Archive of Our Own ^beta

Newt isn’t sure that he’s ever been this tired before. And he once nursed Pickett through a respiratory infection so serious that he required medicating every hour on the hour for a week.

But this… this is a different sort of tired. Newt has the sort of headache that comes with the distinct sensation that his brain has grown claws and a temper and is currently trying to scrape its way out of his skull one agonizing millimetre at a time. He’s so hungry he’s somehow come right the way round to feeling nauseous and not wanting to eat at all. His eyes are bruised and sandy. His mouth is dry. He’s sticky with drying sweat and smells just about as good as one would expect in that state.

And the niffler is asleep, a dead weight in the crook of his elbow, so now his arm’s gone numb and he can barely feel his hand.

He’s tired down to his bones. Down to his very soul. And he can’t sleep. Not yet.

Poor Theseus has gone home to their parents because now instead of a wedding he has to plan a funeral. Jacob is in Newt’s bed because he can’t make his dearest friend stay on the floor, especially when he’s still looking so miserable, and Dumbledore has sent Newt off with a raft of instructions so far-reaching and complicated that they’re making his headache infinitely worse. Grindelwald is clearly plotting some sort of apocalyptic war and has somehow coaxed a vulnerable boy and Queenie Goldstein into aiding him in spite of Leta’s best efforts, and if he thinks even for a moment about Leta he’s absolutely certain that he’s going to start crying.

But Tina is on his sofa drinking tea, very much alive, and safe, and watching him out of the corner of her big, dark, fire-in-water eyes, so, just for this moment, everything isn’t quite so awful as it could be.

He coaxes the niffler into a hat, since going downstairs to put him back into his enclosure would entail leaving Tina’s line of sight for several minutes and he can’t bear the idea, then slowly stretches his arm until feeling starts to return to his wrist. Then he takes off and hangs up his coat, and then he joins Tina on the sofa, albeit leaving a respectful distance – two feet or so – between his knees and hers.

He places the niffler, now asleep in his hat, on the coffee table in front of them.

“He had babies, you know,” he tells Tina, for something say into the stillness of the room. “The niffler. There are four of them. Downstairs. At least, I think they’re downstairs. Little buggers keep escaping. They’re very sweet, if you want to go and have a look at some point.”

Tina’s mouth turns up at the corners, her head tilting. “Does that mean that there’s a Mrs Niffler?”

“Ah – yes. Presumably.” Newt squints, thinking, “the male can incubate the young in their pouches for years after conception if necessary, though, so I’ve never met their mother.”

“Years?”

“Until they find a suitable environment to raise them in. Then once they feel they’ve found the spot, they pop out the babies so that they can grow up.”

“Huh,” Tina considers, still sipping from her teacup. “So the guy stays home with the kids?”

“Oh yes, for the most part.”

“How progressive.”

“The female does most of the adventuring and treasure seeking while the male nurtures the young in their infancy,” Newt peers at the niffler affectionately, “not that that has ever stopped this one from doing exactly as he pleases.”

Tina laughs – though it’s a sound so tired that Newt has to fight the urge to yawn on her behalf.

It is very, very nice to hear her laugh, however.

The silence drifts on past the point where it feels socially acceptable, though Newt can’t dredge up another damn word. His grandfather clock is ticking heavily in the corner. Downstairs, if he listens very carefully, he can hear the mooncalves singing.

“Listen, Newt – ” Tina begins talking at exactly the same moment that he does.

“If you would like somewhere to sleep you can have the sofa, I’m afraid Jacob’s in my bed.”

Tina stops, closes her mouth, starts again. “Where are you gonna sleep?”

“Oh, downstairs, with my creatures,” Newt shrugs, “I often sleep there, I’ll be perfectly comfortable.”

Tina nods, biting her lip.

“Do you have – pyjamas? Because you can borrow a pair of mine if you – ”

“Thank you.”

Newt scrambles up, darting across to the clothes horse where a number of his freshly laundered clothes have been dry for at least three days (he has a tendency to never put his clothes away but instead simply circulate them from his laundry to his clothes horse to his body and back – they spend more time hanging in his living room in front of the fire than they ever do in his chest of drawers). And he picks out a pair of pinstriped red and white pyjamas – his newest pair and, incidentally, the only ones that haven’t been gently nibbled by one or other of his creatures – and adds a pair of socks.

“Thank you,” Tina repeats, quietly – she has followed him across the room, and now she takes the socks and pyjamas from him and stands holding them looking slightly lost.

“And you’re welcome to have a bath if you – ” Newt gestures awkwardly toward his bathroom, “and the water closet is just down the hall there, and there’s bread on the counter if you want toast and more tea of course – ”

“Newt,” Tina cuts him off, and Newt tries very hard to interpret her expression but can’t – he’s never especially wished to be better at human faces than he is (what would be the point?) but right at this very moment it would be helpful to have some frame of reference. “Just – hold still, for a second.”

He holds still. Because she’s asking him to.

And then she does something very strange indeed, and kisses him on the cheek.

It’s just the quickest, softest brush of her lips to his skin – quite high up, near his ear – but Newt’s entire body may actually have just caught fire, dear Merlin, suddenly his headache is gone and his stomach has settled and his bones are light and his soul is a riot of sunshine and butterflies and birthday cake.

He blinks at her, stupidly, for a moment, not at all sure what to say. If he should say anything at all.

“Good night, Newt,” she says, abruptly, and rushes into his bathroom without a backwards glance.

Newt picks up the niffler, still sleeping in his hat, and heads down into his cellar. His cheek feels hot. He touches the place where he still has the distinct sensation of that kiss and then nearly trips all the way down the stairs.

He would dearly like to wake Jacob up and ask him what he should do now (surely a kiss means something? But what? And is he obligated to reciprocate and if so how? What if he disappoints her again or somehow lets her believe the wrong thing again or –) but he can’t wake Jacob, not now, it wouldn’t be fair. And he would have to go back upstairs and through the living room where Tina is in order to reach Jacob, anyway, and he can’t do that either.

So he tells the niffler about it instead. (The niffler listens implacably, and then goes back to sleep).

Newt’s been left in such a daze that he’s forgotten to bring pyjamas down here with him, so he peels off his shirt with sleep-numbed fingers, folds it and lays it with his tie and trousers over the back of the nearest chair and contents himself to sleep in his sleeveless union suit. It’s wool – it’ll be warm enough.

Pickett emerges from his shirt pocket and then, after some insistence, climbs into Newt’s hair to sleep, which is unusually clingy, even for Pick. But bowtruckles tend to be more sensitive than people give them credit for – if Pickett has been upset by the events of the last twenty four hours, Newt can’t entirely blame him.

He collapses onto the hay bales that he ordinarily sleeps on down here, and drags a blanket up over his head. The mooncalves are still humming softly to themselves, and every now and again the auguries huff at one another, or the kelpie surfaces and snorts somewhere in the distance – all these are the sounds of home, the comforting promise that all is as it should be.

But nothing is as it should be and Newt cannot sleep.

His mind drifts back to Theseus. To Leta. To Jacob. To Queenie. To Credence.

His stomach turns.

He curls up on his side, closing his hand over his cheek again.

It feels obscene to be so full of pleasure over something as petty as a woman he adores showing him some minor token of affection, when Leta is dead, Queenie and Credence are lost, his brother and his closest friend are in utter turmoil –

He rolls onto his back again.

The niffler has crawled up onto the hay bales next to him, and now climbs onto his chest. He should put the little fellow away into his enclosure before he starts some sort of trouble – but he can’t bring himself to do so, not at this very moment. The weight and warmth of him on Newt’s chest, alongside his steady breathing and the contented little chirping sounds he makes in his sleep, are comforts Newt can’t bring himself to be rid of.

He smoothes the niffler’s fur distractedly.

The idea that Tina is, even now, on his sofa somewhere overhead, wearing his pyjamas, is… distracting.

He closes his eyes tightly, trying to make his mind blank. He feels all knocked askew inside, as if he’s a set of wind-chimes set jangling – everything in his head clatters, a dissonant cacophony. His body hums with useless energy.

Newt isn’t sure how long he lays there with his eyes closed, trying to force sleep that refuses to arrive.

But at some point, he hears something that sounds suspiciously like a baby niffler getting out of their enclosure, and forces himself out of his makeshift bed to check.

In a sleep deprived haze, he finds Einstein and Marie Curie having some sort of altercation, with Einstein stuck half way between the bars at the front of the enclosure, his oversized head still trapped inside while he shrieks in distress, not, apparently, because he’s stuck, but because Marie Curie is trying to yank the coin he’s clutching in his front paws out of his grasp.

“Alright,” Newt sighs, setting the adult niffler down on the floor in front of the enclosure (the adult niffler doesn’t stir – Newt envies him deeply), “alright, that’s quite enough, thank you.”

He prizes open the enclosure and pops Einstein free, separating him from his sister with a final indignant squeak. Darwin and Tesla, asleep in the back of the enclosure on a pile of gold coins, promptly sit up, roused by the sound of potential freedom.

Newt sighs – but once they’re up, there’s no soothing them back to sleep without food and exercise. So he sticks Einstein and Marie Curie on his shoulder, (Pickett pokes his head out of Newt’s hair, makes a distressed noise at the sight of such disruptive hellions so close to his chosen bed, and retreats immediately to the safety of Newt’s fringe). Darwin and Tesla cling to the front of his union suit as he opens a bag of feed and nudges the older niffler with a toe.

“Technically, these are meant to be your responsibility, you know,” he informs him, as the adult niffler peers lazily up at him. “Though I suppose that’s why you decided to have them here, isn’t it? Should I be flattered that you thought I’d take better care of your offspring than you would, or offended that you’ve decided to take such flagrant advantage of me?”

The niffler snorts, dismissively, then holds out his paws for a food pellet.

Newt is still wrangling the babies into eating in as orderly a fashion as they are capable of – at the very least, not stealing each other’s food and not getting into brawls and not racing off to inspect the shiny light of the moon through the nearest window – when he hears someone come into the basement.

In his exhaustion, he’s half convinced that it’s his assistant somehow arrived early.

“Don’t worry about the kelpie today, Bunty,” he mutters, once again separating Einstein and Marie Curie, “I’ll see to him later – I found a zouwu in Paris so we need – ”

Tina is standing on the stairs, looking perplexed. “Who’s Bunty?”

Newt blinks up at her for a moment, wrong-footed. She looks more lovely in his pyjamas than she really ought to, he thinks. The sleeves are too long for her so her fingers are only just visible from the cuffs. She has such nice fingernails – very neat and clean. She must trim them regularly.

“She’s – my assistant,” he offers, after a moment. “What are you doing down here?”

Tina shrugs, looking more than a little self-conscious. “Can’t sleep.”

“Yes that’s – understandable,” Newt nods, rubbing his eyes – he’s slowly becoming aware that he’s stood here in his underwear – the short legged, sleeveless kind, at that – why, oh why, didn’t he put on long johns before leaving for Paris? Every freckled, bony limb on display – the Niffler clinging to his chest, Pickett in his hair, hay sticking to his back, the babies all over the place. He must make an absolute sight.

Tina is certainly staring at him. Her cheeks are flushed. He wonders if she’s feeling unwell. “Quite a place you’ve got down here.”

“Yes well,” Newt shrugs, modestly. “It seems to keep the creatures happy.”

Tina nods, gazing around as she picks her way downstairs. She’s wearing the socks he’s lent her, though they’re too big for her narrow feet. Newt tries very hard to concentrate on making sure that the nifflers remain contained, as deeply aware as he is of every movement of Tina’s behind his back. The reality of her here, in the very heart of his home, when he’s imagined such a scenario so many times before, is jarring – strange in a way that’s making his skin prickle.

“What’s that?” She asks, abruptly appearing by his elbow and indicating his left arm – and ah, of course that’s what has her  distracted. It is, after all, rather a dramatic looking scar, the skin from armpit to elbow mottled and deep red.

“A burn,” he tells her, “from my days with the ironbellies on the Eastern front. One of the drakes lost a toe to a German incendiary device, went a little mad from the pain, nasty business.”

“Did it hurt?” Tina asks, sounding so genuinely concerned that Newt feels an unfamiliar sort of pressure rising in his chest. He doesn’t want her to feel a moment of discomfort on his behalf.

“No – no, not too badly,” he lies, as firmly as he can. “I was only on fire for a very brief moment.”

Tina laughs, shortly, her eyes wide and warm and still full of worry – she reaches out a hand, as if she’s going to touch the edge of the scar, and then hastily withdraws it. Newt feels unaccountably disappointed. As a general rule, he doesn’t like to be touched at all, and he especially doesn’t like to have his scars tampered with – but he suspects he could make an exception for Tina.

“I’m alright,” he promises, rubbing the burn, self-conscious now. “It only itches sometimes, when I’m too hot.”

She nods, not looking convinced.

Einstein promptly flings his food bowl sideways into his siblings and takes a flying leap into the air at Tina’s shirt – she jumps back with a yelp – it’s the mother-of-pearl buttons, of course, just shiny enough to have the little fellow’s attention.

“Oh!” Newt snatches the baby out of the air with practiced ease, “no you don’t! Behave yourself, Einstein!”

Tina gasps, her fright dissolving into tired laughter. “Einstein?”

“Yes, he’s rather tenacious.”

“I can see that.”

“Cup your hands together,” Newt instructs, gently, “like this – ”

She does as he indicates, and Newt carefully deposits Einstein into her palms.

Tina stares at him, fascinated. “Hey, little guy.”

Einstein is already reaching instinctively for the top button of the pyjama shirt again – Tina picks a coin out of the still open enclosure and waves it in front of the baby’s nose, distracting him.

 “This one’s Marie Curie,” Newt tells her, fetching the little brown female to show her, “and this is Tesla, and Darwin. I named them after – ”

“No-Maj scientists.”

 “I suppose that’s a little self-indulgent, but still – ”

“I think it’s sweet,” Tina is stroking Einstein’s head with a fingertip. “They’re kinda perfect, aren’t they?”

Newt swallows, taking her in – the way she’s placated Einstein into finding a comfortable spot in the crook of her elbow and is now rocking him as she tickles his belly, her expression attentive, warm.

“Yes,” he agrees, softly. “Perfect.”

She catches his eye momentarily and he hastily averts his gaze, feeling the heat in his cheeks rising. The spot where she kissed him stings.

“Tina, I – ” he begins, with no idea at all of how he intends to finish, only that he absolutely must say something to her now, make some sort of declaration – something – anything – “you must know I – ”

His words clog in his throat. He can’t bring himself to look at her face but he’s certain he can feel her eyes on him.

“Take a breath,” she advises, after a moment, her voice soft, near his shoulder. “Try again.”

He takes a breath – slow, steady – then another. “This is ridiculous. Do you know, I’ve never been so incompetent at anything in my life?”

“Incompetent at what?” She sounds like she’s smiling – he chances a quick glance at her face to check, and she is smiling, so softly and so sweetly and so close by that he thinks he might implode. He decides that looking at her was a mistake and returns his gaze to the niffler in his arms.

“At,” he swallows, “I – at you? I think?”

“At me?”

“Well you have spent the last few months under the impression that I was engaged to someone else when nothing could have been further from the truth, and that I had – discarded you when I couldn’t wish anything more than to be near you again – ”

“That wasn’t your fault,” Tina is now inspecting her lovely fingernails – her cheeks are pink. “I guess I coulda checked with you, before I just – assumed.”

“You weren’t to know.” Newt considers for a moment, “though I’m surprised you think anyone could – cast you over so easily.”

She fixes him with another inscrutable look, so that he’s not sure that he’s made himself clear.

“I only mean – I can’t imagine anyone being so stupid as to abandon you once they have your attention. That’s – assuming that I have your attention, of course. But you’re so – anyone who doesn’t think you simply wonderful must be an absolute fool, I think.”

Tina swallows, visibly, her smile tremulous but bright. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, you have my attention, Newt.”

“Ah. Well. Excellent.”

He really might spontaneously combust. He’s never felt anything quite like what he’s feeling at just this minute – tickly all over. Or perhaps that’s just the hay stuck to his union suit.

“Tina?”

“Yes, Newt?”

“If I were to kiss you now, would you have any particular objection?”

“Of course not.”

So he kisses her, quickly, before he can lose his nerve. And it feels hasty and clumsy and he has no idea what to do with his hands (not least because he is still, somehow, holding at least three nifflers), sort of fumblingly bumping his mouth against hers. But she closes her fingers on one of his forearms, and pushes up onto her tiptoes to meet him, and everything in the world shrinks down to the sensation of her pressed against him, of her mouth, of the faint smell of soap on her skin. He can feel her eyelashes on his cheek. He can feel her breath stuttering in her chest. And there isn’t a thing about this – about her – that isn’t lovely – perfect –

Merlin, he could kiss her forever.

When it’s over, he has no idea what to say, but she doesn’t seem to know either, so he supposes that that’s alright.

“I’m going to make you a cup of tea,” he decides, quietly – and she laughs, but nods.

“Alright.”

He takes a few steps before thinking better of it, spinning back round and planting a kiss on her cheek. “Thank you. That was lovely.”

Then he dashes off to the kitchen, her laughter following him all the way up to the stairs.

She joins him on the hay bales, as it happens. He brings her a blanket alongside the cup of tea as she goes on babying Einstein and Marie Curie (he’s never seen them quite so cowed in all their short lives – if she ever wishes to give up life as an auror Tina Goldstein will make an excellent niffler nursemaid). And when he sits down next to her once more – close enough, this time, for their knees and thighs to touch – she lets her head drop to his shoulder, and he hesitates for only a moment before he gives into temptation and presses his face to her hair.

(Yes it smells lovely – yes it’s soft and warm and yes she makes a sound in her chest that might be laughter or might just be a hiccup, but she doesn’t object – in fact she puts a hand on his knee and squeezes).

Come the morning, there will be much to do – much to talk about – terrible, sad things that must be attended to and grim, frightening truths to be faced.

But for a few more hours, at least, Tina is here – Tina is stroking his wrist with her thumb as she rests against him, and after a minute or so she turns her head just enough that her mouth and nose are brushing against his neck, and it feels so perfect and precious he could cry. And he thinks that if they can just have this – just her, just them, just for a little while – he’ll be able to face whatever else is coming.