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The worst is when it’s a pain he isn’t used to. The fists his muscles form, the shooting cold, the sudden stealing of sensation—these holler in a different key, one his baseline signal processing isn’t prepared to filter out.
(Bullshit, Newton will say later, xenobiology apparently requiring enough human A&P to make him a peak irritant. Pain signals are literally the exception to acclimatization, dude. His body has adjusted to working in the heat or cold, at a high or low altitude, but the same pain he’s carried in a steadily-growing number of joints for the better part of a decade still snatches his balance out from under him, pulls a groan out of his mouth like a magician’s handkerchief that just keeps going.)
More often, though, it’s the frequency that increases, not the amplitude; his body beats against the walls, rattles the bars, distraught that he doesn’t heed its signal. Something is wrong! it shrieks until hoarse, clawing its way into a fetal position he hasn’t been able to accomplish in dozens of months. Why won’t you help me?
On good days—ones where he hurts too loudly to think but doesn’t have to drag himself into another man’s skin anyway, that of a scholar and scientist who works when he’s expected to, who has a chronic condition only in theory, who can sit in a chair as long as the next person—he counts the cracks of his joints, listens for a pattern. He wonders if Fibonacci did not know more of arthritis than Galen. On bad days, he has no option but to add evidence to the theory that he can’t do this. He has yet to figure out a way to write while lying prone on the floor, begging gravity to force his hips back into place, so he solves equations in his head.
(What no one mentions is that the graph of pain is not a straight line, some (y-y1)=m(x-x1) where after a certain coordinate, the horizon of one’s thoughts is heavy with fog. Instead, it spirals: there is first a lucid pain, then the haze, then a deceptive clarity in which conscious thought is not only possible but necessary, and lastly a state where one feels one’s grip on sentience has slipped, leaving behind some writhing thing, half-banshee and starving for relief.)
(After that is only a flickering of lights like a cityscape from a painter’s Cyanopsic Period, then black.)
If you could make incisions around his sacrum, slice the tendons like ribbons, and lift the whole thing out, maybe then the bass note strong enough to knock him off balance would fall silent. If you could carve out his pelvis and leave the rest to thrash on the table, or stretch his skin around a new three inches of cushion in each joint, maybe he’d sleep through the night. The knots in his quads would put a sailor’s to shame, but all his sails hang limp in the dead air, and he limps like a dead man, like a barely-walking nightmare.
He was never the most forgiving person, but now, his patience has atrophied down to a size he can cradle in one palm, a bloodied and fractured thing. It’s a relief stronger than an old illicit Vicodin to let the mask clatter to the floor around Newton with a sound like that of three joints cracking simultaneously when he stands, to not need to pretend to be anything more than what he is: stripped of cartilage and compassion, a cruel and clipped specter, a phantom haunting himself.
Newton, in return, gives and gives of himself the one thing Hermann never receives elsewhere: impure and unadulterated dickishness. Some days, Newton is the only one to treat him with something other than a cloying pity that clogs his mouth and claws at his rib cage. Newton stares, blisteringly, at the sum concentration of Hermann’s fragility and does not flinch at all the names he’s called him—doubles down, in fact. He screams at Hermann, not because of him, and Hermann learns that he would rather be a villain than a monster, that any insult cocked and aimed with scathing accuracy—pompous, pretentious, ineffective, overrated, obsolete, lonely—is preferable to horror. He may be the skeleton in his own closet, but he feels nothing but nausea at being anyone else’s demon.
If they do this thing, if they’re not dead too soon for him to sit through the consequences, the PPDC had better pay for his fucking dentures after all the nights he’s chosen to write one more line with the energy he needed to brush his teeth. Instead of thinking about it, he makes a mixtape in his mind, all the songs he’ll never play around Newton. Or ever again, just to be safe. I Wanna Be Your Dog, by which I mean put me down. His body is not the cage, it is the animal, and Schrödinger has lost his keys.
Newton sketches Kaiju knees on the backs of napkins, he mutters about their elbows in his sleep, and he never looks at Hermann like he’s something Newt wants to yammer into a tape recorder about, not even when he’s been awake for fifty hours in a row and hallucinates reptilian angels he never speaks of again.
(Hermann, honoring an unspoken pact, does not call a doctor. He cooks soup. If the Marshall were to find out, he decides, he will say it is like how wild rabbits abandon nests that have been disturbed. The kind of love that inspires self-preservation, the prisoner’s dilemma with its pockets emptied and its shoes untied.)
When Newton is having a bad day, he hums. Hermann keeps all his tells between his lips like a seamstress with her pins. I Wanna Be Your Lover. I Wanna Be Sedated. I Don’t Wanna Be An Asshole Anymore, by which he means he wishes he knew how. He wishes he had the energy to do anything but stare at the slope of his knuckles in the dark and picture Newt kneeling on his hips until they click back around the base of his spine. Hermann wants him closer than from one bone to another and more stable besides, wants Newton to hold his ribs in place with the insides of his thighs, to refuse to look away when he realizes how much of Hermann is made of want.
*
The worst part of the world not ending is that Hermann no longer has a prognosis. This will either degenerate until it kills him or it won’t; either way, he’s likely got decades left of twisting stiffly every morning, of the blaring need to stand after five minutes seated, of spending ten minutes on the floor for every four hours asleep. Usually, on the days when it takes a twelve-step plan to roll over in bed, Hermann plays Tetris on his phone for hours and thinks rude things every time Newt snores. Sometimes, though, Newton is awake, after one Mountain Dew too many or one pill too few or some shift in barometric pressure too minute for even particle physics to detect. On these nights, they don’t talk, and they don’t—God forbid, when every additional sensation is its own declaration of war on a cellular level—touch. They lay side by side, some sketch or another on Newton’s tablet illuminating the lower half of his face, and when Hermann groans in agony despite himself, Newton, bless him, doesn’t say a word.