sciencesaggressively | not cool, brain, not cool

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kate

not cool, brain, not cool

He'd drifted off easily enough, a smile on his face because his arm had been draped over Kate's waist, their fingers entwined and his forehead resting against her shoulder. He doesn't know how deep into sleep he is when it starts, the images tinted in blue--images and memories and emotions. He can see the Precursors, sees their wide eyes as Gipsy Danger destroys them all and closes the breach, a victory for the PPDC but nothing but pain and tragedy for the aliens; he can feel it when Striker Eureka kills Scunner; when Gipsy blasts Leatherback into oblivion. It's all pain, experience his mind believes he's connected to because of the drifts, and the part of his mind that is still just Newt is desperate to get the hell out of this, for an escape, for the pain to ease and--

He wakes up, chest heaving, and he paws at the nightstand beside him until he manages to find his glasses. He blinks a few times, trying to adjust back to reality, and realizes his hands are gripping the bedsheets so tightly that they're trembling. Or maybe it's his whole body that's trembling, that's quickly becoming a larger possibility. His one relief right now is that Kate only shifts a little in her sleep, and he holds his breath until she stops moving and her breathing steadies again; it's the last thing he wants to do, wake her up because of this shit, but then he feels something wet dripping down his nose and he curses to himself as he reaches up to wipe what he knows is blood away.

"Goddammit," he mutters to himself, trying his hardest to slide out of bed without disturbing her. He makes it to the bathroom quietly enough even without his cane to help and winces when he turns on the light, his eyes adjusting to the brightness. When he catches sight of his bloody mess of a face, he grimaces, shaking his head. He grabs at some toilet paper and perches on the edge of the bathtub, stuffing his nose with a distressed sigh. He has no clue what the hell had spurred the nightmare, he hasn't had one since the first time nearly a month ago. He'd honestly thought this wasn't going to be an issue but even if it is, he needs to be able to figure out if this is going to be a random occurrence or if he'll be able to map this out. Nobody needs to know about this, right? It's nothing.

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"No way," she says, shaking her head as best she can while lying down. "I won't wonder that." She's not just putting up with him, she's here because she really, really wants to be, because she can't imagine another place in this city right now where she'd rather be. His bed is warm and it smells like him and he's lying here beside her and even though he's injured and the whole nightmare thing keeps worrying at the back of her mind, he's here. And he's with her. She doesn't have that anywhere else. Even the thought of looking ahead a year or two doesn't scare her now. If she's honest with herself, when she looks at her future in Darrow there's not a whole lot that seems certain, but she does know she wants him to be there.

"That's different, though," she says. "Owen's a totally different person, right? I had three friends, Olive, Ginny and Wichita, all very different people, man, but their faces... shit. They all looked so much alive, but they're nothing like each other. There is no original, you know? They're all the original where they come from, no one's been made from the others. There's this movie with a girl who looks exactly like me, she's a singer in some super famous band and this guy on the island thought I was her at first."

She sounds so earnest in her denial that Newt can't help but believe her--not that he's down on himself or thinks that nobody could stomach him for very long; hell, Hermann had done it for a decade and he doesn't anticipate half as many fights over anything especially serious with Kate. But right now, hearing her say that, it puts him at complete ease, like there's nothing to worry about. Two years from now, he doesn't just want her to be there, doesn't just hope she's there, he's going to make damn sure that she is.

It had happened so fast, this thing between them, but he doesn't think it's because they're reckless or hopelessly romantic--both of them may very well be the first but he's never been much of the latter--it's because they're right for each other, he feels it, more importantly knows it. It's like she's already got him down to a science.

"Weirdly, Owen is pretty much a second Hermann. But yeah, definitely not a cookie-cutter copy." He wonders what it would be like to come across someone with his own face and his first thought is awesome but he can see how it would be a tad discomfiting. "Kinda creepy. But also kinda cool, if I'm honest."

"It's weird sometimes," she says, her voice softer. Generally, she does her best not to think about the fact that there's a movie out there with someone who looks exactly like she does. She's always had an easy time dealing with the idea that her friends and her ex-boyfriend might have been fictional at some point, but trying to apply that idea to her own life is deeply unsettling and not something she likes to dwell on for very long. There aren't many things that are off limits to Kate, but that's one thing she just has a hard time with no matter how she tries to frame it and so she shakes her head, frowning.

"Nope, topic change," she decides. "It creeps me out too much, thinking of someone else out there with my face." It just makes her wonder if her own life had been consumed for entertainment somehow, too, and she hates that. It makes her angry and it scares her, even though she doesn't want to admit to either of those things. The fact that it scares her just makes her angrier. "I'll talk about anything else, though."

He finds it all very fascinating, that they live in a world now where this sort of thing is a possibility--doppelgangers, fiction people come to life--though the thought that his entire life could just be, in someone else's eyes, some big fairy tale story made up for entertainment is discomfiting. He knows who he is, there's no way his life hasn't been real, but then he remembers that there's a Spider-Man running around town and Newt wonders if Spider-Man has trouble accepting the fact that people know him from comic books.

"Anything else, huh?" he asks, very much on board with the subject shift now. "Got any suggestions? Questions? Concerns?"

"You sound like a customer service call centre when you say it like that," she says with a giggle, shifting her head so she can better look at him. She can feel herself getting kind of silly again, partly because of the fact that she's still awake and partly just to counter how unsettling she finds their previous topic. Putting on a proper, polite voice, she says, "Tell us, Kate, are you satisfied with the performance of your Newton Geiszler? Do you have any questions or concerns about the product?"

She turns toward him, resting her arm over his chest again, her nose pressed against the curve of his throat and she smiles. "I guess I'd have to tell them I was pretty satisfied. I mean, I wonder if they'd ask me to rate you on a scale of one to ten." He'd get a pretty high rating, maybe a twelve or thirteen, mostly because Kate's never like the constraints of the whole one to ten thing and has always felt the urge to go beyond it whenever people ask her to rate anything. It's probably a huge pain in the ass, especially when she's getting a real phone call about the service she received somewhere, but she doesn't really care.

His body shakes with laughter as he rubs at his eyes because Christ, he's fucking tired and he knows she's got to be exhausted, too, but this--staying up until the ass crack of dawn just talking, which he's most certainly many times but not in bed with anyone who'd really acted like they cared about what he had to say--feels so nice and whether she realizes it or not, he thinks it's a true testament to how much he feels safe putting his trust in her. He's always quick to assume nothing can touch him, it's why he'd been so eager to jump into the den of a goddamn crime lord, not to mention the brain of two kaijus, but he doesn't mind being vulnerable with her and that's a pretty big deal for him.

He hates giving anyone a reason to think he's weak, had been so angry at himself after that first drift for letting the Marshal and even Hermann see him shaking and crying and a wreck. Not that he's exactly super willing to cry in front of her all the time, absolutely not, that's not really a thing he does; but he wants to let her in, make sure he doesn't push her away even if there's a part him that tells him maybe he should. "I don't come with a warranty," he warns, trailing his fingers over her back. "No returns or exchanges, either. Not even for store credit."

"That's okay, you're definitely the only one I want," she murmurs, a shiver following his fingers up the length of her back. "Except I'm starting to think I should see if I can maybe purchase an extended warranty or something, especially since you don't even come with one to begin with. Seems like a serious oversight." Sometimes it's the only way she can talk about the more serious things, making a joke out of it, but she's entirely sincere in her way. She wants him here and she wants him here for a long time, not just for a few weeks or months, not just until something else comes along, because she can't imagine anything else being like this.

"Besides, what would I even exchange you for? Some way less adorable and brilliant dude? Boring. I'm totally satisfied with the current model," she teases. "Like, scale of one to ten, I'd probably give you a twelve. That's valid, right?"

"It does, right? I'm already damaged," he says, gesturing to his cast, and he has a smile on his face but it doesn't reach his eyes. It's not the leg he's sparing worry about, he knows it'll heal, it's not as big of a deal to him as he might have made it if not for his new friend, the nightmares. He wonders if Owen would do him a solid and check him out more thoroughly, maybe even do a full scan, just in case. Newt's never really cowered from the possibility of anything but the thought that what's in his head could do real damage--which he knows it can, he's seen it happen, he's read the research files--freaks him out more than he cares to admit.

But even if he's freaked out, that doesn't mean Kate has to be, too. So he widens his smile and offers another laugh. "A twelve is like, bare minimum, I'm at least a fourteen. Good to know you're satisfied, though, I'd hate to think I wasn't living up to my full potential."

"Fourteen?" she asks, laughing against his shoulder. If she never had to move from this place, she thinks she might be perfectly okay with that. Her eyelids feel heavy, but she's not at that point where she's exhausted and grumpy and just wants to sleep, she's just comfortable and relaxed and really content. "Really, that's what we're going for? I mean, just jumping straight off the scale to fourteen?" She pauses, pretending she's considering it for a moment, then sighs heavily, a rush of air against his skin.

"Yeah, okay, fourteen is probably pretty close to what I'd land on." She laughs again, her eyes closed, resting against him. "Y'know, this is as bad as the points chart. We're apparently just shit at actually staying on any sort of scale or chart, even the ones we've completely made up on our own."

He's about ready to come back with an argument with supportive evidence as to why, exactly, he's totally a fourteen minimum, but then she's conceding and he nods, satisfied. "Fourteen," he repeats, and he sounds smug but there's a hint of playfulness in his tone. "I'm glad we can come to an agreement on that. I don't know what you're talking about, though, our charts and scales are flawless. We just happen to be exponentially superior in our charting and scaling methods."

He glances down at her, smiling when he sees her eyes closed and stroking at her hair. He's reminded then of something his mother used to tell him when he was young, a lullaby of sorts though she'd never really put a tune to it. He surprises himself when the words come spilling out of him, in German no less, like it's only been twenty-five minutes rather than twenty-fives years since he's last heard it.

"Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf. Am Himmel ziehn die Schaf. Die Sternlein sind die Lämmerlein, Der Mond, der ist das Schäferlein. Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf." He kisses the top of her head, then her temple, and repeats it softly in English. "Sleep, baby, sleep. Your father tends the sheep. Your mother shakes the branches small, lovely dreams in showers fall. Sleep, baby, sleep."

"My father would totally tend sheep," she mumbles, only half paying attention to the words, because it's more just the sound of Newt's voice that she's listening to, the way the inflection changes when he's speaking German, and she knows they've both just been talking about how angry German sounds, but she doesn't think that anymore. It sounds sort of nice now, she thinks, and she realizes she's drifting off to sleep, that she'd wanted to stay awake until he fell asleep first, but she can't seem to stop herself.

It's his fault. For making her feel so comfortable, for the fingers she can feel in her hair and his lips against her temple. "This is all your fault," she manages to say, but she's smiling when she speaks. "You're supposed to fall asleep first."

This is the moment Blaine was talking about. The moment she knows. She doesn't have to wonder about it anymore.

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not cool, brain, not cool

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