Chapter Text
July 7th, 2017
He’s going to be late. Very late.
Newt knows it before he even opens his eyes to look at the clock on the hotel side-table. He knows it as he's stumbling through his morning routine, belated by several hours and displaced over many thousands of miles of ocean from his apartment. He knows it whilst rushing headlong through the crowded terminals of the Sydney Metro, a single despairing blood cell ferried through metal veins under the city’s concrete skin.
Hermann hasn't answered a single one of the frantic texts he's been spamming. They’d exchanged phone numbers over email the night before–may as well, now that they were taking the plunge and meeting in person–but neither had dared to send anything before Newt’s desperate blue wall of caps lock-laden text bubbles this morning. His first ever real text to his pen pal, colleague, and crush of the past 3-odd years echoes in his mind and under his breath:
“I FUCKED UP!”
By the time he gets to the café they had agreed to rendezvous at, the manic juttering of his anxiety has morphed into a cold, dense hole that yawns in the bottom of his stomach. In his tardiness, their breakfast plans have slid down the clock face of the day into early lunch plans. Fashionably late brunch plans, at best. He’s surprised that Hermann is even still there when he arrives, sitting primly at an outdoor table. Though, the dread that seeps out from Newt’s core as he forces his feet not to turn on a dime and take him in any direction other than forward makes him think he would have been luckier if Hermann had simply given up and left.
Hermann looks just like how he does in all of the presentation recordings Newt could find online; stiff, restless, kind of like a cornered animal. He’s never been the best at public speaking.
It’s surreal, seeing him like this. Real. In the flesh, in the bones, in the stupid way he cuts his hair, in the perfect brain inside his head. Newt feels the wind being punched out of him by the weight of Hermann’s presence in physical space. His heart sprints in his chest. He only hopes his flush can be explained away by his rushing here so quickly.
He barely processes the mirror image of his own expression, breathless and awestruck, in Hermann’s face before it’s shuttered over by something colder. Something more protective.
“I’m so so sorry, man,” Newt blathers as he scoots into the seat across from Hermann. He tries not to stare and fails. “I don’t know what the hell was wrong with my phone this morning. I should probably just get a new one. I’m thinking of throwing this one in the Pacific for fucking me over.”
“It’s alright,” Hermann finally says. His voice is warmer than in the recordings, though no less mechanical. Newt can almost hear the gears click in the man's throat as he speaks, his voice methodical and precise as a quartz clock. “But I don’t think you should throw your phone into the ocean. That would be littering.”
Newt’s pretty sure Hermann is joking. Almost certain of it. But by the time he gets over the shock that Hermann doesn’t seem to be mad at him, the appropriate moment for laughter has passed. Instead, Newt excuses himself to order a coffee and steady his breathing. In what feels simultaneously like a minute and a millennia, he’s back at the table nursing on caffeine comfort while Hermann sips what is likely a third cup of tea. The two sit staring parallel to one another like strangers in an elevator. Being greeted by anger, Newt has to admit, would have been merciful compared to this.
“So,” Hermann’s words are clipped as if sharpened in hopes of popping the bubble of suffocation around the two. “You said you were in town for work?”
The half-question feels like a great big flashing sign pointing towards conversational freedom. Newt follows it gratefully.
He talks at great length about the barrage of meetings he's been through in just the past two days and their implications on his work. Touching base with the Sydney K-sci department; choking on practiced professionalism in front of the PPDC higher-ups; acting as a featured guest speaker at an ill-timed yet well-placed cellular biology conference; slogging through 2 hours of negotiations about kaiju sample transport chains. The last of these leads him into a cul de sac of complaining about the treatment of kaiju specimens both before and after the beasts are taken down. The more intact the kaiju when it falls, the less pollution the surrounding area is subject to and the better chance the scientists studying them will know what the hell they’re looking at.
Newt’s halfway through his diatribe about the sheer amount of material that was lost due to stunts like the double-nuking of Scissure when he realizes he should probably spare some oxygen for the man sitting with eerie patience across from him.
“But, anyways, how’s things with the Mark-3s?” Newt asks abruptly. “Do you think you could sneak me in sometime while I’m in town? Joy ride a bit?”
“My work is entirely technical. I-I don't have the clearance,” Hermann says, clearly caught off guard by Newton’s facetious request. Composure returns to him slowly as he continues. “I doubt I could get access to the hangar at all without strict supervision. Besides, they’re not toys, Newton, they’re weapons.”
Newt tries desperately not to think too hard about how it feels to hear Hermann say his name. Not just Newt. Newton. Like in his emails and his letters. It feels like getting a light smack on the wrist, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
All it does is encourage him.
“Oh c'mon, don’t be boring about giant robots. Please, if you could find it in your cold, beige heart not to ruin my fun here.”
“Newton, please, you’re not the only person in the world to have their life irrevocably changed by watching Evangelion in college. These are very real and very dangerous machines.”
“Okay, sure, fine, but I also had my life changed by Gurran Lagann, which taught me that the solution to every problem doesn’t always have to be the most grimdark, self-serious thing all the time.”
Hermann huffs. “Well, I think the stakes might be a tad higher in this case.”
He’s clearly never watched Gurran Lagann, Newt thinks. The stakes can always be higher.
Fortunately, conversation seems to flow more freely after their rocky silent start, and they fall easily into something that feels so familiar despite never allowing themselves the immediacy of even a phone call before today. Unfortunately, this means they nosedive pretty much instantaneously into petty arguments. They throw their voices into the temperate Australian air, butting heads on anything from controversial sects of philosophy to the value of theoretical vs applied sciences and around the way to conspiracy theories and the sizes of European countries as compared to that of Alaska.
Their knuckles occasionally graze each other as they gesticulate over a table the size of a bar stool. Eyes train on lips when one goes silent long enough to at least pretend to be listening to the counterargument. Both of their faces are flushed by the effort of articulating the whole of the world using the parts of their brilliant hearts and minds reserved solely for the inane and the asinine. They are a perfect picture of passionate and ingenious idiocy.
“God, you’re impossible! I gotta piss.”
Newt stands, palms landing roughly on the table. In its frenzied state, his mind gets ahead of itself and begins conjuring scenarios it has no right to. Namely, those involving both of them heading to the nearest bathroom and manifesting the fervent friction between them on a more physical level. A life-giving breeze against Newt’s neck is the only thing that convinces him he's not literally melting.
Something about the way Hermann looks at him now makes his heart lurch and his stomach drop. It feels like he’s reading Newt’s thoughts right off the red in his face and the sweat on his forehead and is just too polite to mention it.
“Do you need me to hold your hand while you go?” Hermann asks, dry as salt.
Newt stalks off, grumbling. “Hold your own damn hand.”
He takes the moment away to splash his face with water and do some box breathing. All he has to do is get things back on track. Find some kind of common ground they can agree on. And in the meantime, he needs to get his own head on straight enough not to lunge lips-first at who is quickly becoming his cartoonish nemesis. Easy peasy. Instead, when he returns to their table, he launches himself back into the fray with an impassioned “and another thing!”
The scientists are hotly debating the validity of pulp in orange juice when Newt’s watch begins chirping insistently on his wrist. He’s going to be late. Again.
As they collect their things and their dignities, Hermann mutters something about wasting time and getting a talking to. Newt highly doubts it. They both wear dark circles under their eyes that are as legible as tree rings, reading all the way back to 2013. Upon his return to the fledgling Shatterdome, Hermann likely wouldn’t get more than a half-interested prod into where he’s been for the past few hours. Maybe a pat on the back for finally taking a break to do something just for himself. Newt just feels bad about that something ending up like this.
They clasp hands and shake amicably, as if they hadn’t been seconds away from having them around each other’s throats moments before.
“I think it would be best if the two of us never spoke again,” Hermann proposes, impassively.
“Promise?” Newt offers his pinky. Hermann lets it hang there, a promise of its own kind living in his inaction.
“Goodbye, Newton.”
It’s only a matter of hours until they begin pinging each other’s phones off the proverbial hook. And a matter of years until they save the world together.