Chapter Text
When Tina refuses her favourite drink during a celebratory night out, Newt doesn’t think anything of it. Just Tina being a health conscious and altogether conscientious Auror. He doesn’t blink when she turns her nose up at an odour no one else could quite smell and he shrugs when she finches at Dougal jumping up on her excitedly once they arrive home in the wee hours of the morning.
It’s only when he’s awoken later by sounds of her wretching in the en suite that he puts two and two together.
“Why haven’t you told me?”
Tina is brushing her teeth when she shrugs, glancing back at him in the mirror. “There’s no point when I know what you’ll say.”
“And what is that?”
“Get rid of it.” She drops her toothbrush down into its holder far harder than it deserved. The resentment is etched on her words and it stings, Picket withdrawing into his unruly mop of hair. Whilst he had disregarded other telltale signs, her drastic shift in mood was something he had noticed, chiefly because he was frequently on the receiving end of it - something that now made all the sense in the world. The back of his head still ached from the jinxed teacup she’d propelled in his general direction the previous night.
Newt sighs, rubbing at said tender spot. “Tina, you can’t seriously be considering anything else.” But of course she was. “You know you couldn’t go through with adoption,” because he knows his Tina and he knows her heart. She’d take one look at that baby and fall in love.
She turns to look at him with those eyes that could bring even the highest of men to their knees. The eyes he just knows their child will inherit and make him forget to breathe. And to be true, he wouldn’t be able to sign those papers either.
“Who said abortion is any easier?” She leans back against the sink, her arms folded under her breasts. It’s her stance of relaxed defiance; an indication that tells Newt she won’t give in so easily. It makes him wonder just how long she’d known about this development; how recent and just how much she’d thought about it, considered the possibilities, weighed their options and, somewhere along the way, gotten herself attached. How much longer still would she have kept it from him? Until she was in labour?
If only he’d paid more attention to the subtle ways in which she was changing. Perhaps then he might’ve been able to dissuade her from committing herself to a future that could never be, however often a small child with freckled skin and the darkest eyes frequented his dreams.
“Tina, please,” he implores, hating himself for asking her to do this.
She has unfolded her arms now and is standing before him, her hands on his chest, her eyes pleading with hope and it takes all his strength not to touch her in all the ways that led to their current predicament. “No one needs to know it’s yours. No one but us.” She is almost pleading now and it hurts him that she feels she must.
It could work and he can tell she has pondered it at length - she was nothing if not fastidious. If only she’d apply her strategic impassiveness to this too.
Irregardless, Newt knows something Tina doesn’t and for any of their efforts to hide the child’s true paternity, the enemy would know.
And Newt refused to put Tina and any child of theirs in Grindelwald’s sights.
“What about when the child is old enough to wonder? Are you going tell him that your elusive friend who lives in a case because he faked his own death is his father?” He doesn’t tell her he wants to be known as ‘Papa’ from the start because he is surprised by it himself. Not to mention that it’s simply not realistic and if she wasn’t going to be, it was his responsibility to shoulder that burden. He could not let his mind wander to that which she’d already given her heart.
“We’ll cross that bridge when w-“
“The bridge was burned the moment we decided to sleep together,” he interrupts, frustrated. It sounds harsh but it was true. It was futile to avoid eventualities and this, he realises, was one of them. They hadn’t exactly been careful. She hadn’t been taking any preventative potion and he hadn't kept a tight rein on his inhibitions.
Still, he couldn’t find it in himself to regret any of it. Though, he omits that from the conversation as well.
“We are not doing this. We can’t.” She had to accept that. End of discussion
The wounded flare in her eyes however, said otherwise. “This is not your decision, Newt.”
With a wave of her hand, Tina slams the door in his face and he’s left with a sore nose to accompany the headache.
He leans back against the door and slides down onto the floor. The ever watchful demiguise joins him shortly after, his small paw pressed to the door, blue eyes flashing.
”if only you could tell me what you see,” Newt sighs, followed by a wince when he hears Tina vomit again.
...
Two weeks pass with no further mention of the elephant in the room and it served no effort to defuse the tension surrounding it. Contrarily, it only seemed to grow with the gradual swell of Tina’s belly.
No one at the ministry has commented thus far but Newt knows people are starting to suspect. It was difficult not to notice when she insisted on wearing her regular form fitting clothing at the office.
Thankfully his contacts at the Daily Prophet were able to avert the wandering eyes of the all too-eager reporters, thirsty for a story which may lead to questions about himself and Tina. It is best his name was kept out of the papers entirely, lest they attract unsavoury attention.
Although he was among those who made no remarks, he thinks she does it to draw not their attention but his, to the small but conspicuous change in her body - the body he knows better than his own - to urge some paternal need or longing in him.
He wishes he could say it wasn’t working.
A couple days after their initial argument at the threshold of the en suite, she’d left a folder in his shed pertaining to MACUSA’’s correspondence with the Ministry in all things operation ‘Dead Scamander’. Tucked gently into the folds between two pages was the grainy, obscured, black and white square that would begin to destabilise any and all grievances he had on the subject.
He stares at it longer than he ought to before securing it in the desk drawer to his right, among half-empty bottles he throws out that very same evening by a sudden compulsion to do better; to be better.
It's hidden beneath the first photo of Tina he’d cut out of an early issue in ‘27, alongside a jewel encrusted rattle Niffler had retrieved from his pouch and gifted him.
Much like with said animated sonograph, Newt would find his gaze drifting toward Tina’s middle whenever his guard slipped in the days to follow. He hates himself for forcing her to go it alone for the past few weeks and decides one morning of many that, like everything else, that enough was enough - they were in it together.
They could make it work. They deserved that much. It was worth the risk.
He calls to her from his shed into her office, the lid of his case slightly ajar to let her know what he’d decided when a blonde, high-heeled vagrant stumbles in.
Turns out it’s her long since disowned sister Queenie, whose sudden reappearance starts with an emotional battle over lost time and ends with Tina on the receiving end of the Cruciatus Curse.
She’s in shock and he’s pouring dittany onto the bloodied wounds, telling her she’s going to be okay and he’ll get them both through it.
“Please,” he implores to what remained of Queenie’s love for her sister to let them disapparate to St. Mungo’s. “She’s pregnant.”
Grindelwald seems genuinely remorseful in his apology that follows but he still doesn’t let them go. For all Newt's efforts to stop the bleeding, Tina's clothes grow stained and heavy against his hands as she gradually weakens in his arms. The wounds would not close.
“Newt,” she barely manages, “the baby...”
“I know. You’re gonna be okay, just trust me. I’ve got you, Tina”
He hears his brother’s confusion behind him, Credence holding a shaking wand to his throat, “baby? What baby?” but he ignores it. Tina needs him.
The cavalry of aurors eventually arrives and as soon as Grindelwald has left with Queenie, Credence and the knowledge of his continued existence, Newt shoves his brother out of the way and gathers Tina up in his arms. He’d have carried her into the hospital if the healers hadn’t got to her first.
As he fills in her details on the medical registration form, his hand shakes when he checks the box marked ‘pregnant’. Thankfully, Theseus is too busy writing an owl to their respective ministry’s regarding the attack. What was to be done now that Grindelwald knew he was alive? Would Dumbledore be able to break the blood pact without the intel he gathered as his spy? Was there any chance of defeating the enemy? Did any of it matter whilst Tina lay battered and blooded; their baby teetering on the edge of birth and death...
Newt’s thoughts drift off.
“Goldstein?” The chief healer announces hours later.
Theseus is out of his seat quickly but Newt is faster. “How is she?”
“She’ll recover.” He feels the relief start to overwhelm him but he couldn’t quite breathe just yet: “And the baby?”
“Are you the father?”
He can feel Theseus’s eyes on him and he settles for “i’m her friend” instead.
He hears the words “I’m very sorry,” and his heart plummets in his chest.
The healer tells them in which room they could find her but he doesn’t hear it. His world had stopped spinning.
He feels a firm hand on his shoulder, lurching him back to reality. “Don’t worry, Newt I’ll break the news to her...”
Newt shrugs his brother off, shaking his head. She should hear it from no one but him.
The next day, when Newt returns to her side after bathing and changing out of his bloodied clothes, he hopes she’ll have finally woken up but he dreads having to face her all the same. He knows she’ll be broken by this just as he knows she’ll blame him for having caused it.
She tells him she doesn’t want to see him and asks him to leave. She’d never before looked at him with such pure distrust and indifference. It feels far worse than anything they’d endured since Grindelwald declared war on Muggles and her sister and Credence both aligned theirselves with him. Worse still than when they were forced to fake his death and forego seeing each other for over a year.
“I wanted that baby too, Tina.” But of course she doesn’t believe him - he never got the chance to tell her. It sickens him to know that she thinks he wanted nothing to do with it. That he didn’t yearn for her each night they slept with a wall between them. That he didn’t imagine feeling their child beneath her skin, sharing in the wonder that was the life they created together. That he didn’t love the child that could’ve been if he had protected her better.
Later that night, he watches as she prepares to leave London, crying as she entered the hearth to floo back to New York. She doesn’t see that he is crying too.
He wants to run into the flames and follow her, make his penance and, if she should let him, hold her so that they might grieve together. He knows he doesn’t deserve to share that with her, but he wants for it nonetheless. He wants her to stay with him.
The green flames erupt within the fireplace and leaves behind a foul aftertaste of despair and regret in the ash that remained.
Newt sinks to his knees and sobs, choking on his pain.