prettyoddasnineintheafternoon:

One of my favorite HC’s about Hermann is that he’s this darkly passionate dude. Newt will observe him humming along to The Smiths, low lighting, reading An Oresteia, and calling that a good Saturday evening. He’ll bring up the death of Alan Turing and look personally offended. He mopes. He’s melancholic. Whereas Newt faces the Kaiju attacks with excitement and interest, Hermann becomes pensive and mournful. Every death is his fault. He could have done something differently, anything differently to change the outcome. Despite the lab being reasonably small, Newt always feels like Hermann’s distant; looming, far away, and not entirely approachable. He gazes out windows. He sighs instead of answering Newt’s questions directly. He complains about his joints only to say he knows it’s going to rain or that no work will get done for the rest of the day. He’ll mutter to himself cryptically,  whole series of numbers from his calculations, without any explanation. He’s perfected the glossy, unseeing, stare, and yet his hands shake viciously. The same Hermann who barely speaks during the day looks absolutely strung out as he works, hair sticking-up, covered in chalk dust, and listening to Tchaikovsky all through the night. 

The first time Newt tells him about his love of the Kaiju over letter, Hermann writes back something along the lines of the myth of Icarus and how “When you strive for the sun, you too will land amongst the sea. Except, I think you might actually prefer it there.”  When they work together, it becomes clear in their routines; Newt takes breaks and won’t go to the lab for days. Hermann is constantly at his desk, recalculating, pursuing, chasing. His father looms as a constant reminder of crippling doubt. He doesn’t eat or sleep for days. He wants to do more, to be better, to be enough. With that same energy he often feels he’s chasing Newt down too. Newt who strings him along by letter and by lab partner, but never sits still long enough to pay Hermann any real attention. Newt who flirts and teases, but never takes anything seriously. Newt who wants fast, hard, and dangerous, but doesn’t know the consequences of his pursuits until it’s too late. So Hermann wakes up each cold, grey, morning resigned to his fate; inefficient and unloved (or at least, that’s what he tells himself.) He imbues tragedy where the cracks in the narrative allow it. Like gold used to reattach pieces of a shattered vase, he knows to repair the world he has to focus on where it breaks first. After all, equations are only fractured things meticulously melded back together. After all, those same fractures grace his limbs and his family lineage and his heart. After all, the lonely and isolated logician he is, doesn’t know any another way to calibrate reality than through the lens of total despair.