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This is a bad idea.
“No it’s not.”
Hermann knows nothing. This is definitely a bad idea.
“Newt, for God’s sake, I’m taking your trousers off so you can go to bed. You’re as pickled as a-” Hermann bit his words back with pursed lips.
Heh. He was totally gonna say ‘a newt’ just then. What a nerd.
“If this is what your internal monologue looks like all of the time I am- I am very worried for the fate of humanity.” Hermann wasn’t coping too well with all of the alcohol they’d consumed himself, if the swaying and fumbling and general lack of sting to his rebukes was any indication.
“Uh, for the record, we won,” Newt replied, face scrunching up as he attempted to reorganize the concept of time back into its place inside his head. It seemed a far more cramped place than usual.
“Like, four hours ago.” Or was it six?
“It was closer to six, Newt, please try and-” Hermann looked as though he was containing a rather unsavory belch for a moment, “-try and keep up.”
Newt was definitely starting to get weirded out a little bit. Probably not as much as he should be, but still.
“Okay, pretty sure that one was just inside my head. Are you psychic now, am I saying these words out loud, or is it some weird-ass leftover from the Drift?” Newt asked, focusing almost entirely on moving his lips, on being certain. Hermann’s eyelids blinked slowly, heavily in front of him. He was kneeling on his good knee, which was a relief, and Newt was propped up on the edge of his bed, trying his best not to list too far to any one side. Through his own inebriation, Hermann managed to conjure a look of genuine confusion.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, jaw working silently for a moment, “but I don’t really care right now. Priority is- priority is bed, and then we can think about Drifts and breaches and neural doggy-bagging later.”
Newt nodded in a way that he hoped looked sage and wise, but felt a little bit more like aimless lolling about. Hermann gave another valiant attempt at undoing the button on Newt’s jeans. Really, all that activity down there would have been awesome, truth told, if its intentions had been any less than pearly-white clean, and if Newt wasn’t in quite such a surreal and intoxicated state he would have almost been tempted to test those waters. There was a cry of success and the button popped loose. A thought suddenly occurred to him.
“Herm,” Newt said, “my man. My Hermann.”
“What?” was the vaguely annoyed answer.
“Undoing my pants is great and all, but-“ Newt hiccupped, “what about my shoes?”
There was a pause, during which Newt was certain Hermann dropped his gaze to the frankly filthy shoes he was still wearing from his own horrifying adventures in Hong Kong. Then the scientist hissed an emphatic swear in German.
“Fuck it,” Newt said, voice low, and feeling ill in a vague and nonspecific way. “I’m sleeping like this.”
“But-“
“I’m sleeping like this and there ain’t nothin’ on this planet that’s gonna stop me,” Newt groaned dramatically as he rolled onto his unmade bed. He mustered up just enough strength to stretch luxuriously and moan a little, but it only gave him an epic case of the head spins and he retreated into a less satisfying (but also less pain-and-potential-vomit-inducing) position. From outside Newt’s bubble of drunken comfort, he heard Hermann give a weary sigh and haul himself to his feet.
“Good night, Newt,” Hermann said wearily, shuffling his feet to go, but nuh-uh, that just wasn’t gonna fly.
“Get in here already, you stupid-” Newt flailed one hand in Hermann’s general direction, and by some miracle he actually found purchase on one of the man’s boney wrists.
“Newt, stop-” Hermann began, but his words collapsed with a quiet oof as Newt pulled him down with him. Newt wasn’t particularly strong at the best of times, let alone with an entire bottle of whatever fresh hell the Kaidanovskys had stashed in their room (God rest their crazy-ass souls), so it wasn’t as though Newt could do any damage to Hermann in his little coup. Besides, the drift had left him punishingly, ever-presently aware of exactly how much of a nuisance that old goddamn injury of Hermann’s could be, so even in his current predicament, he was mindful. Mostly.
As it was, he had to be fast as an oily snake to lace his arms around Hermann’s middle before he could protest. He was warming himself up to try, taking a deep breath and body tensing, when Newt murmured.
“Stay, Herm. Please.”
He felt Hermann relaxing slowly in his arms, and that was enough to leave his lips quirking up as he finally succumbed to sleep.
….
The human mind, as it so happens, requires sleep to convert short term memory into long term memory, sifting through all of the day to day experiences and stimuli to decide which pieces of information and experience are necessary to log and which are fit for disregard. It is painless, and can manifest itself in both abstract and realistic ways within a person’s dreamscape.
This, however, is not the case when it comes to reconciling a lifestime’s worth of another human being’s thoughts, feelings, and subjective experiences within your own.
For Newt, it felt like drowning, drowning in pine tree sap, pine tree sap that had been lit on fire inside of a hurricane. Everything he had seen in the drift, every confused and vibrant snapshot of a memory played itself out in blinding synchronicity with every other moment, and every emotion ever felt heaped itself upon him like a collapsing building. Every thought, every aborted sentence, every millisecond of contempt and frustration and fear, so much fear, the weight of the world balanced on a few fragile lines of chalk, a dizzying maelstrom of data that left him utterly at sea-
Until it manifested upon his own face. Newt was suddenly able to view himself in third person, first person, third person again, an incredible flood of dual memories reconciling themselves against one another like a puzzle that until now he hadn’t realized had been missing its other half. He rocketed through years of stolen glances and secret smiles that were distinctly not his until suddenly he was on the chair, he was in the doorway watching as aftershocks and seizures boiled his blood from the inside (he could feel it again) and the panic from the outside, not Newton not Newton oh Gott what have you done -
And then, as though latching onto that moment like an anchor to a rock, Newt orientated around a moment, no, an object, no, a feeling, and every callous remark made sense now, every stilted insult was underwritten by different words, the real words, and how could he not have known all along it was there right in front of him-
…
Newt jolted awake with a ragged gasp, his whole body thrumming with adrenalin and heart pounding in his chest. Hermann, it appeared, had done the exact same, blind confusion in his eyes as his lungs scrabbled frantically for air. His gaze skittered around the unfamiliar room, onto the unfamiliar bed until they landed upon him. There was a pause as they suffered from a mutual case of rabbit-in-the-headlights, eyes roving across each other with newfound understanding.
“You too?” were Hermann’s eventual breathless words. They were small, reverent words, his face unable to conceal the fear and the hope and the want, that expression was want pure and simple, all at war within his beautiful, glorious mind.
“God, yes,” Newt replied, right as his hand found the back of Hermann’s neck and they were surging forward, two galaxies that had been caught in each other’s orbits for too long for this not to be inevitable, not to be the only outcome for them both.
And boy, could Newt see the stars behind his eyes as Hermann’s tongue did something he certainly never thought a stuffy old professor type like him could do, but he’d hoped, and he’d thought about it, way too often for anybody to care to know about. His hands couldn’t hold enough of Hermann at once, scrabbling uselessly above his dress shirt and oh god, he actually slept in the sweater vest, what even is this, but did he actually care all that much? No. Because at that precise moment, he managed to untuck the back of said dress shirt from the back of Hermann’s equally hideous slacks and slide his hands across what may as well have been acres of skin he had never before been allowed to touch, and had never thought he would.
The realization of that (and maybe the fact that Hermann had ever so kindly relocated his mouth to Newton’s neckline, which Jesus Christ, was a low blow of the very best kind) made Newt moan aloud.
“Oh God, I can’t tell you- how much I’ve wanted this- how long-”
“I know,” Hermann gasped into Newton’s skin, “I know, Newton, because I have every iteration-” he punctuated his words with a sloppy kiss at the junction of Newt’s jaw, “-of every unspoken confession you have ever conceived-” and another, further down, “-written across the inside of my skull-”
He sank his teeth into Newton’s neck with a small, desperate huff, only just on the right side of gentle, and Newt keened and arched up into Hermann’s touches. Too much, this is too much, Newt thought desperately through the fog of arousal pooling deep in his core, this will not be one-sided I swear to God-
With a surprisingly adept move for a man who should, by all accounts, be severely hungover, or at least still feeling the last vestiges of his own drunken idiocy, Newt hooked a leg around the back of Hermann’s and flipped them both over, pinning Hermann’s hands down against the mattress with his own. The shaky rise of Hermann’s chest against his own, eyelids hooded and pupils blown wide, filled Newt with a moment of oozing satisfaction.
“Just wanted to make sure we were on the same page,” Newton said, shooting for a cocky grin but losing it when Hermann rolled his hips up against him.
“We most certainly are,” Hermann gritted, “now please, rrremove your fucking shirt.”
Oh, Hermann was just an asshole. Newt couldn’t even be mad that Hermann had obviously seen how much he, erhem, enjoyed some of his more unique linguistic tics, let alone been privy to the other, less savory little parts stashed inside Newton’s mind that would have let Hermann know about the little swearing thing. Two can play at this game, Newt thought wickedly, casting about within his own mind for any new little detail he could use to his advantage.
Aha.
“Sir, yes, sir,” Newton replied to him slyly, shooting for a husky growl and even halfway achieving it as he rolled his hips against Hermann’s erection. He sat up, straddling Hermann’s narrow frame to peel his shirt up over his head. Hermann’s mouth had opened in a wordless breath and he looked like he was going to have an aneurysm. He’d barely lifted the hem before Hermann’s hands were sliding across Newt’s hipbones, thumbs circling wide arcs and pressing into the soft flesh of his abdomen. Thankfully, Newt had lost his tie at some point throughout the previous night, and the shirt slipped free easily enough. Hermann’s hands had found their way down inside the back of Newt’s jeans, which was a feat in and of itself, but he was using their skin-tight fit to his advantage, guiding Newt’s hips down into an undulating rhythm against him. Newt sunk down low over Hermann’s body, pressing open-mouthed kisses, wordless prayers into the other’s long and pale neck as they ground against each other. He wanted everything, he wanted nothing in that moment but what he already had, what he was already receiving was more than he’d ever hoped for. He wanted to know every inch of Hermann for himself, know his body with as much thoroughness and depth as he now knew his mind, knew his soul if such things exist. The undeniable evidence that Hermann wanted that too, every bit as much and more, was so colossally humbling that Newt could barely begin to comprehend the magnitude of it in that moment.
“Newt,” Hermann hissed through his teeth, “I know you keep lubricant in your bedside table, and I am willing to ignore exactly how I know that for the moment if you hurry up and put it to use.”
Newt’s face heated and then paled suddenly at all of the implications of that sentence.
“Fuck,” he exhaled, nodding his head and frozen above Hermann. He was utterly lost.
There was a mad scrabble at the drawer, the pants and bottle caps alike, and by the time Newt returned to any semblance of personal control Hermann had managed to kick off his shoes, socks and mostly shuck his trousers from his wiry frame. Newt paused, gaping slightly at the incredible spectacle before him.
Hermann’s delicate ankles shifted slightly on the mattress under his gaze, as though he briefly wanted to cross his legs and then thought better of it. The pale scars that criss-crossed up Hermann’s leg, old surgery scars, that Newt now had an incredibly intimate second-hand relationship with. The rise and fall of Hermann’s chest, still hidden underneath his hopelessly hideous (and hopelessly disheveled) vest and shirt, was short and shallow with arousal. Beads of sweat clung to his temples like stars to the sky, and despite the fiercely defiant look on Hermann’s face, the battle-ready glare that dared Newt to laugh, dared Newt to back down, to turn him away, Hermann’s eyes were nonetheless desperate and dark with want.
His dick was also hard and straining at his underwear, but that was barely even registering for Newt by t hat point.
“Shit, Herm, you’re beautiful,” he said, breathless and so sincere that he surprised even himself. Hermann flushed deep red, cocking his chin ever so slightly higher.
“You sentimental sod,” Hermann replied. The wonky smile that spread across his face like sunlight said the thank you that Hermann never quite could out loud. Newt shook his head, laughing a little, and slotted himself right back on the bed where he belonged.
Moving in counterpoint to the fevered moments of before, Newt softly coaxed Hermann into sitting up with him, pressing slow, searching kisses to his lips. He eased his hands up underneath Hermann’s shirt, peeling away those final layers gently, quietly, over Hermann’s head. They came free with the sigh of fabric, and Newt had barely tossed them to the side when Hermann’s bare arms were winding around Newt’s neck and their chests were pressing against each other, Hermann pulling Newt back down on top of him. They were in no rush, with no world threatening to fall around their heads (and wasn’t that a strange and empty feeling to contemplate later on), so they let the sense of urgency return slowly between them with every slide of electrified skin upon skin, every exchange of the most delicious friction available to them. Newt slid one hand down Hermann’s side, reveling in the way his fingertips made the man shudder as they traced over the narrow of his waist to the sharps of his hips and around to the wiry curve of his thigh. With very little encouragement, Hermann lifted his leg and laced it firmly around the back of Newt’s knee. That position gave him just the right amount of leverage to grind up almost violently against him, and okay, yes, it was definitely back on.
”You’re sure about this?” Newt asked him, voice hushed and straining under the pressure of all the sensation he was both giving and receiving.
“I will bloody murder you, Newton, yes,” Hermann hissed, and Newt smiled into Hermann’s shoulder.
The wild keening noise that escaped Hermann’s throat at the first press of a finger did not sound like impending death to Newt, and for that he was somewhat relieved. Hermann’s entire body arched up under his touch, eyes flying open and gasping as Newt moved his slicked fingers, first one, then two, inside of him at a slow, steady pace. His mouth sucked a string of vibrant red marks onto Hermann’s pale skin (completely untouched, a blank canvas, not a single line of ink to be found), and he was quick to discover the many joys that came from pressing his tongue over Hermann’s hardened nipples. A long-fingered hand found its way into the back of Newt’s hair and took hold, and Newt’s eyes rolled back in his head as he was tugged up into a crushing kiss.
“Please, Newton,” Hermann whispered against his lips, and it was all he needed to hear.
The first thrust was achingly slow, Newt being ever so careful not to hurt Hermann as he eased himself inside. Hermann’s fingers tightened and loosened, tightened again in Newt’s hair, and amongst the flashes of Hermann’s every barbed insult about his “scruffy, stupid, unprofessional hair” in his mind (the catalogue of variants stretched back a good decade) he now had the adjoining underscore of indecent, attractive, god damnit, pull yourself together Hermann stop staring thrumming through his mind.
The thought startled a laugh from him, and he saw Hermann open his hazy eyes to glare at him in confusion.
“I can’t believe you’ve been lusting over my haircut,” He admitted, cutting off Hermann’s response briefly with a roll of his hips.
“ I can’t- believe how often you’ve fantasized about my hands,” Hermann countered, rocking back against Newt and punctuating his response with a tug of Newt’s hair. He gave an indecent groan, thrusting harder.
“They’re just- really nice hands, okay?” Newt tried. Hermann dragged Newt’s tongue against his own in a move that Newt decided must mean stop talking, and Newt slid a hand between them to stroke Hermann once, twice, and then he was gone. What was most incredible, however, was that Newt could feel it; not as a separate entity, but within himself, in and of himself, both not his and yet entirely a part of his own experiences. Newt followed him moments later, all sound disappearing as he followed Hermann past the event horizon.
Newt collapsed, breathing Hermann’s name over and over into his skin. By means of the hand still lodged in his hair he found his way up, bonelessly and shaking, to press his forehead to Hermann’s as they came down together. Hermann laughed weakly against him, and although Newt didn’t open his eyes, he was nearly certain he would see a tear track or two across Hermann’s cheekbones. It was a profoundly intimate thing, a declaration in the way that only they could appreciate it in that moment. Newt wondered if it was at all possible for the laws of space and time to bend around them, like a river around a rock, and just let them lie there together forever. A part of his mind that sounded uncannily like Hermann tried to explain to him exactly why that was impossible, but he pushed it away to focus on the feel of Hermann’s heartbeat, moving in tandem with his own against his chest.
Their afterglow didn’t get to last, however, as their grossly overdue hangovers chose that exact moment to rear their ugly heads, and they groaned simultaneously, rolling away from each other clutch at their skulls in horror.
"Is this your hangover or mine?” Newt asked jokingly, and Hermann huffed. The moment was officially broken.
“There’s every possibility that it’s both of them,” Hermann replied, tone sour with pain, and he made to roll off the bed.
No.
Newt reached for him desperately, his hand halting Hermann as he sat up on the edge of the bed. Hermann paused, and Newt could see when the memories, his own memories, surged to the forefront of Hermann’s awareness, for they flooded through him as well. The faceless entities who left, who always left, no matter what he did. Newt realized only moments before they faded that the little parade of ghostly figures weren’t all his.
Jesus, I haven’t thought about this in forever, Newt thought. Something in the drift must have stirred up things he had come to grips with years ago, and the same was to be said for Hermann. He didn’t know whether it was mortifying or gratifying to have someone be so deeply embedded in his own brain, so deeply conscious of the why’s behind everything he did and said and thought.
“I’m just using your shower,” Hermann reassured him gently, dragging Newt into the present. He could clearly sense the impending panic that would no doubt circle Newton’s head the moment he was out of sight. Newt was almost certain that such thoughts would circle Hermann’s head too, but whether it was as a result of some behavioural after-image or Hermann’s own disposition, he couldn’t be sure. Not whilst his head was pounding so insistently, anyway.
“Can I join you?” Newt tried, not quite managing to play it off, but trying.
“I would be insulted if you didn’t,” Hermann replied, leaning over to kiss him firmly, and Newt knew in that moment that yes. There was a reason he had been in love with this horrid man for so long.
And even better, he knew that he wasn’t alone in that feeling.