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“Bro, you look amazing. Really put together, you know? Makes us look as if we know what we’re doing or something.”
The Kaiju tank was a poor substitute for a mirror but it was all they had in their lab for Hermann to fix his collar in and it was reflective enough to fire a glare at Newt behind him. Newt just grinned. His expression was wolfish, teeth catching the unnatural light like a row of glowing tombstones.
“One of us has to look presentable on these TV appearances,” Hermann said dryly. Newt was wearing a battered t-shirt from a band that Hermann had never heard of. The fabric had seen better days, hanging limply in the places it wasn’t scorched or torn by chemical accidents. “If I recall, it was you who suggested that we make a more frequent show of ourselves.”
Newt scoffed.
"Dude, I look great. And who cares anyway? Everyone loves us no matter what. I could probably go out there and say ‘we orchestrated the whole thing’ and they’d still chant my name wherever I went.”
He pushed himself up from the couch and Hermann cocked a brow, unsurprised when Newt slid his chin onto his shoulder but not expecting the hand that straightened out his crooked tie. The couch in the lab had once been a cosy little thing that had seated two overworked scientists during the war, but now it was for more important things, like sharing new scientific theories and watching Newton’s woefully exaggerated monster movies. Since they’d sorted that whole war thing out, their time was their own again. The Shatterdome was their private domain in a noisy, half-destroyed world.
“They’d chant your name, would they? You might have drifted with that disgusting brain but I recall that I was the one who reprogrammed the Jaeger code. Your little Kaiju minions wouldn’t have had anything to fight against if I hadn’t taken pity on you.”
“Yeah but controlling Jaegers with a joystick isn’t as cool as commanding a Kaiju army.”
Hermann laughed. “An army now, is it? Four or five final Kaiju brought up from the Anteverse to take a beating isn’t an army, Newton.”
It wasn’t wholly true but it was fun to tease. The group of Kaiju that Newt had controlled using his insane new Drift tech had obliterated half of the coastline and all the Shatterdome’s remaining Jaegers before Hermann had deigned to reprogramme some of them. The final push on the Breach had already happened and fallen into disaster when Newt had been struck with the idea. If Hermann wasn’t of the same mind, he’d have said that the strain of imminent world-ending destruction had driven the biologist mad. He’d almost said as much until Newt had pitched him the idea.
“We could make the world better, in our own way,” Newt had said, “We could stage one little fight, play ourselves as heroes and be rock stars. You and me.”
Becket and Mako commanded the only manned Jaeger. Hermann liked them enough to give them a share of the glory but the rest was for him. And Newt, of course. After his little pitch, Hermann had sat with four LED screens and his keyboard, controlling the Jaegers at every turn as Newt sat beside him, waging their feigned war with Kaiju bodies.
The media had eaten up the story of two scientists using unparalleled science to drive the Kaiju back into the breach for good. There was no point mentioned that they’d added some dramatic flare and a few destroyed cities to the show, for good measure. It was almost laughable how much people wanted heroes to adore.
“We’re rock stars now,” Newt said. His voice had that cocky quality he took on whenever he talked about Kaiju on talk shows or when he gave lectures about Breach biology. It was infuriating.
“We’re scientists,” Hermann huffed.
“Can’t we be both?”
Hermann shrugged him off, pulling his sleeves up from under his cardigan so they revealed the elegant little cufflinks that Newt had bought him for their joint Nobel Prize presentation. They were made of decommissioned Jaeger steel, from the earliest model. Hermann secretly loved them.
“Need I remind you that you almost slipped up in our last interview? I was left to clean up your mess,” he said. He had made a mess himself, with what was left of the reporter, but he’d always had more stomach for that kind of thing than Newton. Newton might be a biologist with a nauseating love for Kaiju guts, but he was slower to come around to violence than Hermann had been.
Numbers were what mattered to Hermann; statistics and empirical figures were the closest thing one could get to the handwriting of God. It was what made Newton such an excellent match for him. They were so much each other’s opposites, like the one and zero of binary. Which also meant that reporters had to be silenced before they could dive too deep into Hermann’s Jaeger codes, because two people was what it took to hold a world in balance, but it only took one to make them fall.
“Come on baby, don’t be nervous. I’ll be way better this time, I promise!”
“Over a million people tune into these interviews, it isn’t the time to be sloppy. Leave that for your science.”
“Hey!”
For a man responsible for the deaths of more people than Hermann could count, Newton was surprisingly unthreatening, even when insulted. He’d never intimidated Hermann but he was a delightful challenge. Hermann had never met a person he couldn’t overthrow until he met Newton, which made them an unmatched duo for world domination.
“I’ll have you know that there’s nothing sloppy about what I’m working on right now. There’s stuff in this lab that you don’t even know about!” Newt yelled, waving his arms.
Newton had crossed to his own side of the lab, a Kaiju intestine attached somehow to his shoe from somewhere under their couch. His side of the lab was even more splattered with blood and Kaiju blue than usual, which would frustrate Hermann if he hadn’t been scrubbing blood out of his own side of the floor not 48 hours ago.
“Really Newton,” Hermann said, “Things that I wouldn’t know about?” He sidestepped Newt so as to place the other scientist’s back to the glass tank, silhouetting him against the sickly yellow glow. Hermann crowded closer, cane clacking against the floor and echoing in the silence that followed. He left nowhere for Newt to go.
“I know everything that goes on in this lab. Kaiju tissue cloning, Kaiju-human splicing, human cloning. Don’t ever assume that I don’t know what you’re up to.”
For a second, Newt faltered, looking caught out and chagrined until he glanced over at Hermann’s neatly compact chalkboard calculations. He jutted his chin with an arrogant flare in his eye.
“Same goes for you, dude. When were you going to tell me that you’d been working on world economy algorithms?” He nodded at the boards. Hermann smiled primly.
“A little anniversary gift. Wartime fame will only last so long once the governments begin to move on and it will do us wonders to have a grasp on the world’s recovering economy. For a rainy day, so to speak.”
“By grasp, you mean grip?”
“A tight one.”
Newt grinned.
He grabbed Hermann’s tie, which he’d only moments ago straightened, and pulled Hermann closer. He kissed him, quick and impulsive at first but then moving forward like he intended to cause a distraction. Hermann brought the tip of his cane up to Newt’s chest and pushed him away with an unimpressed glare.
“We have a television interview to get to,” he said, “A populace won’t adore absent idols, after all.”
Newt shrugged.
“You’re no fun. Plenty of rock stars get worshipped after they’re dead.” He looked like he was deep in thought for a second, eyes glittering. Hermann cut off the thought before it could grow.
“You’re not cloning any musicians, dead or alive. Now come on, before anyone comes looking for us and discovers our anniversary plans.”