#hermannessa

"And what principle is at work here?" Hermann asks.

"Surface tension!" exclaims Ada, and she gleefully jabs the button that turns on the fan that blows an enormous bubble over their heads. When it pops and scatters soap and glycerin everywhere, she squeals and demands to do it again. 

When at last her daughter tires of the bubble machine, Vanessa takes her hand and allows herself to be tugged all the way across the third floor. "Kaiju room! Kaiju room!" Vanessa glances over her shoulder and Hermann, trailing them, shrugs ruefully. Uncle Newton's influence persists, even in his absence, much like gravity. 

Along with an interactive kaiju war timeline and a very basic Jaeger simulator and a memorial wall, there is one cross section of a kaiju femur. It's genuine, and so sturdy that they don't bother with a display case. Ada runs up to it and starts tracing the osteons. After a moment, Vanessa realizes Ada is finding patterns there, like constellations.

"This one looks like a bunny," her daughter declares. "Are they extinct?" She just learned that word last week.

Vanessa takes a moment to sort out that Ada is not, in fact, talking about bunnies anymore. "They are very extinct," she confirms. 

Ada looks up at her, and when the situation warrants it, there is nothing in all the world more serious than a three-year-old. "What if they come back?"

"Then we'll make them go extinct again," she says.

Then he turns the corner, and it’s worse than he feared. He hesitates, and finally clears his throat to let her know he’s there, then regrets it because it makes him sound irritated, which he’s not, but there isn’t a sound he can make to let her know he’s there and also indicate that he’s terrified. “Sorry,” Vanessa says with a sort of half-smile, half-wince. “Inter-departmental memo. Done in a tick!”

"It’s all right," he murmurs, hoping he hasn’t gone completely red. He tries to look interested in the bulletin board, to not look at her, but after a moment he realizes he’s staring at the FMLA poster, and that could send the wrong message, so Hermann stares at the floor until the last memo prints. 

Vanessa gathers up the stack and then gets the spray bottle of glass cleaner. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” Hermann stammers. He can’t see any smudges on the platen. Her movements are gracefully precise and she does not leave careless traces; he’s never witnessed her so much as chew the end of a pencil. 

"Maybe not," Vanessa says as she sprays, "but I wipe it down every day ever since I heard about what Don in accounting copied." Quietly she adds, "He had to enlarge it by four hundred percent." 

The effort of containing his laughter results in a very undignified and unprofessional snort. Vanessa grins at him, and, emboldened, Hermann opens his mouth to say something equally witty, he hopes, but they’re interrupted, which seems to happen every time Hermann works up his nerve. 

"Psst, Vanessa," says Alison, poking her head around the corner, "is the coast cl—oh, hey." 

"Copy your zines over lunch," Vanessa scolds mildly. She gives Hermann another smile over her shoulder as she goes up front. 

"Vanessa?" Hermann bends down next to where she sits, her back against the botany texts. "Vanessa, what’s happened?"

She glances at him for a split second, then looks away again and swipes at the tear streaks on her cheeks. Her hair tumbles forward as she dips her head, hiding her face. Her shoulders are drawn in, tense. “It’s stupid.”

"It’s clearly not," Hermann says, easing himself down beside her. Their arms barely touch. "If you don’t want to tell me, fine, but if it would help to talk about it, I’m here. And I’m not going to laugh at you, whatever it is." Never. 

Vanessa sniffs a few more times, then says in a hoarse, quiet voice, “On the way here, I nearly stepped on a toad.”

Somehow Hermann does manage to refrain from laughing, but something must show on his face, because she lifts her head to glare. “See? It’s stupid. I didn’t even actually step on it, but I just kept thinking, what if I had?”

Hermann squints across the aisle at natural history, and stays respectfully silent. 

"Also," Vanessa says after a deep breath, "I got an e-mail from Mr. Hansen saying that life drawing is canceled tonight, and I was really counting on that forty quid this week."

He makes a sympathetic sound, and loops his arm around hers. 

"And I slept through my alarm this morning," Vanessa continues, and now the words come fast, a flood that can’t be dammed, "and got to class ten minutes late and found out Alison and I only got sixty-seven percent on our group project, even though we worked our arses off, all because bloody Trevin didn’t show up for the presentation."

"That’s bullshit,” Hermann blurts. 

She lets out a bitter laugh. “I know! Alison wants to egg his Mustang.” Hermann puts his arm around her shoulders, and she leans into him. “Dropped my toothbrush in the toilet bowl this morning, too.” Hermann shudders.

They’re silent, comfortable against each other, for several breaths. Vanessa relaxes a little. Hermann thinks the litany might be over. He threads his fingers into the coils of her hair. 

"Mum called this morning," Vanessa murmurs. "S’what woke me up. She said KJU is pulling eminent domain on their whole neighborhood." 

Hermann turns to put both arms around her as Vanessa starts to cry again. He runs his hand gently up and down her arm. “Just tell me we’re gonna get those bastards,” she says between sobs.