Rating:

General Audiences
Archive Warning:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
Gen
Fandom:
Pacific Rim (2013)
Characters:
Hermann Gottlieb
Newton Geiszler
Stacker Pentecost
Additional Tags:
Pre-Canon
Backstory
Stats:
Published:
2013-08-11
Words:
1858
Chapters:
1/1
Kudos:
3
Bookmarks:
1
Hits:
39
Blood in the Water
telm_393
Summary:
Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler, becoming weapons in the war against the Kaiju.
Notes:
This is for the Jaegercon Gift Exchange, for bademotionalresponses.
Work Text:
Hermann is a very quiet little boy. He lives in his own head, his mother says, looking at him with an
emotion that she will always deny is sadness.
He doesnt play with stuffed animals like his siblings, or action figures, or really any toys other than
a few robot figures and some toy planes.
He loves toy planes.
He says hes going to be a pilot someday, but he never really believes it, not as his hip starts
bothering him more and more over the years and his eyes start to grow dull.
Mostly he doesnt play with toys, though. Mostly he writes in little notebooks and on papers he
carefully pastes on the walls.
He writes numbers. He starts that when hes a very young child, about three, when he watches his
father writing his own numbers on a whiteboard.
He studies those numbers, and theyre too advanced for him to understand, true, but he finds them
fascinating, just the shape of them, and he steals Karlas first grade math book and makes his own
makeshift whiteboard and carefully reads the instructions in the book and then equally carefully
writes numbers all over the pieces of paper.
Thats the day he learns how to add.
Thats also the day that Karla walks into his room and stops and stares at his work and then calls out,
Mama!
Thats the day they realize that Hermann is different.
He skips many grades at school because his parents dont believe in him wasting his intellect on
things that he can already do and try their best to ignore what the teachers warn about stunted
development of social skills.
Sometimes Hermann wonders if he would be better with people had he spent more time with people
his age growing up like Karla always said, and most of the time he doesnt care.
He doesnt care about people because people start hurting him very early onthe children at school
laugh at him and they beat him up and when he starts using a cane they call him a cripple and his
mother promises that theyll go out together soon but they never do and his father says he doesnt
have time for him right now but he will soon and hes lyingand Hermann decides that numbers
are his friends.
Then he decides that he doesnt need any other friends. Numbers do not lie to him and he
appreciates that.
Hermann finally leaves the hell that is secondary school when hes fourteen to study at TU Berlin.
He buries himself even deeper in his studies because he still doesnt know how to interact with
other people, especially not these adults that look at him warily, who dont know what to do with
him.
But Hermann is happy enough, wrapped in his numbers like theyre armor.
When Hermann is twenty-six, his carefully constructed world falls apart as he watches utter
confusion unfold before him on television.
Six months later, the next Kaiju makes landfall, and that is when Hermann is certain this is going to
continue until somebody can stop it, and that is also when Hermann is certain that he is going to be
one of those people, no matter what.
He starts to apply his numbers to the Kaiju.
The third makes landfall.
He begins to see a pattern.
Then, hes predicting when the next Kaiju will land. He writes papers on it, posts his findings on the
internet, informs his fatheranything for people to at least have this knowledge in a world full of
bizarre happenings.
The fourth Kaiju lands a day after he predicts it will, and then hes making another prediction, and
another, and hes trying to figure out where the Kaiju are coming from. Other scientists have
already figured out that theyre coming from an entirely different direction, and thats when
Hermann starts to study exactly where they could be coming from, where the breach was formed.
Because after they find that out, they can start figuring out what exactly is inside the breach. What
this other dimension consists of, if theres any kind ofpassage that the Kaiju are taking.
Hermann is working on refining his predictive model when theres a knock at the door of his office.
He doesnt notice, too wrapped up in his equations, his chalk tapping against one of his blackboards.
The door opens, and that he does notice, huffing angrily and looking over at the stranger who has
had the nerve to barge into his office.
He raises an eyebrow when he notices who it is: a dark-skinned man with a military stature and a
uniform.
Hermann knows where this is going, and he listens quietly as Marshall Pentecost recruits him to the
PPDC.
Hermann nods when its over. Its about time.
+
When hes a child, Newts thoughts go so fast its hard for even him to catch up to them sometimes,
but he does his best.
He scrawls his theories, his views, his diagrams, anything he deems important enough to keep into
notebooks, and when he runs out of paper he writes on any other available surfacethe walls of his
room, his desk, his skin.
He draws on his skin a lot, monsters from movies and from his own mind.
(His mind is full of monsters. They rampage through his dreams, but he sleeps fine, when he sleeps.)
He talks too fast and the other kids call him a freak and Newt laughs at them and skips another
grade because hes bored.
Thats the problem, hes always bored because the world is boring, and by the time Newt is thirteen
years old he wants to crawl out of his skin and do something that is beyond just exist, and he picks
fights even though hes a tiny kid and revels in the pain of getting beaten up because thats a good
way to feel something.
He moves a million miles a minute and sometimes he ends up stagnating, holing himself in his
room for days poring over his work and not even making as many corrections as he wants because
who has the energy, and sometimes he goes so fast that it scares him, that his body feels like its
completely charged with electricity and hes pretty sure its going to electrocute him.
He watches monster movies and marvels in the scale of it all, wonders what it would be like if there
were real monsters.
Newt gets accepted into MIT and immediately jumps in and starts working.
Hes got six doctorates and is teaching by the time hes twenty-five, and when his parents ask him
why Newt laughs and says, You know I get bored easily.
Twenty-five is also the year that the first Kaiju makes land in San Francisco, and Newt watches in
horror along with a huge, jostling crowd of students and professors, but the thing ishe doesnt just
watch in horror, because that monsterits awesome.
Sure, maybe its awesome in the original sense of the word, but its amazing and he wants to study
it immediately, because this is what hes been dreaming of for years.
Monsters, and its sad that people are dying, its fucking tragic, but this is a huge breakthrough,
because what can this be other than an alien?
Kaiju, his mind supplies.
The news anchor calls the monster Trespasser, and a few months after San Francisco gets cleaned
upNewt sees the numbers, the death toll, watches the news, watches people grieving and he
vomits violently just from the guilt, because he thought and he still thinks that the monster that
destroyed so many peoples lives was awesome and for the millionth time he wonders if hes a
monster tooNewt goes to see Trespassers skull, and he looks at it and takes like a million
pictures and its seriously amazing because hes already started to study Trespasser.
He wonders, loudly and to anyone who will listen, which is almost nobody, if Trespasser is really
the last of these creatures.
He doesnt think so.
Its just too huge, too bizarre to happen just once. Where did it come from? If they cant figure out
where it came from, then they cant say that it isnt coming back, Newt argues.
Hes right, too, and theres part of him that says, ha, told you, when the next Kaiju makes landfall in
Manila, and theres another part of him that says, shit.
Thats when he really starts studying the Kaiju, because Newt, over everything, is a biologist, its
whats always really fascinated him, and now he can do what he always wanted to dohe can be a
xenobiologist.
His entire life starts to revolve around the Kaiju, and every time one of them makes landfall he
catalogues what exactly they do, how they look, and he forms theories and he writes them down, he
fills notebooks, hes started writing on his walls again.
He publishes papers on the Kaiju, and thats when he starts to get noticed. Mostly by people who
call him crazy, a freak for caring so much about the monsters and less about defending the world
against them, but there are other people who are interested in the Kaiju and Newt has things to say,
and he knows that he can figure out how to beat them with the proper equipment.
Newts twenty-six years old when hes hanging out in his officewhich is really messy, full of
post-it notes telling him to remember things hes going to forget anyway and diagrams of Kaiju and
blurry photographs of them and notebooks full of notes and diatribes and essays on anything and
everything that he thinks might help his researchspinning around in his office chair, legs tucked
under him, when the door opens.
He doesnt really care, and just keeps spinning, until a hand comes down on the back of the chair,
bringing it to a halt.
Frowning, Newt adjusts his glasses and looks up and finds himself staring into the stern face
ofsome military guy.
Dr. Newton Geiszler, my name is Marshall Stacker Pentescost, the guy says.
Newt nods, because he has a pretty good idea where this is going.
The Pan-Pacific Defense Corps is interested in your work, Dr. Geiszler. Im here to request that
you join the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps in K-Science.
Newt grins. Its about time.
+
Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb are dangerous.
They are weapons.
People forget this. They forget it because its not as obvious in a Shatterdome full of soldiers, men
and women with extensive physical training.
Theyre the last men standing in K-Science, and theres a reason for that.
Theyre brilliant, so brilliant that theyre indispensable, and Stacker Pentecost thanks goodness
every day that Hermann and Newt never even considered leaving the K-Science program, even
when their funding was cut for the tenth time.
Theyre too busy studying the monsters to care, too busy with their dissections and their numbers,
too busy with each other.
Theyre going to help save the world, because they dont need a Jaeger to fight monsters. They just
need their minds.

Music: feedback - denver