knuckles over it. Lightly, and he pulled back as soon as he was done.
“When did this appear?” he asked.
“Huh? I got this like a month ago, dude, where have you been?”
“Avoiding your labyrinth of entrails, Doctor.”
“Newt, dude,” Newton said. “You gotta call me Newt. Jesus, what’s it been, eight years? Lighten up, Herms.” Newton said this to him at least once a month.
“You have six doctorates,” Herman said, for the umpteenth time. “It is the respect you’re owed.”
“I have ten fingers, too, no one calls me ‘Mr. Ten Fingers, sir.’”
“Dr. Ten Fingers.”
Newton turned his head enough to glance at him and cracked a grin. Hermann wanted to cover that mouth with his own, wanted to sweep his tongue inside and nip at that bottom lip. He wanted to taste of Newton’s breath. He didn’t. He hadn’t. He never would.
Five of those fingers wormed their way up Hermann’s own twisted shirt and dug into his ribs. Hermann yelped and squirmed away, breathless with laughter, only to find Newton had rolled to lever himself over him, bodies flush, careful of Hermann’s bad hip.
“I’m getting it colored tonight after dinner. You could come if you wanted.”
Hermann forcibly kept his mouth from gaping.
“I don’t — I have equations to run.”
“Come on, dude, when’s the last time you even left the dome? It’ll keep. I’ll buy you dinner and shit.”
Hermann blinked. “Erm. Yes. All right, yes.”
Hermann wanted to go back to the dome as soon as he and Newton entered the tattoo parlor. He didn’t belong here, among the aggressively pierced and tattooed, beautiful and high-fashion in their own way while Hermann was only a shapeless lump who cut his own hair. He tucked his cane close, tried — failed — to force his feet inward, to look less like a circus clown in drab clothes, to seem smaller. The back of his neck heated with humiliation. He was bloody twelve years old again, learning for the thousandth time that he was outside, that there was something inherently displaced about him, an eternal cuckoo.
But Newton was Newton, and he was either oblivious to Hermann’s burning mortification or he was barreling through it like the bull to Hermann’s china shop. He slapped a hand between Hermann’s shoulder blades, and Hermann would have stumbled except for the fact that Newton was there holding him steady.
“Takahiro!” Newton’s raised voice scraped harsh across Hermann’s eardrums, but he contained his wince. “My man! Come meet my lab partner, he’s a genius!”
A tall man surprisingly devoid of visible tattoos emerged from the back and tilted a fond smile at Newton. Hermann stood up as straight as he could manage.
“Newt,” Takahiro said. “I am not sure I can handle more than one genius in my shop, if he’s anything like you.”
Newton laughed loudly and slung his arm around Hermann’s neck the way Hermann had often seen lads do after some kicky type of sport.
“I assure you, I am nothing like him,” Hermann said stiffly. He was nothing at all like Newton, at ease in social situations even when he was making them awkward, even when he was an outsider. Newton was forever putting people at ease with his “call me Newt,” his refusal of formality, his easily-offered hand. No, Hermann was nothing like Newton, and sometimes he couldn’t tell if that’s what made him hate Newton or love him.
At Hermann’s words, Newton’s arm slipped from its place around Hermann’s neck and his jubilance was palpably tempered. It was hot in the city, and the shop was not particularly cool inside, but he felt the loss of heat nonetheless.
“You’ll find me much less personable, for example,” Hermann said hastily, and though he felt the wild eyebrow Newton sent him, he steadfastly refused to look in his direction. Across the front desk, Takahiro grinned a shiny grin, and jerked his head toward the brightly-lit rooms behind him.
In one of the rooms, Takahiro slid a chair up to a metal work tray, donned nitrile gloves, and prepared needles and ink for the occasion. Herman found himself with a face full of Newton’s discarded tie, shirt, and undershirt, and he glared at him.
“What? It’s either you in the guest chair or my clothes, Herms, you pick.”
“Don’t call me that,” Hermann grumbled. He eased himself into the chair in question. He proceeded to fold up Newton’s clothes so he could lay them flat in his lap. When he looked up again, he found Newton reclining in the tattoo bed and staring at him with some combination of amusement and bafflement on his face. “What?” Hermann snapped.
“Du bist der schönste, verwirrendste alte Mann, dem ich jemals Kaiju Teile ins Gesicht geschmissen habe,” Newton said. You are the most gorgeous, confusing old man I’ve ever slapped in the face with kaiju parts. He said it quietly, with soft eyes.
Hermann’s mouth went dry. He was not aware that Newton was capable of quietude. He still hoarded all the articles Newton published, recently and in the past, never let him know he read them, never let him know how he longed for the man between the lines. He felt a sudden vertigo at seeing that man now, shirtless with vivid colors bursting across the canvas of his skin, regarding him with some measure of the admiration he’d so desired before he’d ever clapped eyes on him.
“Ich bin nicht alt,” was all he could muster. I’m not old. Newton’s mouth twisted as if Hermann were terribly funny, but he didn’t laugh, and then Takahiro rolled up to the tattoo bed.
“Ready?” he asked Hermann.
Hermann tried not to scowl.
“I’m not the one getting ink poured into an open wound tonight.”
“Ah, but the good doctor is such a fine customer of mine, perhaps I could throw in a little one for you, on the house.”
“What do you say, Hermann?” Newton said, waggling his eyebrows. “An infinity symbol right on the back of your neck? Or, like, the Golden Ratio. Oh hey, I know! The code you wrote for the first jaeger to the three hundredth numeral, winding all around your arm. How badass would that be? Holy shit, Hermann you really should.”
For a moment, Hermann imagined it — rolling up his sleeve, joining Newton in his quest to transform his body. But Hermann could not transform his body like this, and he especially could not do it on a whim, on Newton Geiszler’s whim. Someday, this delicate workspace understanding they had would fall apart, Hermann would feel too much and grasp too hard, and Newton would slip away from him, and what would Hermann see when he looked at the neat numbers etched into his skin but his own failure?
“I’m afraid this is an endeavor you shall have to weather alone, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann said. He laced his hands together primly and placed them atop Newton’s clothes. He tipped his chin up. Takahiro seemed to take that as permission and the buzz of the needle filled the room.
Hermann watched as the kaiju slowly took on color on Newton’s body, separate, of course, from the way blood colored him as well. Newton’s abdominal muscles clenched and strained as he endured the pain, and beads of sweat popped up along his hairline and on his chest. His eyes closed and his jaw worked and his fists opened and closed.
Hermann did not place hands on him. Hermann did not wipe away the sweat from his brow. He pulled the chair up and began to talk. Little stories, amusing anecdotes about teaching or less humiliating episodes from his adolescence. His mother’s recipes, his grandmother’s bedtime stories, his brothers’ and sisters’ more harmless pranks. He spoke, Newton listened, and the kaiju came to life.
—
“You fucking dumbass!” he yelled at a piece of kaiju, hands in the air.
“Yes, I do find kaiju stupidity to be the most offensive thing about them,” came Hermann’s voice, tone dry and mild. That meant he was in a mood and nothing Newt could do would make him less insufferable.
Newt bellowed out another prolonged nonsense syllable and waved a tentacle at Hermann threateningly.
“You! Why don’t you find a mathematician to share a damn lab with?”
Hermann’s eyes blazed when he sneered.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Doctor Geiszler, but there are no mathematicians left in the PPCD. There are no biologists left. There is just you and me.”
That brought Newt up short. He hadn’t noticed, in fact. He’d been nipple-deep in kaiju for years, sometimes literally. And when he let his brain take any momentary breaks from it — well. He stared at Hermann until kaiju goo plopped at his feet, until Hermann gave a fussy little huff and fidgeted in place, ruining the ice man demeanor he was always going for and always failed to achieve. And fuck Newt if that wasn’t exactly what he liked about the skinny little fucker. Among other things. He made another shrieky kind of sound that had Hermann making a face like he got kaiju piss on his leg.
"The jaeger program is failing,” Hermann went on, and Newt couldn’t tell what that edge in his voice was — something like spiteful pride, or barely-masked hysteria. “You and I and everyone in this dome — we’re dinosaurs.”
“Yeah well, you’d be used to that, wouldn’t you, Grandpa?” Newt shoved his glasses up his nose, uncaring of the smudge of guts it left, and turned back to his specimen.
“If I were such a grandpa, I’d be hobbling full-speed to the Wall of Life program right now. And yet here I am, with an overgrown manchild and the tatters of my dignity.”
“The Wall of Life is bullshit and anyone with half a goddamn brain cell knows it.” He gestured at Hermann with his hands full of kaiju, and Hermann pointedly did not flinch back. “How long do you think it would take these things to bust through a frigging pansy-ass wall?”
Hermann’s crooked mouth tilted upward in one of his dirty little smiles. Newt’s pavlovian dick twitched in his pants at the sight.
“They called the Titanic unsinkable. I’d rather be a dinosaur cracking the iceberg than the captain driving headlong into it with nothing but prayer on his side.” He said it with such zeal, with such fire in his eyes, like he could, in fact, math all the kaijus to death, that Newt could no longer hold back the insistent rush of blood to his groin. Mixed metaphors apparently did it for him, at least when they were coming out of Hermann Gottlieb’s mouth.
“Dude you have no idea how much I want to blow you right now,” he blurted, and Hermann froze. Hermann froze instead of letting that dirty smile spread sly across his face. Newt’s heart dropped into the bowl of his belly.
“I am busy, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann said. “Perhaps there is someone else who could occupy your… time.”
“What? Who the fuck else would I blow?”
“Anyone but me, Doctor.” Hermann turned to make his way to his side of the lab, and Newt could see how he leaned on his cane more heavily.
“What the fuck?” Newt was aware he’d gone shrill, but he didn’t much care.
Hermann whirled around to face him over the divide between their sides. His color was high, and despite the totally bullshit conversation they were having, Newt’s urge to lick that color was almost irresistible.
“I was not aware that the termination of an ill-advised liaison required a mutual agreement. I am ending it, Dr. Geiszler. It should never have happened, and now it is over.” He turned back to his desk and flipped through some pages, but Newt knew what Hermann’s attempts at nonchalance looked like, and they sucked.
Newt felt like his body was buzzing. He took a deep breath and held it so he wouldn’t make some kind of ear-exploding sound. Again.
“Dude. Look. I didn’t mean anything by what I said before. It was just — tattoo nerves, all right? So let’s just fucking forget it and—”
“This is not a relationship, Dr. Geiszler—”
“Stop calling me that!”
“—and as such there will be no negotiation of terms, no heartfelt apologies to return things to their status quo, no—”
“Yeah, all right, fuck you, I get it! Jesus Christ, how can you stand there and listen to yourself talk without wanting to cut your own head off?”
“It’s certainly better than listening to you screech out your inner monologue all bloody day! Inner means you don’t say it out loud, you imbecile!”
“How does it feel to be so goddamn boring the person you spend all day with has to talk to himself for a little stimulation?”
“Remind me how boring I am while you’re begging to get your mouth on me, it’s all very convincing.”
“Oh my God, you are actually the worst, you are curdling my loins as we speak, I can’t even believe I ever touched you.”
“Get it all out of your system, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann said, nose in the air.
Newt did, in fact, screech, and he did, in fact, march down to the control room and put in a request for another lab directly to Stacker Pentecost, and he did, in fact, avoid Hermann Gottlieb for the rest of their time in Tokyo.
The Shatterdome in Hong Kong, however, had only one unoccupied lab in its defunct research division, and when they landed their asses there six months later, the silence was unbearable. They filled it again with arguments and insults, and Newt hated himself for how that made the loneliness abate, just a little.
—
We, kaiju.
We, Hermann.
We, Newton.
There is hunger and disdain and the fathomless, ultimate knowledge that we will wipe out what is puny and insignificant to make way for what has import, gravity, consequence. We will clean this house.
There is also loss and grief and joy and humiliation and laughter and lust and pride and accomplishment and terror and fear and love, love, bright and hot and unquenched love.
We love. We destroy. We do our best.
—
Hermann couldn’t throw stones. After all, he was the one clutching at Newton Geiszler, the pair of them laughing, practically bouncing in place, and Hermann barely felt the twinges of pain that radiated through his hip and up his spine at the motion. He’d pay for it tomorrow, but for now, the world was saved and he felt as if he had been blasted into the stratosphere on the euphoria of it.
It was after, hours and hours after, after the booze had been consumed and all the backs had been slapped and the high had worn off. It was after, when Hermann was limping into his bunk, that he found Newton sitting on the stoop before his quarters, looking small with his face tucked into his knees. He wore only boxers and a t-shirt, and he smelled freshly showered.
Hermann stopped short, swallowed around the sudden dryness in his throat. The Drift was lingering, the empty space the kaiju left filling with shadows, impressions of Newton’s history. It was nothing tangible, like grasping at fog. It was all abstraction — feelings, tangled and bleeding into each other and impossible to extricate from one another. Newton felt so acutely, so sharply, and there was nothing that pierced him so deeply as Hermann. Not even kaiju.
Newton loved him. Loved him in that vivid, explosive way he had, loved him with a ferocity Hermann wouldn’t have thought possible, especially after all this time apart. Newton loved him without hope or gain for himself. Newton loved Hermann simply for being Hermann, even when he was infuriating, or awful, or embarrassing. He didn’t love Hermann for the way he made Newton feel, he didn’t love Hermann for the reflection of himself in his eyes. Newton loved purely, inasmuch as love — a churning miasma of a million different shades of other emotions — could be pure. Newton loved Hermann the way Hermann loved Newton. It was intoxicating. It was humbling. It was, frankly, overwhelming.
And Hermann, who could brave living in coastal cities and Drifting with a dead kaiju, was terrified of it.
At the sound of Hermann’s cane, Newton looked up, blinking away the bleariness in his eyes.
“Hermann,” he said, voice croaky.
“Are you drunk?”
Newt laughed, humorless. “Nah, dude.”
Hermann ventured a step closer, and a step closer still, until he was close enough to set his hand in Newton’s hair. Newton’s eyes slid shut as if his touch were a profound relief.
“Are you all right?” Hermann asked quietly. “You should have a CT scan, probably.”
“We should, you mean,” Newton murmured.
“Yes, I suppose,” he said. Newton’s head came to rest against Hermann’s good hip. Hermann kept stroking his hair. “Come inside,” he said, and when his heart stumbled he willed it to find its rhythm again.
Newton only nodded before staggering to his feet. He and Hermann leaned on each other until Hermann swung the door open, and together they shucked Hermann’s clothes and Newton’s t-shirt without worrying about where they landed and slotted into the bed. They had never done such a thing before. Their assignations had always been confined to their labs, and beyond the collision of bodies for the express purpose of reaching coitus, they had never touched in so prolonged and intimate a manner. Hermann let out a shaky breath before burying his nose in clean hair that stood on end no matter its product content, apparently.
“Why am I the little spoon,” Newton grumbled faintly. He made no move to change his position, though, and simply burrowed further into Hermann’s chest.
“Because it pleases me,” Hermann said, smoothing a hand down Newton’s side. Newton hummed a sleepy note of agreement. “Sleep now.”
Newton, too tired to make even a token protest, simply obeyed. Hermann stayed awake a while, breathing in the scent of him. He traced the lines of Newton’s tattoos with his eyes, memorized each riotous splash of color. He never wanted to drain the color from his life again.
—
Newt’s least favorite thing ever was to feel stupid, and he felt stupid now. Worse, he’d done it to himself, and couldn’t blame a jealous, inferior mind the way he had when he was a kid, skipping grades like stones on a pond and inspiring hatred and derision everywhere he went. He consoled himself with the knowledge that if he had been an oblivious dumbass, at least Hermann had been ten times worse. What kind of bullshit was it, to break up with someone because you thought they’d break up with you first, despite the ridiculous, ass-over-teakettle, totally gross lovesick thing they’d said in the least romantic language on Earth?
Newt rubbed his hands over his eyes and went back into the bedroom, where he gathered up his t-shirt. He was gonna find that prissy, pretty little asshole and make him be less stupid. Just as he found his glasses, the door opened and Hermann was there, balancing two cups of coffee and what appeared to be a bag of donuts in one hand and using the other to shove the door shut with his cane.
Newt was up and taking the stuff from his hands before Hermann could open his mouth.
“Hey,” he said, and Hermann’s dark eyes looked stricken. Newt poked Hermann in the chest. “No running away, you got it?”
Hermann relaxed his spine enough to look less pinched.
“No,” he said. “No running away.” There was a pause and a shuffle, and his thin mouth arced downward. “Apologies,” he said.
Newt set the stuff down and stepped into Hermann’s personal space. He brought his hands up to cup Hermann’s jaw. Hermann’s eyes fluttered shut, black lashes lush against a pale cheek. Newt rubbed his thumb over Hermann’s lips.
“You are a stupid, stupid shit, you know that?”
“So are you. Newton.”
Hermann opened his eyes, and Newt felt his spine light up when he met his gaze.
“The thing is,” Newt said, “I’ve been missing out on kissing you for like, ten years, and it’s totally ruining my life.”
“Oh, honestly, Newton, there was an apocalypse on and I hardly think—”
“Shush. Just laugh. I made a joke.”
Hermann huffed and shifted his weight, scowling harder.
“Except I’m totally serious,” Newt said. “Do you have any goddamn idea what it’s like watching you, day in and day out, with your hands all long and clever and your face all sharp and endearingly asymmetrical and your brain all big and fat and your eyes all brown and your hair all stupid and your mouth, Hermann, your fucking mouth and how it’s always frowning all lopsided except once in a blue frigging moon you smile and the world stops turning, I swear to God, the sun’s like ‘ah shit, I got competition,’ and I gotta look away because I will for real go blind or have a heart attack and I’ve never, ever been allowed to just—”
Hermann yanked him forward and finished the job by catching Newt’s lips with his own and pulling Newt in flush against him. Newt may or may not have squeaked, no one could prove that, but he groaned and opened his mouth to let Hermann in. Hermann made a needy, humming sound deep in his chest and pressed closer, mouth hot and slick. Newt tangled his hands in Hermann’s hair and held him steady.
“Oh fuck,” Newt said into the kiss, and he certainly did not whimper. “Oh fuck don’t stop kissing me ever, ever.”
Hermann responded by sweeping the tip of his tongue inside, along Newt’s bottom lip, before sucking said lip into his mouth. Newt shoved a thigh between Hermann’s, and Hermann leaned into him, somehow overwhelming and enveloping and perfect. They kissed in long, hot draws of breath and tongue, Hermann’s hands convulsive on Newt’s hips until finally they grabbed his ass. Newt moaned and ground his hard cock into Hermann’s. Hermann’s leg gave, but Newt was there to keep him upright. Newt was there.
Hermann gasped when he staggered back, and through the haze of dizzy arousal Newt could see his mouth was swollen and the skin around it abraded by Newt’s two-day stubble.
“Bed,” Newt said, hoarse. He let Hermann lean on him as they made their graceless way to the narrow bunk, where they made quick work of their clothes and collapsed in a heap, careful to set no weight on Hermann’s right hip.
“This will be novel,” Hermann muttered, and Newt began to laugh. They’d fucked for eight years and had never seen each other naked, or in a bed. Newt propped himself up over Hermann and took in a good long look: Hermann was thin, of course, that was no secret, but he had a surprising amount of muscle tone in his arms and chest, and his stomach was sleek and spare. His collarbones were a lovely, prominent line, and his skin seemed fresh and smooth. His cock, uncut, fat and leaking, nestled in dark curls, was no surprise, but a welcome sight nonetheless. His left hip made a perfect crest begging for Newt to grab it, while his right hip was — malformed, an echo of a memory told him, in German no less, along with his spine. I’m sorry Dr. Gottlieb, but it’s unlikely that he’ll ever walk.
Hermann was stock still underneath him, eyes shut, lips parted to draw quick breaths. His shoulders were tense. Newt leaned down to kiss him on the eye, because it was so pretty, and the cheekbone, because it was so sharp, and the nose, because it was so cute, and the mouth, because it was filthy and fantastic and he’d never get enough.
“You showed them,” he said, and Hermann opened his eyes. Newt saw fire and defiance there. “You fucking gorgeous rock star, you showed them all.”
Hermann’s breath shuddered out of him and he hauled Newt up by the hair to plunder his mouth again. Newt rocked his hard cock into Hermann’s, made him moan, before pulling away to pressing sucking kisses into the beautiful ruin of Hermann’s hip. Hermann’s hand settled in his hair.
“Newton, you— Gott.”
Newt looked up from between Hermann’s legs to find Hermann sweaty, hair on end, skin flushes, chest heaving, eyes at half-mast.
“You look like a Rodin,” Newt blurted, by which he meant that Hermann looked sleek and beautiful in imperfection, swept away by passion, desire made flesh and wrought in stone. Newt didn’t have the words for it, but at the tilt of Hermann’s mouth, he knew he understood. Hermann was there, a soft warmth in the back of his mind. Hermann was there, and Newt was not alone.
“And you look like Newton Geiszler.” By which he meant, Newt knew, you’re better than high art because you’re you.
Newt crawled up his body and kissed him again. Hermann’s arms came around and hugged him tight. Newt pulled back again and splayed his hand on Hermann’s chest.
“So, like, I totally want to fuck you, like properly, with my dick and your ass and the whole deal, and I definitely want you to fuck me, that shit has been on my to-do list for as long as I’ve known you, but for right now I just want to kiss you for like a million years and all the prep work involved isn’t really conducive to that so I think we should do something else for now, is that cool?”
“Newton, let’s not have a repeat of the time you talked so much you passed out.”
“Listen, that was a one-time thing in middle school and you shouldn’t even know that, okay, no fair man.”
“Kiss me again before your mouth’s so full of words I can’t fit my tongue in.”
“You’re totally mean and also kinda gross, Herms.”
“Kiss me again, Newton,” Hermann said.
“Yeah,” Newt said. “Yeah okay.”
So he did, and while Hermann fondled Newt’s arms and ass, Newt ground his hips into Hermann’s. The slick they generated between the two of them wasn’t enough, and Newt went lube-diving in Hermann’s bedside table. He popped the cap and slathered it on their cocks, relishing the way Hermann’s mouth fell open even as his eyes slid shut. Then something sparked along the edges of his memory — Hermann’s memory, that’s Oxford, long before Newt ever would have visited as a guest lecturer — and he squirted a bunch of the lube on the insides of his thighs.
“Come on,” he said. “You can fuck me like this, yeah?”
He fit himself in as the little spoon again and eased Hermann’s right leg over his hip. Hermann’s right arm clasped him by the waist while his left came around Newt’s neck and hugged him tight across the chest.
“What happened to kissing me for a million years?” Hermann’s breath passed warm over Newt’s shoulder, where he was being kissed, sucked. It took the bite out of how peevish Hermann sounded. Newt shuddered, shoved his ass back into Hermann’s groin. Then, without moving the position of his hips, he twisted his torso around and hooked his elbow behind Hermann’s neck.
“I’m pretty limber, dude,” he said, and captured Hermann’s mouth. Hermann moaned, stole his breath. He pushed his cock into the channel of Newt’s tightly-clenched thighs and grunted like Newt’s body was balm to the deepest wounds. And maybe it was, because that’s how Newt felt right now about Herman’s cock driving through his thighs, dragging across his hole with each movement, nudging at the electric space behind his balls. Hermann’s left hand had taken rough hold of a nipple while his right held Newt’s hip still. With his own free hand, Newt jerked himself off for all he was worth. They undulated and thrust and moaned and whimpered and sometimes when Newt would pull back so he could look into Hermann’s face, he saw a disbelieving wonder he felt echoed in his own mind. Hermann couldn’t believe he got to have this, and all Newt could be was grateful for the chance.
“Newton,” Hermann said, half swallowing the second syllable. “I’m—”
“Yeah, yeah do it, fuck, Hermann, come on, me too.”
Hermann’s grip on Newt’s iliac crest tightened, and his thrusts quickened, and Newt had to turn away to let out a wail. Hermann buried his face in Newt’s neck and shoved into him hard before stilling and letting out a strangled grunt. Newt felt a burst of warmth all over his balls and ass, and then Hermann sagged against his back, twitching with aftershocks.
“Shit, Hermann, shit, shit, shit.” Newt pressed his ass back into Hermann, scrabbled back to grasp at Hermann’s side, and he didn’t even have to ask before Hermann was sliding long, aristocratic fingers through his own come and pressing one into Newt’s asshole. Newt cursed, a prolonged, fricative syllable, and slid his hand from Hermann’s side to grasp his wrist and push his hand up further.
“You greedy, filthy man,” Hermann whispered, and the words were a delicious buzz on the skin behind his ear. Newt’s toes were curling, and Hermann fit one more finger in alongside the first. He hooked them both and pressed hard against his prostate. Newt’s breath left him, and his vision dissolved into a cascade of white stars as his orgasm blasted out of him.
When he came back to himself, he was boneless and wrung out, loopy with endorphins and wearing a stupid grin. Hermann was stroking his side and gumming at his trapezius muscle.
“So… do you think that coffee’s cold?” Newt said.
Hermann chuckled low into Newt’s hair. His hand came around to curl against the tiny flub Newt may or may not admit to having under his navel.
“We can get new ones.”
“My God, the extravagance.”
“Enjoy it, Newton. We helped save the world. I imagine if we were to check the newsfeeds, we’d find that we are…”
“Rock stars?”
“People who can afford another cup of coffee.”
“Rock stars.”
“Oh, honestly.”
“Give it up, Hermann. I know you have fuzzy feelings with my name on them all over your desiccated little heart.”
Hermann turned his wrist and Newt answered by tangling of their fingers together. He let his head fall back, let himself settle into Hermann’s body. Hermann set his mouth against Newt’s neck and took a deep breath. Newt’s eyes fell shut.
“Yes,” Hermann said. “Yes I do.”
End