Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tina came in from the cold with a certain numb detachment, the concept of having been so close to Grindelwald not yet catching up with the practical side of her brain.

The vial of stolen memories felt like fire against her breastbone as she strode up the stairs, under the warning clock set perpetually in the amber and reds nowadays, and to the Auror Office.

It was five in the morning. She’d wandered for much longer than she should have done, and it still hadn’t felt like enough. In Bhutan, in front of the entire crowd, Grindelwald had dismissed her; he’d reckoned with each one of the people unwittingly drawn into this strange drama between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and looked right through her.

Bold of him. Stupid of him, even. There’d been plenty of time for her to whet her teeth on training. And if he had, as the No Maj had said, passed so close by the orphanage, taking another victim in his wake, then she would reckon with it in every way she hadn’t the first time he’d taken on Percival Graves’s skin.

When she strode into the office—the morning shift had begun an hour ago—her coat caught on the door handle. With an irritated huff, she looked down, and found she’d skipped a button on her blouse. Must have done it yesterday evening. Neither Jacob nor Queenie had told her.

And with that small observation, the emptiness as blank as the oil in the execution chamber faded.

She was a trained Auror. Determination was meant to fuel her better than company or coffee, and had done for enough years that she’d forgotten what it was like to be around something like a family. Now, with no Tolliver, with Queenie coming back strange and Jacob always having been a polite friend, with Newt abroad as he so often was with the uncertainty of only letters between them, Tina wondered what might have happened if she had been just a few minutes earlier.

I would have wanted to kill him, came into her mind, unbidden.

And yet here she was, back in the office again, as if no time had passed at all. There would be ways to make it work. Like finding a knife in a kitchen drawer ready for a close-quarters fight. Like shaping anything into anything else. The last time the bastard had been in MACUSA, they’d taken his tongue, and if given the state Queenie had come back in, it was deserved.

She sighed, and shoved open the door, re-tying her hair into a spiky ponytail as she did so.

“Morning, everyone,” she said, keeping her tone brusque: a deliberate strategy. The wixen world claimed its gender equality was far ahead of the No Majs, but that still didn’t make it good. “Came across a worrying development on my way in this morning. I was on the Second Salemers watch, headed into the aftermath of something strange.”

Hessia Elmder looked up from her desk, interest piqued, but Frank Donovan, one of the Senior Aurors, was already frowning. Tina weighed them both, sensing the potential stand-off brewing in the imminent debate.

“Exposure threat?” asked Frank. He kicked his boots up onto the chair next to him, then cocked his head to one side. “Must have been high if you bothered to tell us about it.”

Graves had run a quiet department, playing fast and loose with the idea of disclosure. He had got away with it because he had been fair; Grindelwald had got away with it because there were secrets.

“So what actually happened?” said Hessia. She and Tina had exchanged the same looks a dozen times since the department's "restructuring" last fall. When three of their most empathetic colleagues had been quietly reassigned after questioning a memory wipe that went too deep.

Tina swallowed. The kidnapping the No Maj had reported, if it had been done by Grindelwald, would need resources thrown at it. But a member of the Anti-Wix League?

“Minimal,” Tina said. “There was one fatality. A No Maj woman. Looked like it was a magical accident.”

She headed to her desk at the head of the bullpen and began sorting through the photos from the last body found with Grindelwald’s mark, setting them to one side and pulling out the schematic for a raid due the next day on an illegal gambling parlour offering parts of smuggled magical creatures as winnings.

“Any witnesses?” pressed Frank.

She held her breath, and imagined smelling the pressed flowers Newt sometimes sent in his sporadic letters to slow her heartbeat.

The victim had been a woman who’d looked so much like Queenie.

Queenie’s eyes—her hair, her nails, her face, everything about how she carried herself that once made her stand out from every crowd—were still as empty as they’d been when she’d silently let them patch up her wounds from Grindelwald’s barrier as the crowds faded.

“No,” she said.

Frank snorted. “Well, then, it’s hardly complicated, is it? Rappaport's Law covers this. Standard procedure—documentation, then return of the body or incineration, unless it’s someone of note. We can’t risk anything else if there are magical traces, not after what happened to that senator kid. Nearly exposed the whole of New York, if you remember correctly. We had five deaths on the night from the various anti-wix crackpots who thought it was finally the end of times and went at their weird neighbours—and three of those were ours.”

The other two, Tina knew, had been Charity and Mary Lou Barebone. Other than perhaps Percival and Newt, she was the only person who’d been able to identify them as the orphanage had been cleared and re-secured. The real number who’d died in the rubble that day had been far, far more, but the No Maj services had been too overstretched to find them in time, and MACUSA had practically locked down, instead.

The AWL woman deserved better than a cursory dismissal, regardless of her views. But challenging procedure meant drawing unwanted attention, with Queenie newly returned and vulnerable.

Tina exhaled slowly through her nose.

“Head Auror Scamander sending fucking telegrams again?” asked Frank, catching her hesitation. “Still convinced everything’s linked to his personal vendetta? Like it wasn’t enough he started getting wix thinking about joining the blood Great War. Now he wants us to step into another European fight. None of our business—or, nothing we can afford.” Even before he’d called to tell her about the most recent body, found with the strange bug-like creatures adorning it, he had indeed sent several persistent telegrams. Tina didn’t avoid challenges. She’d met with him, when it had been necessary.

Two weeks ago, they’d coordinated on arranging an extradition of a British wix hiding in America who’d been printing pamphlets about undetectable potions to feed No Majs—and it had been polite, friendly, even, over stale biscuits and office-quality tea.

It had always felt traitorous to Newt, to like his brother, even if it was massively outweighed by how much Theseus also irritated her. Against all the stories of Theseus’s rigidity, his golden status at the Ministry, and precise records of everything he did wrong to Newt in the face of his perfect image, Tina had been mildly horrified to find that they shared many of the same flaws.

“I'll complete the documentation myself,” she offered. “And as for the telegrams, that’s not on your clearance level, Donovan.”

Those were in the locked drawer of her desk back in the private office she hardly used, wanting to establish the trust with her colleagues she’d lacked for her five years as a Senior Auror after Grindelwald’s infiltration. Complete with their handwritten signature and sentences underlined for emphasis.

There were no real consequences to being caught, not with the current Director being who he was. With the wixen and No Maj economies entering a death spiral, everything was domestic. And it being domestic meant the status quo, and the status quo meant any negotiations of Rappoport’s Law were off the table if you wanted to keep your job.

But, most of all, it meant that everything that could render the appearance of managing was all they had to put on the table.

Given she had kept Picquery’s ear since 1926, being one of a handful of people who could point out that—unlike the European-American Committee in 1927, who’d at least pretended at an assessment and aimed to hire someone who wouldn’t, but could, in theory, bring an Obscurial in alive—Credence had been executed without an option even to stand down. No one would care, but the secrecy would at least shake people.

“Unusual characteristics?” Hessia asked. “Nothing exciting, but worth documenting,” Tina said. “But, at any rate, we’ve a busy day in front of us. I want to see everyone hit quota, if they can, and I also want to make sure everyone bar those who are designated on definite duty to attend the workshop this lunch on evidence collection. We’re seeing too much slip through the cracks.”

Last week, Cowen—who’d been the last Chief Auror, still a Senior when she’d returned to work in 1926—had approached her in the corridor. Taking her aside, he’d asked: “Are you sure there are no other interests operating in your office?” Tina knew there wasn't—or, at least, she had tried her hardest to root out corruption at every turn. But in terms of the rules that could be broken, that needed to be ruthlessly exploited for every grey area they’d possessed, she’d become somewhat of an expert.

Of course she had.

They were the same rules that would have killed her and a man she had—had grown particularly fond of. They were the rules that had obliterated Credence. While she’d been politely, diplomatically advocating for minor shifts in Rappoport’s Law, over the years, she had become something Cowen could have accused.

But, given she was Chief Auror, she’d just told Cowen to leave it, in the same tone that’d dominated her fiery days. The fire still burned, but she wasn’t sure what smoke signals it’d produce, and what it’d reveal at the end.

There was only one other person in MACUSA who might know what Grindelwald wanted so close to the old orphanage. Because, unlike Tina, he wouldn’t have been haunting it for a closure that would never come.

She glanced up at the ceiling and shook out her tight shoulders, the too-warm office with its heavy desks and copper pipes providing a heat that was both stifling and reassuring.

Outside, the sun was yet to rise.

The worst part was that there’d be few, if any, consequences for not forcing a chase. Since the broadcasting of Bhutan, even though Picquery had allowed her to go only on the condition of supposedly gathering surveillance information, there’d been no questions asked about what to do next. Some careful documentation had pronounced Credence dead—and after one of her first strategy meetings back in the boardroom where the blinds never worked, Picquery had taken her aside and told her it was a tragedy, and so it was all over.

When Tina perched on the edge of her chair, drawing it close to her desk and grabbing her pen, she could almost imagine she felt its light. It was the same dim, lightning-bolt sensation of recognition she felt, every time she sat in this chair.

Once, this had been nothing but a dream. Once, this had been the only piece remaining of a dream she hadn’t known she had, and Tina never had been quite like Newt. There was no real benchmark for her to go by—it still felt like she could only see his brilliant world through the cracks in her own—and it didn’t escape her that she’d been drawn in close only by the mess of Theseus’s kidnapping.

Two hours before the end of the workday, Tina went to find Percival Graves.

The rehabilitation centre was in an annex deep in New York: a secure address that Picquery only granted to a handful of people. Located underground and accessible only through apparating through a storm drain, it would have been nearly impossible to stumble across. Tina would have certainly gone looking, if she hadn’t had the President go to the private office she now inhabited as Chief Auror, and pass her a nondescript postcard with all the information she’d needed on it.

She stepped out of the dotted light of the storm drain and headed down the long, concrete corridor, until she reached the blank wall on the far side. Pressing her badge to its metal surface turned it from a smooth plane into a bubbling mass. Concentric gears rose, seemingly out of nothing, and clicked apart as the wall began to peel away from itself, opening up in the shape of a mechanical collapsing star.

Beyond was a small black booth. The ceiling lights embedded in the corners emphasised the eerie infinite mirror effect the shined, claustrophobic lines of wall and ceiling creatures. She turned her head a little to one side, and dozens of herself stared back at her. All the same Tina, whoever that was beyond the maze of mirrors. She’d struggled with it when with the team, and for some reason, it felt profound now, staring at the folded versions of the same Tina.

The waiting security wizard was still watching in silence, ready for her directive.

A plain-faced man, he sat on a metal stool with a footrest; and on that footrest were steel bands holding his ankles in place. Any forceful movement or attempt at a tackle and the room would seal shut indefinitely. Another hidden execution tactic. Another security safeguard from before her time. And in the end, this man was free to leave at the end of the day, but those waiting beyond required the President’s permission to go beyond this inky portal linked to MACUSA’s distant rehabilitation unit.

He turned her hand over with cold fingers and held the stamp against the smooth inside of her wrist. Pushed down with a click; a brief pressure as a small needle came out from the centre, blood bubbling up through reverse enchantments to pool in the tiny thumb-sized dais. With this amount, they could amplify the security measures beyond all hope of escape should she misbehave, attuning it to her specific magical signature.

“Percival Graves?” the man asked in his thick Brooklyn accent, before she could even part her lips.

“Percival Graves,” she repeated, withdrawing her arm.

As much as she tried to persuade them to let her go in alone, they simply wouldn’t hear of it. The three mediwixen left her at the fourth room of the third floor, standing in the steel-reinforced frame under the low-ceiling, her hands clasped in front of her.

Lingering made her feel sick, too strong a reminder of her first visit, where she’d wanted to go to everyone running this place, shake them, and say: How could you let anyone near him? He’s not the same. He’s broken. He wouldn’t like to be seen like this.

Because on hearing the door unlatch, on an open or a close, Graves crumbled. Sometimes he wept. Sometimes he pulled out his hair. Sometimes, he sat so still, for so long, that he soiled himself.

“Percival?” she called out, looking down at her feet, scuffing her shoes against the floor: back, forth, back, forth, swiping street detritus across the linoleum.

There was no reply, so Tina went in. There was no one standing by the bookshelves lined with texts she’d memorised at the Auror Academy. The chess set by the window that looked out onto a strange, enchanted blankness was similarly abandoned with only half the pieces still in play.

The closest she’d got to understanding psychiatric institutions had been via prisoner assignment, with the actual transfers handled by the Executioners—so, for now, she processed the new absence of a bathroom door as proof he wasn’t in there, either.

Reaching into her satchel, she sat down in the small annex that served as a study, taking the folding chair.

“Percival?”

Had they done something to him? Taken him away?

Making sure her footsteps rang out, not wanting to spook him, she entered the main room again. For all intents and purposes, it was nice. The quiet level of luxury any townhouse in upmarket New York might possess, complete with paintings on the walls.

Then, she finally saw him, kneeling on the floor by the bookcase, a newspaper spread in front of him.

With his dark hair and clothes, he’d blended in perfectly with the somber bookcase.

“Could you get me my cane?”

Tina saw it under the empty coat rack—because where would he be going?—and knocked it over. Wincing, she picked it up and handed it to him, offering an elbow for support.

“No,” said Percival gruffly, leaning on the shelves behind him instead as he slowly unfolded himself back to standing, an unmistakable grimace crossing his face as he touched his knee. “Not the end of the work day yet, Goldstein. What’ve you come for?”

“I wanted to visit,” she said, being honest.

“Really? Because Salazar knows no one sees fit to, anymore.” There was a faint undercurrent of resentment in his words, held in with careful dignity. “Maybe that’s not it. Bastards still think anything under the sun could hinder my rehabilitation. Like I’m not getting put out to pasture after this, whichever way the wind blows.”

Looking at her former mentor’s face felt like taking a time machine back to long enough ago that it could have been a different world entirely. Even trying to imagine it—the colours were different, the imagined geographies and senses all wrong.

Tina pressed her lips together as Graves finally straightened up. He straightened his waistcoat and began a slow, steady stride towards the whitewashed alcove that passed as an office. But the moment they both sat, the sound of their breathing mingling awkwardly in the quiet, Tina heard the sound of water.

A little of Graves’s composure cracked. He ran a hand through his hair—hair, once kept perfectly shaven at the sides, that’d now grown out to nearly chin length in a shaggy peppered black-and-white cut.

“One moment,” he said, but made no effort to move. “I left the water running.”

Tina twisted over her shoulder, looking at the patch of polished floor Graves had just abandoned. Several books were open around it—none that she recognised as analysing magic specifically, not from the dense style of text that lent itself better to the discussions of constitutional law they learned at the Academy.

Graves, coming from the family he did, had probably been taught those since he was old enough to walk.

Then, burying his face in his hands, Graves mumbled, “I think I’m losing my mind,” and took the cane for the second time, laboriously moving past to the bathroom.

The pipes groaned as he turned off the tap, and then, he was back.

“Got caught up washing your hands?” Tina asked, trying to lighten the mood as Graves sat behind the desk, crossing his legs.

He frowned. “What?”

“The tap?”

“No.” Graves looked at the photos, brushing his thumb over the grainy pictures of the wounds. “So what’s this? A case? Explain it to me, Goldstein. I need it. The distraction. Or…just to feel…useful.”

“Useful, sir, or competent?” Tina asked, catching his hesitation on the last word, the way it had sat like a marble in his mouth that hadn’t fit.

“Competent.” The ghost of a smile touched the side of Graves’s mouth. “Like I was a leader once. Hard as hell to imagine here, spending most of my time thinking about how the machinery’s running. I sit, and I think, and I try to do whatever exercises I’m offered.”

He said it politely, almost gently. There was a soft side that occasionally came through him, like the damp, rilled patch on paper when tea had only just begun to spill.

“It was a murder. Recent. Here. A woman found by the riverside with Grindelwald’s brand on her chest. Theseus recently reported a similar one in the United Kingdom. London. So that’s two, now.”

And he’s sending his little brother over to illegally share classified information across borders, mentally added Tina, but she said nothing more.

A sharp intake of breath. Graves looked up. “How is he? They don’t tell me anything.”

“Oh.” Tina bit down on the inside of her cheek. “We’ve talked. Since he’s been back. It seems like he’s practically back in the field from the telegrams he’s been sending me. And…”

Tina trailed off, not knowing what he wanted to know; the only indication of any particular inclination lay in his forensic examination of the photos. An awful pause emerged between them for the second time. This time, she could taste the hint of bleach on the air.

“Are they asking him anything?” Graves said, voice low. This time, he leaned forwards, hard, hair swinging forwards over his face. The impact of his ribs against the wood was weak, but the desk was bolted to the door. “About Grindelwald? About what he remembers?”

Newt had mentioned it in a handful of his letters, but offhandedly. They were either achingly mundane, glances behind the curtain at the normal parts of Newt’s life, or entirely different—like missives from a different cut of the world, in which anything beyond flora and fauna didn’t exist.

Theseus is meant to be laying low, Newt had written, but you know Theseus—or rather, you don’t, but when he’s convinced there’s problems, he’ll do anything to bring it up, and—well, we can’t precisely say that there aren’t any problems at present.

She couldn’t tell Graves about anything to do with Dumbledore, not really, but in that moment, she felt a horrific kind of aching want to try and trust someone and something. To be able to just pour out all the doubts that had plagued her for the last few months to someone who knew and trusted her, someone being ground to pieces in the same system, someone born and bred under circumstance like she had been and wedded to a job neither could lose.

“No,” said Tina. “I don’t think so.”

“So it’s pattern recognition on our end, to see what this killer is doing.” Graves tipped his head to one side. “It’s been so long since they gave me more than puzzles and books. Have you considered the location? Is there any chance that, if this is one of Grindelwald’s, it’s a ritual? He…he always…he never…”

He touched his forearm, where there was an old, faded tattoo of Grindelwald’s symbol: a deactivated tracker rune, not a brand.

Last time, he’d not even revealed that.

Neither of them had bothered to pretend it was anything like it had been—but Graves had simply lapsed into silence when it came to anything personal, like that memory spell the Healers had diagnosed had already removed all access to his own emotions.

Tina waited, patiently.

“I remember some things,” Graves said at last.

Since when had he been willing to make a concession after a professional command had been disregarded, under-interrogated? Not for the first time, Tona felt uncomfortable—just how was he bargaining for his information about the world behind his rehab?

“Such as—this symbol,” continued Graves. “It was important to him. He had known me for years—kept me, for years, I think, by the time it came to actually transferring the mark. It could have been entering else, but in the case I was found dead, this was what suited him. A way to turn around how wrong the infiltration had gone in ‘26.”

“So you’re saying that the branding of a dead body is uncharacteristic of Grindelwald?”

“Well, he’s known for showmanship, isn’t he? Obviously I barely know anything about the election. I don’t even remember the time of day I was taken and know the year only out of simple probability. But he left me enough memories to paint his good side. He’s a politician for the people. It’s not meant to be known that he sees Muggles as cattle and had a past of…”

“Of what?”

“I forgot. Something to do with his school days.”

“His expulsion from Durmstrang for conducting experiments on fellow students.”

Graves hummed and roughly shuffled the photos back into a pile. “Again, I don’t—“

“Wait, sir,” interrupted Tina. “What do you mean you don’t remember anything about your kidnapping?”

Graves frowned. “Isn’t this common knowledge? That’s why they closed the investigation. Between the persistent holes in my memory and an utter lack of evidence, we’re staying focused. And I support that. Can’t quite afford to be kind in these times.”

Picquery must trust Tina not to say too much. But the truth was that she’d have trusted Graves over the President any day.

Even with the nightmares of dark water closing in over her head, even with the notebook she’d carried around for nearly a year—that entire year of the Spellbound article—etching in the little details of every person's differences, down to the slow, biting changes of tone in Newt’s letters, sometimes abrupt and almost dismissive, sometimes aloof, and altogether too rare.

There wasn’t much trust to go around MACUSA these days.

She grabbed a handful of the wool fabric of her trousers in her hand. Was this room monitored? Surely it was—but then again, they’d never been able to find the magical records of any signatures spiked in Newt and Tina’s near-execution, all cursory photos and form-filling skipped, and the remaining subconscious traces that haunted most of the wixen world conveniently gone.

Tina herself had learned how to make the most of those gaps.

There wasn’t time to do that here. This was her third visit—so, fuck it.

“I don’t know if they began one,” said Tina. “I don’t know if a full investigation was ever signed off.”

He stilled. It was the full body paralysis they’d warned her about, down to his breathing coming to a halt, going motionless. They must have provided him with all his own, old clothes. He still had the scorpion pins. As far as she remembered, his expensive apartment had been marked as a crime scene and then sealed, only to be excavated when there were developments.

“Bastards.” With gritted teeth, he held his position: legs crossed, defensive, hands on the evidence. “What did I expect? I can’t even look at myself in the mirror. It would have been chaotic, too. The mess after I was gone. It’s nothing I haven’t thought about it. I understand why they might have done it.”

Tina hesitated. But, before she could answer, Graves shoved back his chair. “I can’t even fucking do that,” he hissed, and turned, hitting the wall with the heel of his hand. “Fuck. I can’t even do that. I can’t look at myself and I can’t remember—they say it all started with an Obscurial, some prophecy that we’ve dismissed as bunk, and I don’t even remember—there was a man before that.”

“Credence?”

“Is that it? Is that him? It’s not all of it. It’s personal, whatever that is, or it’s practical—whatever. Neither of those fits in with him being this messiah. He’s not a blood-and-guts revolutionary, and if he was, he wouldn’t start in the West, not after the Great War.”

The few, brief letters Credence had written to her—all dropped off at anonymous collection points by owl, all directed through various enchanted objects left in her office fireplace—had revealed very little. Some had been barely sentences long: disturbing questions, at most, written in the tone of a child rather than a man barely five years off her and Newt’s thirty-six.

A shadow side speaking.

“The prophecy—that ended with Leta Lestrange.”

She twisted her hair around her finger, unsure what to say next.

The other woman was a strange punctuation mark in her life—a ghost, well before she’d offered Tina her hand, and helped her out of the case. A haunting before Tina had met her and realised her heartbreak, her jealousy—hadn’t made her want to turn a cold shoulder to the beautiful, aloof woman who’d nevertheless crawled into Newt’s case with her, and ridden all the way on a Zouwu out of the archives.

The memory of Queenie joining swallowed the rest of the night. Even with the death tolls. Even with the papers, which were eaten up with name lists and the combined criticism and praise of Theseus Scamander, accompanied by harried photos of the man and hordes of cameras.

Newt hadn’t talked of her to Tina since, in those confused years between Paris and now, when everything between them had felt as though it’d evaporated through distance and memory alone. She didn’t think Newt ever would. It was an intuition she couldn’t place.

With that, Tina decided she’d had enough of thinking of the dead.

“Just because someone’s dead doesn’t mean it’s over,” countered Graves, “because I was dead, wasn’t I? Look what it did to me. Maybe I should died. But that didn’t.”

“And you believe in prophecies?”

“Of course not. But if Grindelwald believes, then he’ll make it—he’ll—“

The words came to a juddering halt. Graves looked up, nostrils flaring, leaned forwards.

Tina flinched.

With a soft gasp, he caught himself and sat. His square hands were trembling as he brought them to his face. “None of this is helping. Not when it comes to making me myself again.” He paused. “I was a fucking good one. I really was.”

Tina stared down at the pictures of the dead woman they’d found by the riverside and eventually declared a wix.

There were two knocks at the door and Graves grabbed for his cane. “Hide those pictures—I at least remember some memories of you, Goldstein, and I’m sure they’re not approved,” he said, and went to answer it.

On the first visit, when she’d talked to the mind healers, they’d explained they were dealing with a time-specific memory charm. It was the majority of Graves’s six years in captivity that had been erased. Grindelwald had “allowed” him to remember the fact of that. It had been the only thing he’d remembered, near the end.

He’d been lucky, the mind healers had said. The charm had been unusually precise and yet incomplete.

Deliberately so.

Fully wiping six years could have compounded with the existing trauma and destroyed his mind. Instead, they’d determined through the therapies—whatever had been going on while Tina had been in Bhutan with the team, even before that—the worst memories had been scrubbed, and anchoring ones remained.

“Mr Graves,” she heard a woman say. “We have the potions for your memory treatment.”

Mr Graves.

If it was such masterful work at Grindelwald’s hands, why was Graves bleeding memories of before his capture at all?

“Do you want me to take them in the bathroom?” Graves asked. He shook his head like a dog throwing off water, taking a single step forwards and leaning against the trolley. “God. My head’s spinning.”

Tina quickly ducked back into the alcove. Stuck for better ideas, Tina took the papers and shoved them up her blouse. Straightening up, tucking the hem into her trousers, she re-entered the main room.

The mediwitch smiled blandly at Tina; Tina gave a tight twitch of her mouth back. Her cues were increasingly taken from Newt, who, unlike his brother, made no pretense or effort at charming smiles when he least felt like them, content with his usual wide-eyed expression, teetering on morose.

“What’s this?” Tina asked.

“A curative regime,” said the mediwitch, more politely than Tina had expected, and she had to consciously recalibrate. “We’re focusing on strengthening the memories that have been retrieved in the present rather than the ones that can’t. It’s a complicated protocol.”

What’s wrong with you? she thought. Do you have a problem with other women? Compensating for what from your parents? You idiot.

“A bit experimental,” Graves added. “But they don’t often do much for cases like mine.”

There was an awkward silence in which the mediwitch tried again to smile, and Graves simply stared at the trolley before him with the expression Tina imagined on a horned serpent before it bit its handler. Then, without being prompted, he reached for a lilac vial. Knocked it back.

It took the tension leaving his shoulders for Tina to realise it’d been there.

But when he reached for a vial the colour of the murky river—the river, she thought, by which they’d found the first body, a body that made no sense with Grindelwald’s presumably political agenda—

—he went to the bathroom, cane tapping against the floor, and she heard him turn on the tap.

“Is it making him feel sick?” Tina asked, having a brief, unpleasant flashback to how the hospital had smelled with her parents.

Her mother had vomited so much from the pox she’d coughed up a back tooth. When Queenie’d had a tooth chipped at Ilvermorny after reading one of the older boy’s minds and telling a teacher about what she’d seen, their mother had said nothing.

Tina had cleaned up the bucket anyway, knowing how much their parents had paid for the cosmetic graft.

Screwing her eyes shut, she followed the mediwitch to the bathroom. It was small and clean, with rubberised handles on the path and enchanted anti-slip mats on the floor. Graves took a metal stool out of the bath and placed it in front of the sink; then, he extended his bad leg, shifted his weight through the cane, and slowly lowered himself down to eye level of the tap.

“The water helps,” explained the mediwitch. “It should retrieve memories.”

“Ah. That’s why the tap was on when I came in.”

The mediwitch paused, checking the temperature of the water before laughing and shaking her head. “Didn’t need to do that. Muscle memory, sorry. What were you saying? The tap was on? Just running?” She paused. “Was he watching it?”

A muscle in Graves’s jaw jumped as he tilted his head, just a fraction, to the side. That was the mulish expression that’d sent many trainees to correction.

“No,” Tina said. “He probably just forgot after washing his hands. I mean, I’ve been here for a while.”

“Good,” said the mediwitch, her voice taking on the quality of water circling the drain. “Good.”

“I’m sure,” muttered Graves. He looked down, and then added: “Goldstein, you can go now. It doesn’t get prettier from here. Some of the potions leave me knocked out.”

“Why?”

“Damaged nerve endings.” He lifted his hand with the artfully missing fingers. “Magic only replenishes itself with rest. They found a way to screw me in the end.”

Tina shook her head, letting out a long, slow breath. “And the memories? Wouldn’t they help the investigation? How do they get replenished?”

This was her mentor. This man in front of her, as different as he’d grown over the years, had still been the one who’d paid for the Academy at a time when nothing short of a miracle would get an orphaned halfblood woman a sponsor.

But when he looked at her, something in the tired slope of his dark eyes told her the truth. When it’d come to talking about death—and whatever this state of being was, that Percival was trapped in—Tina had hesitated.

“What investigation?” Percival said quietly.

Tina lifted her chin, just a fraction. You’re always showing up where you’re least wanted, Grindelwald-and-Graves had said.

“You’re right,” was all she said, straightening her loose blazer over the papers hidden at her ribs. Then, tangling one hand in her hair, she turned on her heel and left, unable to bear a backwards glance.

Crack.

For the fourth time that early evening, Newt apparated himself across another stretch of blocks, having memorised the location of Tina and Queenie’s shared flat in that week after MACUSA had signed them to secrecy on the New York incident. Usually, it was discouraged to apparate through unknown environments, and he’d certainly barely been back to New York after everything.

But Newt, besides being a connoisseur in discretely ignoring any established rule, written or not, had always become very, very good at disappearing. It was a skill he’d begun to hone the moment he remembered realising, at maybe five or six, that whatever he was, it was different.

By then, his mum had already been ill. His father had already grown cold at the sight of him. And Theseus—and Newt could never think of this time favourably, could never seem to cast it in an adult light—had started changing. The old days when he’d liked and loved and trusted his brother without complication were spread as thin on the landscape of his memory as over-diluted watercolour.

Because then, with Theseus soon becoming what he had—with everyone still giving stilted praises, with the men at the galas eventually taint themselves by shaking a Scamander hand—it had all seemed too late, in Newt’s mind.

He worried about it now, as he put one foot in front of the other in an eager, clomping pace, because Newt was coming to learn how it worked. Social connections were terrifying, in most cases, and enjoyable and desired in the others.

He worried about being wrong only when he began to grow close to someone; and in exchange for that worry, he measured everything within a framework. No longer was it his own fears, every ounce of inadequacy laden on him from Theseus’s successes and the world’s rejection of his career. And so a more skeletal framework had emerged.

Newt Scamander believed there were three important things in life. Trying, even if you failed. Not worrying, because it brought unnecessary suffering. And doing what he thought was the right thing at any moment, wider conceptions of morals and rules and shoulds be damned.

Which was why his heart felt as though it was beating a ferocious path out of his chest, in the present moment. Like the stampede of a Zouwu. Because he knew Tina worried, and suffered for it, and the realisation had come perhaps too late. Never in her letters had she admitted to it, or the clear depth of it—but then, Tina would never admit something in a letter.

Newt found it easier to do anything but speak. In crowded rooms, sometimes his voice fled him entirely, and no matter how confident he felt, a lump choked his throat and made him feel fourteen again. Tina—Tina was different.

Newt had worried Tina.

He hadn’t even followed his normal rules with dealing with people—hadn’t felt she’d wronged him, hadn’t been afraid she would get too close, hadn’t quietly decided she’d be incompatible with everything different he wanted to pursue, hadn’t feared letting her in would mean she would control him.

Learned patterns from the past, really. Like much of his inner landscape, it felt incomprehensible. The sensation was like reaching for a smooth rounded river pebble while being carried the opposite direction in the cool stream. It was like losing air in any of the remembered offices and schoolrooms and nooks of his childhood home. It was like being told he was wrong, as he had been, over and over—whether it had been Theseus trying to show how to behave normally, how to yoke his life to the Ministry, gentle and overbearing and well-intentioned and sharp-tongued about it.

Maybe he could understand that a bit better after having Theseus step in front of him for Grindelwald, begging Grindelwald to leave Newt. It didn’t change the fact the only creatures Newt stood to categorise were humans, and at eleven, the summer before he’d started Hogwarts, he’d been taken away.

Newt scrubbed a hand over his face.

Was it being back in New York? Thinking of Credence, and Sudan, and the only failures in perhaps his entire life that had ever stuck with him? Other things had brought him dull, quiet shame. But only the two Obscurials had brought him pure, uncharged grief—because Newt was a pacifist—had been a pacifist—and Nyaring was still the only person Newt had ever killed.

I want to be able to love Tina without fear, he finally settled on. But I’m not afraid. It hasn’t been eight weeks, but that’s okay, isn’t it?

Maybe it proved that he’d try and be—

He didn’t know. He never thought much about being.

Then, across the road, he saw a familiar figure, her hands in her pockets and her face angled to the side, scanning every alleyway she passed, and his heart stopped.

“Tina,” Newt whispered under his breath, starting to move towards her as if pulled in on some invisible string.

A smile blossomed on his face. He didn’t think about how it looked. He concentrated on his feet, his case bumping against his calves, as he jogged across the road and came to a breathless halt in front of her.

Tina was busy staring into one of the alleyways; so Newt kept walking backwards, matching her rapid pace with his case clasped between two hands in front of her. At some point, he really had to announce his presence, but she seemed like she was concentrating. Intently. Before he’d met Tina, he’d never thought a person could look wonderful when they were angry—because despite Newt having made a life’s business out of neatly evading humans and their anger and whatnot, the crease between Tina’s brows was foreign and familiar at once. It just made him want to learn more.

Ah, he thought, well, to learn more I really should say something, so that we don’t—in the Brazilian Ministry—yes, when I said that feelings didn’t have an expiry date and she really wasn’t very sure and we weren’t actually in love for a few years even though, maybe, maybe, aren’t we definitely—?

“Hmm,” Newt said aloud.

Tina jumped practically out of her skin, eyes rounding. “Ah!”

“Um, hullo, Tina,” Newt said.

He looked up from her shoes in time to see her put her wand away, a slight flush spreading across her cheeks, and hastened to explain. “So, ah, my brother—he, um, he saw someone get murdered in quite a bad way, and it looks like it’s rather more complicated than normal, because they surmised that Grindelwald was likely involved in some way. Which makes sense. I can’t say I always follow the papers, but a handful of times, Albus has asked me to pass on messages and the like to people whose lives might be in danger.”

“Yeah.”

“There were actually signs of a creature residue at the scene. Now, on my way, I visited his office at the Ministry and had a small look—“

“—you broke in?”

“Well, he didn’t look as though he felt very well, and you see, normally I would just ask—anyway because he asks me to do so much paperwork for that bloody Ministry. And you’d think, um, doing all of that, you might as well go in and out a little, when it might be helpful.”

Newt fiddled with the buttons on his sleeve. “Strange, really, what appeared. But it’s, um, not something I suppose is that useful to talk about too much just yet, because there are lots of dots to join, and really. Really, don’t you think that, if something’s happening in America, because you’re sort of on your own here—?”

“Newt,” interrupted Tina. “Is it okay if we find somewhere quiet—inside?”

“Oh. Why?”

“The murder here happened on the streets at night.”

Newt hummed, falling into step with Tina as she started walking off again. So much of their time together had been spent like this: parallel paths, different goals, and an odd dearth of time spent sitting and looking at one another. Which was how Newt had often dated in the past—he’d had more than a few experiences during his travels, because why not?

“Let’s sit and look at one…” began Newt, then realised he’d spoken a little too honestly. “Let’s sit and talk about it all, um, peacefully. You’re right.”

“Although, if we stayed out, we might be able to catch them, next time,” said Tina thoughtfully. “In the act.”

“Oh?” Newt considered it.

If it was Grindelwald himself, he was torn between wanting to brush with him—perhaps for the first time in his life, unsure why that was—and proposing to Tina they return to England.

“I’m not sure that’s—that’s a good idea,” he concluded.

“Mmh. You’re right.” Tina grabbed his arm and pulled him down the next alleyway. “I know a quiet place. Another speakeasy, only I’ve never made any arrests in this one. Learned the hard way that you have to leave a couple of places open for informant meetings.”

“That sounds good,” Newt agreed. “I know it’s not been eight weeks yet, but—“

Tina pulled out her hair tie, sending her hair tumbling down. It had grown out from its bob over the last month, now skimming her shoulders, the sharp fringe beginning to soften at the sides into gentle wisps of hair. She raked her fingers through her hair, which was darker at the roots—Newt supposed it could have either been sweat or grease, both indications of a mild level of stress.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, avoiding his eyes as they skirted the heavy industrial bins behind the backs of the restaurants and kept turning, following New York’s grid of streets. “It’s been a really…strange day. Two days. I’m not…I don’t know.”

“That’s perfectly fine,” Newt said. “Many of my days are strange.”

A slight laugh. “Yeah.”

They rounded the next corner; there, set in the wall, was an innocuous arched door with peeling red paint. Tina nodded to it, swallowing. “We don’t need to change our clothes for this one. It’s more of a…discrete establishment.” She was still wearing her Auror’s coat. Newt hadn’t figured out the rhythm between them for these daily, simple, together tasks, where there were certain cues to be navigated and parsed in real-time.

If only the more he appreciated a person, the better he could understand them—which also came in useful when he didn’t particularly know them and so happily let exterior understanding fall to the wayside, uninterested in hierarchies or subtle interpersonal games.

But sadly, it didn’t work that way. It was time and repetition, more than anything else, hence how he’d come to understand Theseus and Albus and maybe Jacob (because Jacob was open, and easy to talk to, and entirely forgiving). Time and repetition, he thought, being the two key features in this analysis of behavioural understanding.

That was how he got creatures to trust him—and, he supposed, how he came to trust that he could be good for the difficult creatures known as humans, in return.

In the end, he decided to say it, hoping that it wouldn’t be a repeat of that letter. He hadn’t truly meant to insult Tina, as well. Tina wasn’t like the others Aurors; at least, she had to not be, and Newt was happy to make that shift in his head, mentally locating her outside of the establishments he generally found bureaucratic wastes of time at best, and devastating for his creatures at worst.

“Are you sure that they won’t mind you…going dressed like that? As in, um, inside? In case they think you’re an Auror.”

When she glanced at him, Newt hastened to explain. “You see, on my travels…um, there were several places I liked to frequent that weren’t precisely on the side of legal—you could say that they were illegal, actually, or you probably would—and it was generally a little intimidating for people who weren’t committing the worst crimes and were, say, just there to pass on a few notes and the like if there was an Auror inside.”

“What? I’ve been inside illegal places before without raising too many eyebrows, I’ll have you know. When we met, I was doing covert surveillance. So covert that you bumped into me.”

“What kind of places?”

She seemed to consciously re-adjust her face. “Oh, this and that. I never went out much. But a few times in my Academy days, I found a few drinking spots. Given that MACUSA also enforces the prohibition laws, just to keep the No Majs from finding us out, it wasn’t always easy.”

“That’s really interesting,” Newt said, meaning it. “If you know where to look, every capital city has a nightlife. No, not a nightlife. More like…discrete meeting places. A lot of them are a lot of fun.”

“Like a pansy club?” Tina asked.

Newt shrugged. “I don’t know what that is.” If it was a place where queer wix gathered, then he’d been to more than a few. But sometimes he missed out on the relevant slang.

“Huh. Lally talks about those. But you know what, never mind,” said Tina. “Let’s just get in out of the cold. Believe me, it’ll be fine. Or, at least, it better be. I don’t think I could handle much more going wrong today.”

Feeling as though they’d just skirted around a conversation about something important, Newt followed Tina as she tapped her wand against the door in a complicated arrangement. A gust of damp, warm air hit them both, lit with golden corridor lights burning at the corners, and they descended the stairs.

Inside, it was busy, loud enough that Newt cast a quick charm over his ears to soften the chatter. It was raucous—every other table was full, occupied by a couple or sometimes a trio. Past the bar was a length of corridor and doors with numbers. Cheap hotel rooms. In his travels, Newt had stayed in several. Had even visited a few places like this.

He accidentally stared at a couple kissing over their drinks for a little too long before ripping his eyes away.

Tina didn’t look around, ever focused, in counterpart to Newt's wandering attention. He wondered how they’d be able to privately talk in this location, and then immediately snapped his eyes to the floor.

This was a simple meeting. All they needed to do was keep Tina up to date.

After all, Newt had petitioned Albus to let Theseus on the team, even though Albus had been hesitant to directly involve a Ministry employee. At the time, even though they’d not been talking much—just because of the directions of their lives, the gentle divergences of grief—Newt had known Theseus needed it.

Here, with Tina, he got that same sense. When he’d been running errands for Albus, blissfully unaware of the larger political games, he hadn’t quite considered that everyone might have been drowning on their own. Too caught up in being at least a little useful to someone he trusted with his life. In, say, his fourth month on a different continent, it wasn’t easy to keep tabs on anyone or anything.

Tabs on Theseus. The thought sent a shiver down his spine, making him raise the cuff of his coat to his mouth and worry gently at the fuzzy fabric. He’d worn the blue one, today—although it certainly wasn’t the date they’d planned at eight weeks, and was a simple meeting, and he was going to be very careful about not making Tina confused between the two with the social cues he knew he often mixed up.

Yes, the idea of keeping tabs on Theseus was rather awful, in its own way, for multiple reasons Newt couldn’t determine. Awful not just because of it being a bad thing in itself, but awful in multiple, indistinct directions, like looking down off the side of a small skipper vessel and catching hints of a fascinating leviathan in the depths that possessed the power to consume him whole.

Tabs on Tina, however, were different. Especially since Bhutan; especially since they’d decided that this was it, the end of the confusion and hesitancy, the final establishment of the fact that they actually did want to court one another.

It was a fresh start. For Newt, he suspected, it was a second chance. Fair enough. He usually vanished before they got to the semantics of those.

“Here,” Tina said, claiming a small corner table and avoiding the sticky drinks that’d been left there. “Do you want to order a drink? They’re not always too strict on having to buy to stay, which I always think is a good sign.”

“Ah, it’s okay,” Newt said, folding himself into the chair opposite and reaching into his coat, pulling out the file with the information regarding the murder of Theseus’s colleague, Dunnington. “I don’t drink. Or I try not to. Ever.”

“Ever?” Tina asked, signalling for a waiter, ordering a beer. “Why?”

He clasped his hands together under the table. “It’s a bit of a complicated story.” And with that, his hands were like flighty birds, one moving up to scratch at the back of his neck.

“Oh,” Tina said, her eyes softening. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s—it’s—well, it didn’t affect me specifically. That much. Or at least, I don’t really remember, not that I spend a lot of time thinking about it, but I’m fairly sure that, sometimes, my father drank rather too much. And while I'm not like him in the least, I do understand that perhaps we share certain propensities.”

Newt gestured towards his head, uncertain how to explain that his father, too, had once been diagnosed with the same schizophrenia before there was even a name for it. “For when it all gets difficult,” he continued. “To find ways to escape. I usually, um, go for things that can't be found over the counter, things that are rare enough that I won't stumble across them again and find the temptation.”

That had been, maybe, too honest. Tina’s expression didn’t change. She still looked sad. Which was, he supposed, a relief, because at this point, Theseus would have started up the what illegal substances have you been taking and you know there are certain drugs that can kill you if you do them once and you better not be keeping it a habit once you get back to England because think about what the Ministry would think.

“Your father was an alcoholic?” Tina asked. She sighed. “Ours never drank, but Queenie often said he was just as erratic. Just as prone to the ups, and the downs. But he always meant well.”

“Oh. No. No, mine just drank.” He desperately wanted to say something else about the tidbit of information—the parents Tina clearly cherished but rarely mentioned, carrying them around her neck like memory.

“We can go somewhere else if you'd like...?”

“No, no, I—gosh, maybe that wasn't as—um, maybe that wasn't as appropriate a conversation as it sounded in my head. I suppose I just wanted to, um, explain, I suppose, that if I'm not drinking, then it's not because I'm having a poor time, or not enjoying your company, because I truly do.”

“Theseus didn't tell me you had an alcoholic father,” Tina said.

Newt was uneasy at this classification. Alcoholic father. Alexander Scamander, even years after his death, barely felt like a father at all, even if Newt did occasionally remember him and tear up. The human brain was impossible. For him to be mourning someone who he’d struggled to mourn at the funeral years later.

The silence between them stretched and stretched, the humming of conversation and clinking of glasses around them echoing. Tina coughed into her fist.

“So…” she said, taking the file and looking through it, expression not changing. “Theseus told me that there was a creature angle to this crime. That they have no idea as to the purpose or exact origin.” She looked up. “Newt, if Grindelwald does have something to do with these murders—and why he would be doing them, I’m not sure—do you think it might link to you?”

“Me?” Newt blinked. Glancing around, he hunched down, hair falling over his face. “I don’t think so.”

“Really?”

He was lying. He’d known, for some time, that Grindelwald had an odd interest in him. While Grindelwald seemed to harbour a caustic, utilitarian vendetta against Theseus, eclipsed by the obvious obsession with Albus, Newt had always felt like a mouse being toyed with by a cat. Those mismatched eyes watched him, and waited, and occasionally left cryptic messages.

“Well, for being friends with Albus, I’m sure he occasionally thinks about killing me, but there’s nothing I was involved in, other than New York, I suppose, until he became a significant political threat halfway through last year. At which point—um, or so Albus informed me—he became a threat through…”

Newt waved his hand.

“Democratic systems,” Tina supplied.

“Things that seem unimaginable today will seem inevitable tomorrow,” Newt quoted.

Inexplicably, looking at the photos Tina was annotating, he thought again of Theseus: how much Theseus had probably enjoyed Albus’s quote. How his brother had been lecturing everyone through the newspapers on the train to Berlin, before everything had gone wrong. Things had been unimaginable. And then they had been inevitable.

“Is this really unimaginable, though?” Tina asked, circling several of the glinting fragments of shell. She waved away the waiter when he returned to the table with a polite, awkward smile, almost tipping over her half-empty glass as she did so. “I think we have several questions at play here. And I know that you’re not officially authorised to work on this—and neither am I, but that’s whatever—but honestly, if this is how it’s going to work, with you as an intermediary instead of having to speak directly to Theseus, then we’ll be able to get away with it.”

“Get away with it?” Newt asked with a slight smile. “You’ve, um—you’ve come a long way in the last few years on rules. But—but I agree. It doesn’t seem impossible that Grindelwald is involved, or at the very least, that the motives or victims or methods were connected in some way. I mean, I’m no expert, of course, but I suppose we all saw for ourselves how much influence he has…how much he could get done, if he wanted to. Which is, well. Mildly terrifying and also poses a problem against which we can’t, um, really do very much. Not very much doesn’t mean nothing. But if we wanted proper answers…” “Proper answers are overrated,” said Tina, not looking up. She hummed. “Or at least, at this stage of any investigation.”

Looking at the photos properly, instead of just stuffing them into his coat to try and get through the various hoops of an illegal trip to America, set something at the back of Newt’s mind working again. “It could be a red herring,” he said. “A distraction.” “What makes you say that?” “Well, um, most things are, aren’t they? Distractions from what’s important? Although maybe Grindelwald doesn’t have the time on his hands to be bothering with us. I always assume it’s the case, um, until proven wrong.”

Notwithstanding the last six months, Newt knew himself and the cadence of his own emotions, and knew that whatever lessons the universe had wanted him to learn would again take a few months to sink in.

“But that’s just one of my theories,” continued Newt. “The other is, um, the presence of the creatures. The opalwings. They’re…I’m not unfamiliar with them. They’re valuable, but I never was able to learn why on my travels—and I couldn’t pick trouble, not for the sake of both my contacts and the creatures.”

“Maybe it could just be smugglers,” Tina agreed. “Using Grindelwald’s symbol as a cover, perhaps. I remember when Grindelwald began burning villages in Eastern Europe, your brother had some concerns that several of them were only misattributed to Grindelwald because the Ministries were otherwise occupied.”

Newt reached for the handwritten report Theseus had slipped into the file and peered at what the forensic examiner had observed.

“The opalwings were already dead when they were put inside of the vivisected victim,” he paraphrased. “The victim’s wounds would have been healable by magical methods if the fatal spell hadn't been used on him, but likely would have been life-changing as the stomach and bowel had been punctured in placing the opalwings. The opalwings had begun to break down, which could have been a natural process, and produced a faint residue that, when analysed, had no obvious magical signature of its own.”

“So they were nearly pointless,” Tina said, chewing on the end of her pencil.

“They surely would have a cultural meaning,” Newt said. “Every creature has one. Every creature leaves an imprint on the world, whether wixen respect it or not. It could have just been taken so far from home on the networks for buying and selling that no one recognises it. At least, not, um, not here, and not easily. But if it were Grindelwald doing it, or involved, don’t you think it would be a bit strange for him to send a message that no one can understand? It seems, um, that he wants to begin in Europe, no matter what.”

“Agreed. His messages are meant to be universal.”

Newt scratched his chin. He’d left in quite the rush, and he felt the soft rasp of stubble against his slightly overgrown nails. It was an interesting sensation, enough to distract him a little from the background hum of the room, so he did it again, tracing a gentle line up his jaw.

Tina was looking at his hand. He also looked at her hands.

“Earlier this week,” said Newt, “I was investigating a few smugglers, and they’d left behind traces of shell that might have been the same specimen. You see, I couldn’t identify it at that precise moment, because, um, we were running for our lives. Usually, I take out my test tubes and microscope and field journal. Which would have been extremely inadvisable. But the fragments feel as though they draw blood to the surface. That was the only observation I could make.”

“Medical use?”

Newt considered it. “I don’t think so. But, just because I’ve passed a few books back and forth on this subject for Albus, even if I find the area of practice a little grotesque myself—in the manners I’ve seen it, I’m sure like anything you could—well, can you justify it? It does require harm. Where was I?”

He crooked his finger and pressed it to his mouth, considering the photos. “I wonder if it might have been an attempt at a ritual. A forced bond between a creature and a human, maybe? Or both of the bodies—“

“—there was one more, by the river—“

“—by the river? Hmm. That’s, um, that’s interesting. Where in the river?”

“At the side of it?” asked Tina.

“Ah,” said Newt, “just because there are certain creatures that—mmh, never mind. Let—let’s not worry about that right now. I don’t know if it’s actually that relevant, and I don’t know how much time we have.”

She looked as though she’d relaxed a little since they’d entered, her sloped shoulders finally beginning to drop to somewhere lower than her ears.

In general, the wixen world was wary of creatures, especially in Europe. The idea of making someone ingest creature parts or decoratively placing them inside someone, Newt felt, constituted some kind of social taboo. The only painful irony was that he knew there had been massive progress made in the years since he’d published his book. The kill rate of the DCRMC had gone down by thirty-two percent, the last time he’d borrowed whatever he needed from Theseus to re-enter the Ministry and check.

In the book and his subsequent popular articles for various magazines—even the rare academic journal, despite his lack of formal qualifications—he’d said nothing about the kind of magic that was done with creatures, but given their cruel use in potions and equipment-making, it was inevitable.

“It was by the river, not far from…the orphanage, maybe?” Tina hazarded. “Maybe…what landmarks would you remember? You know the first ‘gas leak’ we had? I’m not sure if you do; that was MACUSA business. Around four kilometres directly east.”

The orphanage. The gas leak. He didn’t like that. It felt like a triangulation of every bad memory. Maybe not bad memory—but the kind of memory that tended to fall under the metaphorical water lurking deep at the centre of his mind, and drown.

“I don’t know about the location. What that might mean. I don’t do those magics; my reservoir isn’t deep enough.”

Besides, it required a lot of training, a lot of knowledge. Newt’s brain refused to fully process anything he wasn’t fully interested in. And there was so much else demanding his attention at any given moment when it came to his creatures that eating and sleeping already was a struggle in any of his periods of melancholy.

“What do you think Grindelwald might want to do rituals on random people for?” Tina asked.

Without realising it, they’d both leaned in, the air around them turning conspiratorial and hushed, as if they were students gossiping in a hidden section of the library.

“If it’s Grindelwald at all,” Newt said.

“I can believe he has his fingers in many pies.”

“Maybe, um, not as many as he’d like us to believe,” countered Newt. “I—I’ll admit that I never really saw the point in having lots of connections with people that—anyway, but Albus says—“

“Dumbledore tells you a lot, doesn’t he?” said Tina. “But what the hell, we’re working with him now.”

Newt hummed, remembering the conversation they’d had a few years ago. You might trust Dumbledore, but, Newt, I can’t. I just can’t. Not after Graves. “Perhaps.”

“At least this time we’ve figured out,” and Tina flushed a little, folding her hand into a shape like an origami crane and moving it back and forth between the two of them.

Unable to immediately interpret the symbol, Newt nodded, then pulled out his notebook, borrowing Tina’s pencil for a few moments to scratch out a note to himself. Had Albus looked into creature-human bonding to learn more about the blood troth and its effects? The key issue, of course, was sourcing creature blood to run the tests: cruel and unethical.

The only access he had that didn’t require bleeding something—which he absolutely would not do—were the dragon blood samples in the Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau.

Tina smiled, looking down at the paper, and then said, in a business-like tone: “So, what would the…bonding look like?”

“No, um, no idea. I saw a few cases in Marrakesh, but generally in the underbelly of some of the magical marriage markets, and nothing that was…well, obviously it was serious, and awful, but not as life-changing as perhaps it should have been.”

He paused, and then nibbled at his lower lip. “Beyond that, I’m not really sure. That sort of thing, um, you only really have a hope of witnessing it if you’re exceptionally unlucky. I tried to help one family whose son had—but they’d cast the—I couldn’t. It’s too risky; there are too many interests in smuggling at that level, and getting involved means having to do things you’d, um, regret. The creatures needed me. Even if it took me to rather painful places.”

Tina looked fascinated. “Such as?”

“Once I was locked in a cage for a little while,” Newt said. “That was quite the inconvenience.”

“A little while?”

“A few days.” He touched the small scar on the thin meat of his shoulder, right at the crook of his neck. Nowadays, he barely thought of it, beyond it rubbing when he wore his travelling pack—which was only because the knife had gone deep. “It was just another mishap of many in that year. 1925. I’m not too happy to talk about it, if that’s alright.”

She sighed, flicking her fringe back from her face. “No, no, I understand. That was the year I was fired. So I understand.”

Newt hadn’t known that. He opened his mouth, sure that he would say something, and abruptly came up short.

1925. 1925. It rang like a bell in his head, over and over; sweating, he looked at the floor, at the drink someone had spilled perilously close to his scratched boots, and his own distorted reflection in it.

Quickly, he came up with a deflection. “At any rate, um, it’s the Rosiers to worry about in Europe, but their sourcing comes from further afield, too. The French Ministry investigated the family for apparently taking advantage of the Muggle imperial legislation despite the ICW’s wixen code of sovereignty. So—so, um, they’re—they’re everywhere.”

“What, like Grindelwald’s lieutenant?”

“Vinda’s brothers operate the creature, drug, artefact trading side of the business. Vinda, she keeps, um, her reputation clean in public, running the business and its legitimate operations, very much a—hmm. Having the reputation of the reputation people give Veelas, perhaps. Beauty on the outside and fear on the inside. Except I never thought Veelas were treated fairly, it’s not their…anyway. You can’t accidentally stumble upon what she does, and so I never have.”

Digging into what’d happened after Sudan, before he’d returned home, would only cause trouble. It had been fully investigated. Merlin, if Theseus hadn’t come to knock down his door after it, then Newt’s alibi was safe—and so, unfortunately, were the smugglers who’d held him.

Total strangers, but then again, it’d been the longest he’d ever been imprisoned as an adult, and Newt hadn’t been feeling forgiving.

It surprised people sometimes, that beneath his awkward exterior lay someone who wasn't always. Wasn’t always forgiving. Not when it mattered. Because kindness wasn't weakness—it was a choice he made daily, deliberately, despite knowing exactly how cruel the world could be.

The memories blurred at the edges. The cold and thirst and darkness. The strange conversations he couldn't quite remember. The opalwing shells scattered across a stone floor.

He blinked, forcing himself back to the present. Raising questions about Grimmson now would be madness. The man was ensconced in the Ministry, his bounty hunter reputation giving him connections throughout Europe's underworld. A specialist in creatures, yes, but Newt had seen his methods firsthand during that nightmare of an assignment hunting—

No. Even thinking about it felt dangerous. Five times in his life he'd encountered Obscurial situations. Five. And with the Department of Mysteries already showing interest in his modest research into Obscurial folklore—odd books going missing from his shelves, the sense of being followed on his last trip to Cairo—he couldn't risk drawing more attention.

Not when there was so much at stake. Not when Credence was only just beginning to find stability. Not when Theseus was still healing. Not when Albus was counting on discretion.

So, yes. It really had been nothing. Just another mishap in a life full of them.

Except his hands were shaking slightly, and he didn't think Tina had missed it.

“I’ll talk to Albus, and ask him if either the bodies or the opalwings could be signs of any specific ritual Grindelwald would do,” Newt said. His former teacher would know. Albus so often knew Grindelwald’s plans that Newt occasionally wondered if it was less a genius foresight and more of a deep, entrenched similarity, not that Newt could bring himself to care too much about that, nor worry about it.

“And if he could explain why he’s visiting the orphanage again, too, that would be great,” Tina said, carefully re-filing the documents and handing them back to Newt, the brief brush of their fingertips feeling electric, making the red-tinged honey-warm lighting of the dodgy bar suddenly seem to slow time in its syrupy web.

“Mmh.”

“I can’t look at that place. I just—I just can’t. Thinking about all the children trapped there. She just believed that each child had the capacity for magic, and what did that miserable woman do? Beat them. Tried to change them. Trapped them, in there, with no family, no way out—”

There was a bubbling, in that place in his mind.

Two of the places he’d been trapped, been made to mourn, linked surely not in reality but in theme, through the broken systems of the human world he sometimes had to fight not to despise.

When he looked up at Tina, he felt as though he was drowning; when she looked back at him, he wondered if she felt as though she were drowning, too, or if this rare moment of eye contact that felt like peeling back his soul was the equivalent of coming in to land.

“I still don’t want to wait and watch for him to come back,” Tina said softly. Her leather trenchcoat, which she’d unbuttoned upon entering the bar, was slipping down her shoulders. When she brushed her knuckles against her nose, clearly thinking, he could see how the straggling edges of her grown-out bob lay damp against her nape.

“You’re one of the most important people on the team,” Newt said, meaning it.

“Just on the team?”

“And, um, to me. But you always would be. No matter what you feel, and whatever it is, I don’t mind. But I just thought I’d tell you that part of it—that I think I—I have this space, in my heart, that’ll always be held by you, and there’s nothing you have to do about it, other than maybe—um, maybe know. Because I don’t know if you remember how I…how I see you. How beautiful you are.”

When he focused on the warmth in his chest, the drowning began to fade into the background. Perhaps he was still sinking, his body still fuzzing cold at the edges as the deep beckoned, but there was light slanting down from the surface above.

When it came to the necessity of breathing, there was no old pain to choke on if the only thing he allowed himself to inhale was the intensely, terrifyingly tender love he had for Tina. It had always been the way. Love, as an escape; escape, as survival.

The table between them suddenly felt far, far too wide, even though it was small enough for them to bump elbows. In Newt’s workshop, in that little wooden room where he’d built a pen for the Qilin, they’d come close enough to kiss.

A kiss after Bhutan, they’d promised—but after Bhutan was meant to be in at least four weeks, and waiting that long—?

Should they wait that long? Should they, when his heart was beating so fast he felt dizzy, and Tina’s eyes were shining with some indistinct half-plea, and the two of them were together?

“Newt,” Tina said, and his name in her mouth sounded like a question he didn't know how to answer.

Her hand lay palm-down on the table between them, her fingers slightly curled as if waiting to grasp something.

“I know we said we'd wait,” she whispered, “but I'm not sure I—”

“Neither am I,” he said, surprising himself with his boldness. He hesitated. “But we did say…we did, um, say eight weeks. And then we were going to have a date. A proper one. The kind people who are courting have.”

Tried to change them. Trapped them there, with no family, no way out.

Words trapped behind his teeth.

You didn’t know what I tried to do. You don’t know anything about me. It took so long after coming back to finally hear my brother sobbing in our bathroom about it, and when I heard, I locked him in from the outside and walked away. I would explain it through comparison if I could because that’s the only way I know how to explain the things that hurt me when they come out of the drowning water.

I’m not conscious of showing this pain anymore, but maybe it means I’m sleepwalking.

On and on, the dirty seam of memory ran under the feathery sensation of forming words, leaning in close to her. Tina leaned forwards. He could see she had a beauty mark inside her left eye, only visible in the way a reflected slice of light from the barman polishing a crystal glass caught the gentle fronds of her dark iris.

“Is anything about this kind?”

“What?”

“I felt like shit after I fell for you and you left,” she said, eyes still soft, still so close he could feel each puff of her breath across his cheekbones. “I don’t know what to do. They broke my sister. It’ll be all I can think of, for the rest of my life. Everything is waiting, Newt, and I’m not like your brother. It’s not restraint. I’m just scared. Exhausted.”

“Please don’t be,” he murmured.

“What are you?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

“You always have.”

“Maybe.”

Tina ducked her head, inhaled. Jaw set, she looked up again, and said: “Please can I kiss you?”

Reaching down, he took hold of the wooden chair legs and pulled it across the floor, spinning gently out into the aisle. A barrier. His head was floating. The first person sidestepped the chair, the second and third aiming for the back corridor lightly jostling his shoulder, but his entire point of focus had narrowed to just Tina.

He’d never imagined it before.

He had no expectations. And so every second of this felt like a blissful possibility, no matter the miasma of everything else netting between them.

Propping an elbow on the table, he offered himself to her, looking up at her through the hair falling in his eyes.

Tina reached out and laid her hand against his cheek, tilting his face upwards. She took a deep breath, lips slightly parted, glossy. Then, with a sharp exhale as if pushing off an invisible wall, she closed the distance between them, and kissed him.

The pit in his stomach deepened, dropped—jangling confusion. A perfect sense of rightness. Making a small noise, he inched forwards to the edge of seat, unsure where to put his abandoned and empty hands so distant from the rest of his body. The rest of his body—it was a dark room lit only by the light of this single point of contact, condensed into something overwhelmingly bright and brilliant.

Tina sighed into his mouth, one of her hands coming up to wrap around his shoulder. The cool heel of her hand pushed back at the joint; he realised how tight his body had wound itself, how loose his arm rolled back in its socket even as all the muscles stretching across his chest felt the gentle strain.

They twisted into one another, folding inwards and tighter. Newt had to press the right side of his knee against the right side of hers. Their noses bumped—Newt felt a brief jolt of panic. Was he doing this wrong? Then, Tina angled her head, trying again. The contact was cold, warm at once. She tasted of coffee—old coffee, closer to bitter fruit than chocolate—and his mind was blank.

At last, his hands found purpose, and gently alighted on her waist. Pressing the pads of his fingers against her waist.

Until, at last they both came up for air.

Tina's eyes fluttered open, pupils wide in the dim light. Something unreadable flickered across her expression. Her lipstick was smudged, and Newt realised with a strange surge of possessiveness that he had to be wearing some of it now.

He waited for the familiar warmth, the satisfaction that should follow. Instead, a peculiar hollowness expanded in his chest. Not unpleasant, but unsettling—like discovering a new room in a house he'd lived in all his life.

It hurt like lost time.

It hurt like feeeling too soon.

She reached out and squeezed his hand. In silence, they sat there, as close as they had been in that small room in Newt’s workshop, everything between them just as undefinable and definable and right as it had been before.

Yet it had landed strangely. They had fled into one another, and it had altered the shapes of the gaps—gaps that Newt wondered if Tina had fully inventoried in her own feelings, and that he had yet to discover beyond realising that he was still lonely even surrounded by new friends and colleagues and most of the simple things he’d ever wanted.

Newt focused on his breathing.

“I feel like a time traveller,” she said quietly.

Yes. Newt rather thought he did, too. Leaning to the side in the chair, he hooked his leg backwards around one of the legs, pressing the familiar hard edge of his leather case into his calf.

Before the silence could stretch any longer, he spoke. “It’s late.”

“Yeah.” Tina tucked her hair behind her ear and got to her feet. “Yeah, it is.”

The idea of stringing together a sentence felt like grasping at smoke. Instead, he gathered his case and offered her a hand up; she took it, another casual moment of contrast that felt almost unworldly after so long of only letters. That they both existed—that they weren’t fictions of one another’s minds or fragments of a singular adventure.

“Should we talk about it?” Tina asked, twisting back to look at him as they wove through the crowd, dodging their fellow patrons, heading for the dark window of the back corridor.

“I don’t know.”

“It wasn’t eight weeks.”

By the time they managed to find a quiet spot just between two pairs of closed doors, metres away from the concrete maintenance corridor that’d deposit them back out into the cold night, they were both breathing heavily.

Newt’s heart rate hadn’t come back down.

“I think we should talk about it,” Tina said, leaning back against the wall. She raked both hands through her hair, then fell back against the wall, folding her arms across her chest.

The lighting here was low and red and sensual. Shadows pooled in the hollow of Tina’s throat.

The kiss hung between them.

“Do you wish we hadn’t?” he asked, rubbing his thumb over the handle of his case.

There was a lump lodged behind his ribs, akin perhaps only to when his first childhood love had told Newt he wasn’t a girl and could never be—or perhaps that day he’d walked into the living room of Leta and Theseus’s flat, the engagement waiting, the two of them having written their own story entirely they hadn’t told him.

A pause.

“I…I d—didn’t think it was bad,” he added softly.

“Of course it wasn’t. It’s not that. It was…perfect.”

A couple stumbled past them, laughing, hands already fumbling at buttons. The woman's perfume lingered after they disappeared through one of the numbered doors, a too-sweet cloud that made Newt wrinkle his nose.

Tina caught his eye; they both almost laughed, and then the laughter, too, began to dissolve, the intensity of whatever had been burning through it.

“I spent years thinking about what it would be like,” Tina said suddenly. “After the Spellbound article. After your letter. When I'd catch myself missing you, I'd imagine us meeting again. Kissing.” She laughed, the sound brittle. “But I never imagined it would feel like…”

“Like remembering something that hasn't happened yet,” Newt supplied, the words arriving from nowhere.

“Yes. Exactly like that.”

Someone jostled Newt from behind; he stumbled forwards and bridged the gap between them entirely by accident, only needing two steps to do so.

Maybe he didn’t need a resolution to this liminal state of feeling. But he could kiss her again. He could offer it, and see what happened; being careful, yes, being careful, but if it felt uncomfortable and comfortable for the second time, maybe that was only natural.

For a second, they were pressed together.

Newt felt the familiar pressure building in his chest—the same tightness that had appeared when Theseus had asked him to join the Ministry, when Leta had waited for him to speak after their argument, when Dumbledore had first suggested he might help with Grindelwald.

After all, it was the case that had carried him across continents whenever staying in one place demanded choices he couldn't make. It had always been this way—hesitation followed by circumstance, followed by adaptation to whatever current had swept him along. His life, shaped more by the rapids than by the rudder.

Why change that, when it’d somehow brought them back together?

The brief flash of desire settled into a softer beast, uncertain and purring between them as they settled into an uncomfortable silence that felt more familiar than it should have done.

“You look like you’re thinking,” said Tina. She tilted her head a little to the side where she was leaning, her hair catching static against the crimson wall.

“I’m thinking about kissing you again,” he admitted.

“Me too. Kissing you.” She looked tired, her face shining with sweat, collecting right at the corners of her eyes. “However long it might take, I promise that I am choosing this. It’s just—it’s just that I feel wrong, tonight, and it’s making it feel wrong.”

“All we need to do is try,” Newt said.

“Don’t say it like that. This wasn’t just a fling.” Tina glanced from side to side. “It’s never even been that, has it? I mean, do we know one another? Do you know me? Do I know you? A little, maybe.”

“Instinctively, certainly,” said Newt.

“But not in the way we should after six years.”

“I’m always, um, slower with that sort of thing than expected,” Newt admitted.

She jerked her head to one side. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

“Home?”

“Do you have to go back to England?”

The answer he wanted to give was no, but the combination of, terrifyingly, realising he too didn’t feel ready for something that felt so fragile in his hands, and the rush of emotion that always came with seeing Tina, had exhausted him.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

She started to walk, fast and efficient as always as he ambled along behind her, case swinging. The back door loomed, the ambient smell of cigarettes heightening until Newt had to put his sleeve over his nose—because the heavy fog of it made him crave opening a fresh packet.

Opening the door, Tina gestured him through. He hung around in the alleyway, feeling a little foolish, waiting.

“Well,” he started.

“Thank you for tonight,” said Tina.

He reached out and took a gentle hold of her wrist, looking at her knees for a sudden rush of overwhelm that made the eyes suddenly feel far too close. As if he was going to step through to end up on the other side of her.

“I’ll see you again very soon,” he promised

“You better,” said Tina, and with that, she began walking. He watched her go for several moments, caught up in the fluttering butterflies in his stomach, and then turned on his heel.

Crack.

He’d apparated so many times that day that it should have felt difficult. But, no—somehow, it felt easy, this time.

The next morning, at the crack of dawn before lessons began, Newt went to visit Albus, attempting to dodge the anxiety that had persisted since Berlin. If Grindelwald was in hiding, Newt didn’t particularly want him to return any time soon—not that they would have that option—and was happy for this to continue, heading from place to place and visiting the people he knew and loved.

In many ways, the mission to try and stop Grindelwald from defrauding the election had been useful, if only to remind him that a world outside his own existed. There were easy places to stay, when you were grieving, and they only grew more seductively when endless, simple, didactic tasks were offered on a platter. For the last few years, that had been exactly what Newt had been doing. In theory, he’d chosen his side.

What it really meant was that Leta’s death had woken him up, although he’d never have admitted it to Theseus. In practice, the first time those pressures of politics had forced him into anything had been the election, in his leadership of the team. Barely successful; it had been barely successful.

He didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of that fact.

Normally, his former teacher opened the door nearly immediately. He had done so since Newt was still a student at Hogwarts, endlessly overwhelmed and despairing, perhaps knowing how desperately Newt needed that space.

“Albus?” called out Newt, leaning down to the keyhole and calling out through it.

It was a habit of Theseus’s Newt had always hated—fiddling with locks and keyholes and peering through letterboxes, although, then again, maybe that was only a feature of their relationship. But after the fight with Grindelwald, Newt was concerned about Albus.

After a few minutes, Newt heard slow footsteps approaching the door. Gently, it swung open, opening up the cosy office beyond as Albus slumped into one of his squashy armchairs. “Newt,” said Albus.

He looked terrible—exhausted, with bloodshot eyes and ruffled hair. Albus usually kept his appearance impeccable, but today, he hadn’t even changed out of his pyjamas yet, and class would begin in about an hour. While the old, supposed power dynamic between a teacher and student had never fully materialised—Newt not really being aware enough of the significance of social hierarchy for it to count, he supposed—it was certainly an observation that Albus wore blue silk pyjamas, with little moons embroidered on the collars.

“Albus,” said Newt, closing the door behind him. He sat on the armchair opposite Albus, loose-limbed, and carefully tucked his case to the side and out of the way. “I thought I ought to share with you what Tina told me, but now that I’m here, I’m also concerned that, um, it might be useful to ask you how you are, as well.”

“Please. Don’t worry about it,” Albus said, in a tone that was very convincing but didn’t align with his appearance. One of his hands drifted to his wrist, where he wore the troth, and tightened around it until his knuckles turned white. “I’m not the most well, as you probably could guess with your expert skills on spotting various maladies and diseases.”

“Only in creatures,” Newt pointed out. “I can do basic field medicine, but please don’t ask me for help with anything more complicated. Um, most of the potions I brew would sit rather unfavourably in a human digestive system.”

Albus hummed a short laugh, visibly pulling himself together. “So. What did Ms Goldstein say?”

“Chief Auror,” said Newt instinctively.

“Chief Auror Goldstein.”

Newt explained the story from start to finish—from the first body Tina had found by the riverside in New York, to Theseus seeing Dunnington’s murder and the appearance of the opalwings, to whatever had happened just a day ago, where Tina had stumbled upon the strange scene near the orphanage.

Albus let out a small sigh when Newt told him Grindelwald had been in the area, but didn’t react beyond that. “It could be that he’s afraid of the prophecy, even now. I suspect it was fulfilled—none of us realising it, perhaps. Much like history. We prepare to repeat our misconceptions and fears, and, in doing so, we repeat our mistakes. Alternatively, of course, you could argue that prophecy is a game played by fools and idiots who dream of having a grander destiny than they do, and that while scribbling it down next to his shopping list, the old muse missed off the second and third verses.”

“When it comes to trying to understand the Obscurials, it’s…not helpful,” Newt agreed. “Um. But—do you think Grindelwald might be after Tina?”

The hand covering the troth tightened. “No. I don’t think he is. Gellert…Gellert is preoccupied with something else.”

Newt narrowed his eyes, propping his chin on his fist and leaning forwards. “Are you quite sure?”

Maybe it was just the glimmer of regret he felt, remembering he’d agreed with Albus that Theseus should stay in the flat with the special cleansing device, until they could be certain that he wasn’t another Percival Graves. Or the memories of the subway.

“Quite. Not certain.” Albus rubbed a hand over his face. “Oh, I wish I could promise you everyone would be safe. It’s not possible—nothing like that is possible, in times as dark as these—but that doesn’t mean I can’t wish. The only consolation I can give you is that the troth is loosened. Gellert is either mourning the loss or working frantically to make some use out of it. Both, maybe.”

“From now on, um,” Newt began, “I need you to help me protect both Theseus and Tina.”

“And yourself, most of all, Newt.”

“Not really.”

Albus looked out of the window. “I do mean it.”

Of course. After several years of letters—because when, really, when would he have been able to talk to his teacher after being expelled?—Newt had come to Albus on level grounds. No longer a student, they’d met as equals. First, it had been discussing research. Albus was already established in academia, while Newt was desperately trying to break in. Then, it had been dragon blood, shortly after the war (worth revisiting, given the grisly reminder of its links to blood-bonding). And, finally, it had become something simple, cherished, and rare in Newt’s life: friendship.

Yes, it had divided him and Theseus through 1926 and 1927, when the Ministry had suspected Albus of collusion with Grindelwald and Theseus had tried everything he’d known to get Newt to explain himself.

Which Newt wouldn’t—hadn’t.

As a child, between the rest of his family and the majority of his fellow students, Newt had believed life was pointless. Not in the sense that he’d actively wanted to be gone—but he’d certainly wanted to be anywhere else. The message was constantly clear: he was different, and not in a good way. Not as good as Theseus, not as academic as Theseus, not as obedient as Theseus, not as social as Theseus. While Theseus’s future at the Ministry was practically laid out in front of him, so bright and perfect that it had essentially stolen any hope Newt had for his own, Newt had only ever wanted to work with creatures.

Even though, in hindsight, he knew that it had been its own kind of cruelty. He’d lied to the teachers and told them it was him who’d set the Jarvey, even though, really, it had an accident in the prefects’ bathrooms that Leta had never fully explained, even years later. Leta had wanted to give the Jarvey to the Menagerie after the first string of slurs it’d shouted at her—and Newt had, unequivocally, said no.

But it wasn’t that which had made him lie.

Years after her death, it was impossible to articulate why he’d done it, other than knowing what her father was like and knowing what his own family wanted for him. He’d set it all up. Been crafty. They knew he was odd and supposedly stupid and from a mongrel family. It was the Lestrange that should have outranked him, in the eyes of Black—except it wasn’t just any Lestrange. It had been Leta.

So, Newt had been able to lie that it’d been him, knowing Leta’s own tendencies at rule-breaking had meant they didn’t believe her confession at all. When the expulsion had come, he’d felt brave and bold and kind.

Then, once reality hit, all those illusions had broken just a little more of his fundamental feelings in the nature of human beings.

“The opalwings are strange, too,” Newt said, “and I don’t know if I remember them from the time I was taken captive in ‘25, or whether it’s from somewhere else entirely. But, um, that I don’t know them—I don’t know. I’ll watch them. Theseus is working with Grimmson, and if it comes down to it being between either Grimmson or I to have a, um, sensible observation, I would humbly hope I get lucky.”

“Mmh.”

Albus stood, almost abruptly, and walked over to the expensive tea setting in the corner. There was a faint clink as he rearranged the teacups, fingers drifting over several different jars of loose leaf tea before selecting something flavoured with lemon.

Without asking Newt if he wanted tea, Albus began to make it, heating the teapot with a jab of his wand. One teacup made its way to Newt, who cupped it in both hands, slouching over it; the other went to Albus, who went to the window and stood, looking out at the Scottish wilderlands beyond the castle.

“Beyond Gellert,” Albus said slowly, “I think it’s the Germans that we may have to be concerned about. There’s a power vacuum. Vogel is stepping back into it; and given I don’t think Gellert is fond enough of the man to let that stand, it either serves him, or he’s…unhappy.”

Vogel had got away with nearly everything, while Vinda and Grindelwald had gone into hiding.

“Something about records tampering in Brazil means Santos has no leg to stand on for the inquiry…which is unfortunate, because she’s smart. And lovely, too, which is rare. Gellert is—he’s—”

He went still. Clutched at his wrist again.

“The troth?” Newt guessed, getting to his feet. “Do you want me to look at it?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” said Albus—but then let out a low hiss of pain. “It’s not…it’s a side effect, this, not a purpose. It’s not based on my emotions or his or any of them at all. It’s the magic that’s strung through it. The magic that links him and I—that’s what’s restless. So restless that I wonder whether a trace of this magnitude might be a sign of something stirring.”

Newt presumed it was nothing creature-related, which therefore meant he wasn’t entirely thrilled at the prospect. “Hmm. Okay.”

“But I want you and the team,” said Albus, “to focus on everything that’s happening right now. Everything that we can see, because, before we look for deeper conspiracies, it’s quite certain that the rest of the world is willing to turn away from what’s perfectly obvious. Let’s get that right, if we can. The one contact we might be missing is Yusuf—”

“Surely he can’t have gone back to being a double agent?”

“We don’t know.” Albus pressed his forehead against the glass. “If Gellert is looking for anything that might help him bolster a return, it would be his cerebrum venedium. Without it, he starts to become…consumed by his visions. There’s a way to make one. A ritual. The traces I’m feeling through this accursed troth—I think it’s ley line manipulation.”

“But how?”

Albus went quiet for a moment. “If Yusuf returns, I suspect he might know. Otherwise, I’m sure Gellert will soon come to find me. He’ll make it again and find me. Please don’t worry about it, Newt.” His voice was tight and ragged at the edges, his breathing quick from what must have been the pain from the troth. “Whatever happens, I don’t have a plan—not yet. But with the troth loosened, I don’t necessarily need one, not like before. I just have to know him, and have him know me, and—”

He did not turn around.

“Newt, please could you go?”

“Then we’ll wait for him to make the first move,” Newt said. “Something other than these murders only the government might be able to stop.”

It sounded callous, said like that, but as he was working out how to try and amend it, he saw Albus’s entire body was trembling.

“Professor?” Newt took his first, slow step backwards. “I’m going to ask Theseus to let me on the case. Then, um, maybe we can see if any of the murders can…I don’t know.”

What else could he say?

I’m trying to trust Theseus? Maybe I’m pathologically incapable of doing it? Maybe I keep wondering if he’s going to turn back into who he was? Maybe I can’t even remember who he was in the first place?

Maybe I thought you were going to give me the clarity you usually do, because when you lie to me, when you hide things from me, I do it all because I consider you a friend?

“It's curious, isn't it?” Albus said, still facing the window. “How the very institutions meant to protect us so often become our prisons. The Ministry, MACUSA. Even Hogwarts at times.”

Newt couldn’t think about that.

Not the laws of the Ministry, not the Volatile Child Acts, not the way his father had enforced normality at almost any cost in his children. Not the similarity to the Second Salemers, not the dying kinship he’d felt with Credence, not the dread that came with Theseus trying to make amends.

Even those, when he’d got home from where they’d taken him, had finally calcified into a knowing that we will never, ever be fixed.