The rain had started again, tapping against the windowpane like a metronome for grief. It hadn’t stopped much since Newt left. you used to think the skies over Berlin were grey; now they felt colorless. Hollow.

He didn’t say goodbye like people do in movies — no dramatic pauses, no promises sealed with teary kisses. Just a long hug at the station, the kind where you know someone is already slipping through your fingers. “I’ll write,” he said, like we were in the 1940s and not in the middle of a goddamn Kaiju apocalypse.

Now he’s halfway across the world in the Hong Kong Shatterdome, burying himself in cortex scans and Kaiju entrails, chasing answers with that mad light in his eyes. you get it — you always did. He’s trying to save the world. But knowing that doesn’t make it easier at 2 a.m., when the bed still smells like him.

you picked up his old Ramones shirt from the floor this morning. Still wrinkled, still faintly stained with coffee and lab dust. you pressed it to your face, and for one raw second, it was like he was here. Like if I turned around, he’d be grinning at me, eyes wild with a new theory, arms open like nothing had changed.

But everything has.

Newt’s Pov:

He hadn’t even unpacked his duffel bag when the lab called him in again. Another fragment of Kaiju cortex had arrived from Tokyo, still pulsing faintly in its containment case. He stared at it too long, eyes bloodshot from no sleep and too much caffeine, but his thoughts weren’t really in the room.

They were still back in Germany. With her.

He’d left in a rush — not because he wanted to, but because he had to. The war was getting worse, and the Kaiju were evolving faster than anyone could explain. He told himself that if anyone could crack it, it was him. That if he just worked fast enough, smart enough, maybe people like her wouldn’t have to live in fear anymore.

But the truth? He hated himself a little more every day for walking out that door.

He hadn’t called yet. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know what to say. What was he supposed to tell her? That he missed her so much it physically hurt? That he kept one of her hair ties around his wrist like a talisman? That he hadn’t slept in her old hoodie because it smelled too much like home and it made him feel like breaking?

He caught himself one night, fingers hovering over his phone, her contact pulled up and glowing softly in the dark. He didn’t press call. Just stared, aching.

Every time a siren blared through the Dome, he pictured her waking up alone, thousands of miles away, clutching one of his old shirts like it could protect her. And maybe it could. Maybe some part of him was still there — in the fibers, the threads, the spaces they used to share.

But he wasn’t.

He was here. With the monsters.