Chapter Text
Cover by Syrupness
A shadow haunts a corner of the sitting room in the Goldstein sisters’ apartment. If anyone looked directly at it, they might think it was a smudge of smoke from a candle set too close to the wallpaper or a bit of ash that someone forgot to point a quick scourgify at.
But everyone in the Goldstein sisters’ apartment is out when the shadow first appears — they are all being extensively questioned by MACUSA aurors.
And, even after that, they are exceptionally busy.
Firstly, men are still not permitted in Mrs. Esposito’s tenement building. The New York Ghost will surely already list Queenie’s offenses — as it had Tina’s, months ago. Mrs. Esposito will not be pleased. She might even leave her own rooms on the first floor, rather than simply yell at them up the stairs.
The sisters and Mr. Newt Scamander stand outside the building and puzzle through it.
“No, we can’t do that,” Queenie says. Her eyes are dry now, but still red-rimmed. “It’s too suspicious.”
“That’s why I didn’t say it,” Tina says, sharper than she means to.
“What?” Newt asks, softly.
“You can't go up the fire escape, honey, it's broad daylight,” Queenie says. “You’d be less obvious in... a bright pink petticoat.”
“A bright pink petticoat?” Tina repeats, horrified.
“I wouldn't be opposed to the idea,” Newt says. “If it was the most expeditious way to get upstairs.”
“Did you really?!” Queenie says, reacting to some thought Tina obviously can’t hear.
“Oh, no, not me,” Newt says, lifting his hands and trying to wave off Queenie’s wide-eyed curiosity. “It was my older brother.”
“Ah, well,” Queenie says. “It’s the accent, I guess. You’re too much of a gentleman to try sneaking into a girls’ dormoritory.”
“What?” Tina says, now loudly horrified.
“It was my brother — my brother,” Newt says. He sets his suitcase down gently and pulls out his wand.
“If you think this will work—” he begins to say, moving his wand in the familiar patterns of transfiguration.
“Not out here in the street!” Tina shouts, her voice strangled in her throat.
They duck into an alley together, leaving Queenie to supervise the suitcase alone.
When they emerge again, Newt’s baggy trousers are a smart grey skirt with a matching jacket. His coat fits a bit closer and his wool socks have turned into silk stockings. He’s kept his tie, though it makes a bit of a fuller-looking bow.
“Now don’t you look pretty as a picture,” Queenie says, obviously delighted. Newt looks at his shoes, which are a bit more like heeled boots at the moment.
“Just don’t say anything,” Tina says.
“You know what you need, honey?” Queenie says. “A hat! You’ve just got to have a hat with that outfit.”
She conjures up a bright teal cloche that perfectly matches Newt’s coat, but clashes terribly with the red in his cheeks. Tina groans.
“Are we done?” she asks.
Mrs. Esposito does, in fact, stop them on the stairs. Queenie sacrifices herself to the woman’s nosiness, and feels Newt and Tina’s relief wrap around her like a priceless mink scarf.
“Oh, yes, it was horrible,” Queenie says. “The No-Majs were even worse than the Obscurious.”
She says it the way Mrs. Esposito does — not pronouncing the word quite right.
It’s exactly what Mrs. Esposito thinks, and she doesn’t sense a hint of sarcasm in Queenie. When Queenie wipes her eyes, their landlady thinks that she must be terribly shaken. Her nerves have always been much more delicate than her sister’s.
“I don’t know how I could have let this happen,” Queenie says, her voice quaking.
Mrs. Esposito barely notices the other woman with Tina Goldstein, but she’s dressed very boringly. Must be a coworker. Everyone knows how those career girls are — uninterested in marriage and makeup charms.
Once Tina has shut the door behind her, she watches Newt turn his clothes back into their proper shape before he sets down his suitcase.
“Your suitcase!” she says, smacking her hand against her thigh.
“My suitcase?” Newt asks. “What — what about my suitcase?”
“We could’ve snuck you up here in your suitcase!” Tina says.
“Oh!” Newt says. “Of course. Of course, why didn’t I think of that? Well, this was certainly more interesting, I must say. And now your — Mrs. Esperanto knows there’s someone else up here, so she won’t be surprised to hear anything odd.”
“Esposito,” Tina says, softly.
“Yes, Mrs. Esposito,” Newt says. “She seems very… overly involved.”
Tina groans, “She is.”
For a short moment, neither of them thinks about the events of the day. Tina isn't able to think about much beyond Newt’s calves in silk stockings. Newt mostly thinks about how strange Americans can be — and about sexual dimorphism in Erumpents.
The smudge in the corner of the sitting room goes unnoticed. Queenie returns to the apartment and puts dinner together with none of the enthusiasm she’d had just the night before, even though the three of them are quite hungry.
She sits at the far end of the table, hoping to force her sister to sit next to Newt. Instead, Newt takes his plate over to his suitcase.
“It’s been a rather long day,” he says. “I should check on my creatures.”
Tina nods, without turning her head to look at him. She cuts her food with the side of her fork and eats as though shoveling sawdust into her mouth would give her more pleasure.
Queenie sighs and eats with her elbows on the table.
“We really don’t have space for a guest,” Tina says.
“With that suitcase of his, I’m sure Mr. Scamander can turn the linen closet into a guest room,” Queenie tells her. He is already thinking about it — or simply living in his suitcase. Apparently, he’s used to that. But Queenie knows, as terrible as her sister might be at taking care of herself, she’s not gonna let Newt live in a suitcase. She wouldn’t even think of it.
In their sitting room, the smudge moves slightly, as though it too senses the sadness drawn over the Goldstein tenement like a storm cloud.
Above Manhattan, the heavy clouds of a morning thunderstorm linger into the next day.
“Some weather we’re having,” men say to shoeshiners and bosses and wives.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” they say.
“At this time of year?”
It stays damp and dark for the full length of the day. And the city, as always, is full of coal smoke and cigarettes.
Small threads of darkness find each other and weave together amongst the clouds. Something dark floats up the length of Manhattan going north, back somewhat the way it came — over the Bronx. But then it heads out over the water of the Long Island Sound.
If you’re well-to-do in New York City, they’ll bury you in Green-Wood. It’s the Père Lachaise of Brooklyn. But most of the people in New York aren’t well-to-do, many of them aren’t much of anything at all. Many of those people end up on Hart Island.
That’s where a little shadow finally rains down, settling into the grass. There’s no stone here, and no name even though the woman was identified. Her sister brought a photo of her a few years after she was buried, and they dug her body up.
“Yes,” Mary Lou Barebone had said, looking at the putrid body. “That’s her.”
She had a ring on her rotten finger, which Mary Lou kept.
Of course, Barebone was no sister of the woman in the grave. But all she needed was a photograph and that ring.
“I promised her I would care for him,” she had told the priest in Brooklyn.
It had worked so well that Mary Lou decided that day she wouldn’t bother with so much effort the next time she found some witch’s child. Besides, the papists were nearly as bad as witches. God knows what they would have done to the boy if she’d left him there.
He had been given a name by his mother, of course, and for a short time she had loved him. At Angel Guardian Home, he had been christened and baptised with another name.
One of the first boys in an orphanage full of girls — all his life, he remembers being around women and children, such that men seemed alien to him: both fascinating and frightening, as all unknown things are.
Mary Lou Barebone gave him her name, though she never let him believe for a moment that he was truly her son.
But magic doesn’t need gravestones and genealogies. Magic is something in the blood, in the flesh, in the bones. No one can beat it out of a child. No one could bury his real mother’s bones so deep that he wouldn't find her.
The shadow curls up on the damp grass like a sleeping cat, dark as midnight.
“Do you hear something?” one gravedigger asks another.
“No,” the other says. “But it sure is some weather we’re having.”
“Isn’t it?” the gravedigger says.
“You read about Senator Shaw?” the other asks, wiping graveyard dirt from his damp face.
“Who hasn’t?” the gravedigger says. “Somebody really ought to do something. All those anarchists and troublemakers comin’ into New York.”
“Well, Shaw woulda, that’s what they killed him for,” the other says.
The shadow uncoils itself like a snake and heads up into the clouds again; refusing to hear anymore of this conversation.
It can’t learn its name from the dirt of its mother’s grave. This is not the home it searches for, aching in every fraction of its shattered self.
But the next place it goes is no home at all.
Modesty Barebone can’t remember what happened last night. She spent the day crying in the empty, falling-down house where she’d grown. She doesn’t know where her parents have gone. She doesn’t know where her brothers and sisters are. Why only her? Why did Ma Barebone only take her?
She trudges back to the church where they lived with an empty belly and her hair in knots. There are a few children sitting outside the church, looking just as hungry and dirty.
When she reaches the door, she touches it only softly but it swings open. She sees the dusty floor and the scattered, torn pamphlets. The wand she made still lays in two pieces where it was thrown.
It was just pretend. She was only playing.
“They’re dead,” she says, turning to the other hungry children. “Mother’s not coming. Chastity and—”
Her throat closes suddenly.
“Credence,” she coughs out. “They’re not here. They’re dead.”
The other children look away, but they don’t argue. Slowly, some of them get up and go away to find somewhere else to beg.
She goes inside, stepping over the wreckage and making it as far as the place where she slept. She changes out of her wet and dirty pajamas.
Then, Modesty kneels down and begins to cry. Because now she remembers — they’re all dead. She can see it now, Credence killing Ma Barebone and then Chastity after. He threw Ma from the second floor and then he — Modesty doesn’t remember what he did to Chastity, only that she was dead.
Modesty fled to the only place she knew, and Credence tried to follow.
It was a policeman, Modesty thinks, with grey hair cut in close on the sides of his face, who saved her from Credence.
That’s what she remembers, and that she hid all day from the rain that came in through the fallen down roof of the home where she used to live.
Why did he do that? Why?
Modesty fears that she is the reason, and it makes her cry harder there on the church steps.
A second shadow curls up in the shade of her folded-up knees.
Modesty Barebone — that not being the name her mother gave her — has no one at all in the world and she is very hungry. This only makes her cry more and more.
Men and women in nice coats and nice shoes walk past the Barebone church, empty now of the bodies of Mary Lou and Chastity.
Now, there are no Barebones left, except for Modesty who is hardly one at all.
As if by magic, she suddenly remembers her real parents and all her real siblings. It's because of the policeman — the one with the grey hair. He reminds her: One day a policeman had come to the door and said something about sections and the law and violations. Modesty wasn’t supposed to be awake at that hour, long after her mother had put her to bed.
“Please, the children are asleep,” her father had said.
The policeman took her mother away and said he would return to take care of him in the morning.
This wasn’t what she had told Credence, of course, she said the police took her brothers and sisters to an orphanage. But Modesty doesn’t know where they are at all. She disappeared out a window that night, afraid. When she came back hungry in the daylight, the house was full of holes and broken windows. There was no one inside, and no evidence that there ever had been.
The neighbors did not recognize Modesty; they had forgotten her. Everyone had.
She came to the Barebones’ church because she was hungry, and Mary Lou saw something in her.
“Something wicked,” Ma Barebone had said.
Modesty lifts her head and wipes her eyes. Someone has dropped their billfold a few inches from her shoe. She picks it up and sees many bills and even more coins. There’s no one in the street now.
She clutches the money in both hands and thinks of the automat. Will the cashier ask where her mother is? What will she say?
Modesty gets up off the ground and pats at the wetness on the back of her skirt. In her shadow, something follows her. But no one notices it. It follows her into the bright lights of the automat, hiding in the shadow of her skirt. The cashier barely looks at Modesty, who tries to smooth her hair down with her hands.
She takes her nickels and goes, standing on tiptoes, to get all the soup and sandwiches that she can hold on one tray. It’s the most food she’s had in a long time, and rich enough to make her feel a bit sick. But she keeps eating.
That night, Modesty rests her head on the table at the automat and falls asleep.
The next day, she goes back to the Barebone church by herself. There, at least, she has a bed and clothing. There’s water to bathe with. She still has the little bit of money in the billfold.
While Modesty bathes in cold water she took in cups from the sink, a shadow opens the lockbox in which Mary Lou Barebone kept all donations to the New Salem Philanthropic Society. Modesty hears a huge crash as the lockbox is thrown to the ground. Coins spill everywhere across the wood floor of the church.
Modesty screams, just a little, and cowers in the cold, metal tub.
When she goes downstairs, finally, she’s certain she’ll find Credence ready to murder her. He’s come back to finish his work, she thinks.
Her wet, bare foot steps on a dime and it sticks to her skin.
Modesty’s mouth hangs open, her blonde hair dripping on the wood in a way that would’ve had Mary Lou screaming.
The lockbox is now in two, dented pieces on the floor. Everywhere around it is money, like an explosion.
Modesty gathers it all up and hides it under her bed.
She has enough money now that she doesn’t have to worry about eating for a few days. She could even buy candy if she wanted.
It’s been a long time since Modesty has had a piece of chocolate.
The next morning, a little bit further up the island of Manhattan, somewhere, deep below the Woolworth Building, America’s greatest living aurors question Gellert Grindelwald about the location of Percival Graves — among other things.
Grindelwald smiles and says, “I think I left him in a cupboard in my country home.”
“Your country home?” a British auror asks, his tongue cold in his mouth.
“Yes,” Grindelwald says, fluttering his blond eyelashes. The iron of his manacles blisters his skin, and President Seraphina Picquery has ensured that he can’t so much as take a sip of water without at least three top level aurors supervising.
“The one in Bavaria, it’s a family home, very remote.”
One of the other aurors sighs, and puts her hand to her brow.
An extraction team is mobilized from Scotland, in the name of intercontinental wizarding relations.
“I wouldn’t put much hope of finding anything,” the British auror tells Picquery.
Her face does not move an inch. She doesn’t even blink.
“I believe it would be in your ministry’s best interests to find Mr. Graves,” she says.
She does not say, “My country found your criminal, so yours had better find my cabinet member.”
She does not say, “A whole team of you tea-swilling, limey bastards came here, but it took a Hogwarts dropout who smuggles magical animals to find Gellert Grindelwald.”
She does not say, “I was so busy and so afraid that I didn’t even notice it wasn’t him.”
She does not even blink.
The next day, under veritaserum, Grindelwald tells his interrogators, “Actually, I think I was mistaken the day before. You won’t find Percival Graves in Bavaria after all.”
“Where will we find him, then?” an American asks.
“Have you checked the space beneath his desk?” Grindelwald says.
“Yes,” he says, turning his strange eyes toward the ceiling. “If I remember correctly, you’ll find a false floorboard there and I might have left him under that.”
He looks the American dead in the eye and smiles. “Hurry now, he might still be kicking.”
The extraction team is put on hold outside Stuttgart on their way to Bavaria. A team of six checks Graves’ office, which has, for many weeks or months, been occupied by Grindelwald. They could find anything there.
Beneath the dark, heavy desk, there is a false floorboard as Grindelwald says. But the space beneath it could hardly be large enough for a man the size of Percival Graves. Still, investigators collect the notes and letters found there — as they have collected everything from Graves’ office, home and known safehouses.
They review, categorize, and analyze every pen stroke and wax seal.
The investigators who pour over these notes, which seem to be those of the true Percival Graves, summarize their findings and present these to the aurors questioning Gellert Grindelwald.
But also to those questioning Porpentina Goldstein.
She arrives each morning after taking two bites of toast and finding her appetite has abandoned her. In her smart suits, she walks into the office where she used to work to be questioned by those she had once called colleagues. There are foreign aurors here now, because of Grindelwald and Credence — the Obscurial. Because she has a relationship with most of New York’s finest, they often have someone foreign interview her.
Today, a woman with a pleasantly French accent greets her.
“And where are you from?” Tina asks. “If I’m — am I allowed to ask that?”
The woman smiles. “I’m Marie-Jeanne Abegweit, of Quebec.”
“Oh,” Tina says. “That’s not too far.”
“No,” Miss or Mrs. Abegweit says. “It is not.”
“Now, Miss Goldstein,” she says. “Can you tell me how long Mr. Percival Graves was acquainted with the Obscurial Credence Barebone.”
Tina blinks a few times with her hands folded in her lap. They took her wand away from her before they even let her speak to an investigator. She picks at the cuffs of her blouse for lack of anything else to do with her hands.
“Miss Goldstein,” she says.
“I… I first mentioned Credence — I mean, Mr. Barebone, to Mr. Graves before he left for Europe in the summer. I believe it was early in April, or maybe late in March.”
“And how did you learn of the Obscurial?” Abegweit asks.
“We were — I mean, all of us, every auror in New York City, was trying to figure out what was causing, uh, magical incidents in No-Maj areas,” she begins. “I happened to come by some of the sites in the days after the… the incidents, and there were always children there.”
She sighs.
“I was so foolish,” she admits. “I should have noticed. But the children had pamphlets for the… The New Salem Philanthropic Society, that’s Mary Lou Barebone’s organization. She inherited it from her father, who is… I believe he is a descendant of Bartholomew Barebone.”
“The Obscurial, Miss Goldstein,” Abegweit says.
“Yes, yes,” Tina says. Her chest tightens as she thinks this over. She can feel the church door under her hands again. She can hear —
“The society seemed linked, in my mind, to more than one of the incidents,” Tina says. “I filed for permission to investigate and — after, only after it was granted did I go to the church. That’s the New Salemers' church Mary Lou had set up. It was… Pardon my language, but it was shit. It could’ve fallen down in a summer squall. There wasn’t even a lock on the door.”
Tina takes a breath.
“When I went into the church, I saw a woman — Mary Lou Barebone — standing on the second floor,” Tina says. “I could hear her striking something, hitting it. Hitting —”
Tina swallows. “Someone. With something — a belt.”
She has to tell and re-tell this story almost every day. She goes in. She tries to stop Mary Lou Barebone. Credence cringes behind the woman he calls his mother. He’s folded in half from pain, with blood dripping from his hands.
Tina holds her hands up like he had held his that day.
“She was hitting the young man across the palms,” she says, the same phrase almost every day.
“That was Credence Barebone,” she says.
“And did you know at the time that he was the Obscurial?” Abegweit asks.
“I barely even knew what an Obscurial was,” Tina says, as desperate to be believed as the first time she said it. “I didn’t know one existed in this day and age.”
She’s not sure if Abegweit believes her. Tina Goldstein isn’t sure if anyone believes her.
“And did you speak to Mr. Graves about the Obscurial at this time?” Abegweit asks.
“I put it in the report,” Tina says. “You’ve seen that, haven’t you? I put it all in my report to him. He is — he was my boss, after all.”
“Yes,” Abegweit says. “And did you introduce Mr. Graves to the Obscurial Credence Barebone?”
“No!” Tina says. “No! I begged him to — to do something.”
“Why was that, Miss Goldstein?” Abegweit asks.
Tina looks up at the ceiling and tries to contain the hysterical pitch of her voice. She’s a professional. But every time they ask her this: why? Every time, it gets a little harder.
“She — Mary Lou Barebone was torturing children,” Tina says.
“Did you have reason to believe any of those children were magical?” Abegweit asks.
“No,” Tina says.
“Did you see this woman hurt anyone other than the Obscurial?”
Tina wants to scream.
“No,” she says, very evenly. “No, I did not.”
She knows what she is admitting to — every statute and subsection. She doesn’t regret it. If she regrets anything, it’s that she didn’t go back to that church more often, that she didn’t whisk Credence Barebone away from that woman the way she had obviously stolen him away from some magical family.
If she could go back, she would take him away and that little girl he was so worried about too, Melody or Modesty or whatever her name was.
And the law could go hang.
Tina Goldstein thinks of her own parents — if they had caught the pox when Tina was much younger. Credence didn’t look or act much younger or older than Queenie. She clenches her jaw.
“Miss Goldstein,” the Canadian auror says. “Please describe the incident that lead to your dismissal.”
This one she can repeat with almost no emotion. After hearing Percival Graves’ voice condemn her to death, talking about how he told her to collect her things and leave the premises carries very little sting. It probably wasn’t even Percival Graves anyway.
It was still the real Seraphina Picquery that had her reassigned to the wand permit section, but even that doesn’t hurt anymore. Comparatively, so much else has happened.
Now, Tina even feels a little pride talking about how she caught Mary Lou Barebone in the act again and, that time, she couldn’t hold her peace. If that awful woman wanted a witch, Tina had thought at the time, she’d very well get one.
But there had been witnesses, including Credence himself — again.
“Someone would have had to obliviate him,” Tina says, “though, considering that he wasn’t a No-Maj, I doubt the usual memory charm worked.”
“No, I doubt it did,” Abegweit says. “Did you know it wouldn’t work?”
Tina scowls. “Of course not.”
“Did you attempt to make contact with the Obscurial after your firing?” she asks.
“Yes,” Tina admits. “But he didn’t recognize me. Or he acted like he didn’t. He wouldn’t even meet my eyes.”
She shoulda done something, she thinks. She shoulda. She shoulda.
“Did you know that Mr. Percival Graves or persons acting as Mr. Graves were in contact with the Obscurial at this point?” Abegweit asks.
“I had no reason to think that,” Tina says. “Mr. Graves didn’t even think there was a case with the New Salemers. And then he fired me!”
“When did you become aware of the nature of the Obscurial Credence Barebone?” the woman asks, her voice perfectly even. Her quill continues to scribble down notes even as Tina remains still and quiet.
“Only after Newt… After Newt Scamander —”
Down the hall from Tina Goldstein and many floors above Gellert Grindelwald, another diverse team of aurors questions Mr. Scamander before representatives from the Ministry of Magic. The president of the Magical Congress of the United States of America remains in attendance, as Mr. Scamander is a foreign witch accused of breaking international laws within her jurisdiction.
Newt Scamander addresses Madame President Seraphina Picquery and his own ministers with all the calm of a professor presenting his four hundred and twenty eighth lecture on the mating preferences of the North American Horned Serpent as compared to its European and Eurasian counterparts.
Which is to say that he isn’t nearly as intimidated by them as any present would have prefered.
“I entered this country via a Muggle — that is No-Maj steamer from London,” he says. “I presented my passport to No-Maj Customs and concealed the nature of my belongings. I had no intention of registering my presence with the Magical Congress of the United States of America, however when I was confronted by the auror Tina Goldstein —”
“Excuse me,” President Picquery interrupts.
“Yes, Madame President?” Mr. Scamander says.
“Let the record show that Tina Goldstein is not employed as an auror of the MACUSA, and has not been such since November of this year.”
“The record reflects this,” someone says.
Newt waits a beat. “May I continue?”
“You may,” Picquery says.
“When confronted by Tina Goldstein, I misrepresented the purpose of my travels as being for the illegal procurement of Appaloosa Puffskeins from Fleury’s Fancy Fauna, which was closed last year by MACUSA enforcers.”
If Mr. Scamander would only act disappointed about this, then President Picquery could derive some pride out of such a petty fact. But he speaks as if he’s a bit bored or just incredibly British.
“In fact, my intention was to travel from New York City to the state of Arizona to restore a native Thunderbird to its natural habitat,” Mr. Scamander says. “The individual possession of living or deceased Thunderbirds, of course, being illegal within the jurisdiction of the MACUSA. These laws notwithstanding, the animal had been smuggled from its native America across the Atlantic to a personal residence in Egypt, where I found it.”
This makes Madame Picquery frown.
Much of Mr. Scamander’s testimony henceforth makes the president frown. Especially when he gets to Mr. Percival Graves.
“I first suspected that Mr. Graves was not the man I believed him to be when he overlooked the Thunderbird which, without explanation, I possessed in violation of MACUSA’s statutes. However, it was his perverse interest in an Obscurus I had preserved following the death of its host, a young girl in Sudan — it was this which lead me to either of two conclusions: Either Mr. Graves, the head of MACUSA’s law enforcement body, was a sympathizer to the notions of Gellert Grindelwald; or he was Mr. Grindelwald in disguise.”
Newt holds his hands very carefully against the desk before him and looks directly at MACUSA’s president.
“I suspected that not even you Americans could put such a sadist in power intentionally,” he says, “and so I was forced to conclude that the later, however outrageous it might seem, was the more reasonable conclusion.
“After all, I had been in the company of Miss Tina Goldstein for some time by this point, and she had, at every opportunity, proved herself to be loyal to the laws of her nation, incredibly intelligent and also notably compassionate in her character. If she was an auror, then surely the man who lead America’s aurors could not be the same creature before us.”
Eventually, the officials grow tired of being lectured and let Newt go take his lunch. He goes up two flights and finds the counter where Tina Goldstein stares out a massive window while clutching a cup of coffee in both hands.
“I think I’m developing a taste for your coffee,” he says, as jovial as he can manage. It’s nice to let himself use a little inflection.
It’s also nice simply to rest his eyes on Tina’s face, but easier to talk about coffee than that.
“I —” Tina starts, then she drops her head and stares into her coffee cup.
“I guess we don’t have very good tea here,” she says. “It’s probably much better at home.”
“Oh yes, of course,” Newt says. “Everything’s better at home.”
Tina frowns, and Newt looks away, puts his hand on the counter and curses himself.
“I mean, not that I’m in a hurry to leave,” he says.
“It’s alright,” she says. “I would be if I were you.”
They look at each other and then away.
“Could I… What is there to eat here?” Newt asks.
“The sandwiches are, well, they’re edible,” Tina says.
“Could I get you a sandwich?” he asks.
“I’m not very hungry,” she says.
He looks out the window and she looks at the side of his face for a long, long moment.
“But we could split something,” she says, hesitant. “I didn’t have much at breakfast.”
“Me either,” he says.
He goes to the counter and orders coffee for himself and a sandwich to share. He remembers that Tina doesn’t eat ham. He orders roast beef, thinking about Queenie’s explanation of why she only eats chicken and fish. Apparently a Legilimens of significant power can hear even the thoughts of sentient animals.
They debated this at some length, while Tina sat on the loveseat beside Newt and read a book.
It was a pleasant enough evening, considering the day previous he'd been questioned at length about every single creature he’d brought into the country.
After a few minutes of standing at the counter with his hands in his pockets looking at the back of Tina’s head, the food is served up on a tray.
“Ah, I forgot to request extra utensils,” he says, as soon as he’s back by the window next to Tina.
“Newt,” she says. “It’s a sandwich.”
She smiles a little, a bit wobbly.
They each take a half of the sandwich and, without really meaning to, measure their bites so they never have to hold a conversation. They just spend all their time chewing. Even the mustard tastes like sawdust in Tina’s mouth, and while it’s hardly the worst thing Newt has ever eaten, he can’t say it’s at all good.
“Do you think,” she begins to say, wiping her fingers on a handkerchief.
When she doesn’t continue, Newt asks, “Do I think what?”
“Do you think it’s possible,” she says.
She clears her throat by coughing into the hankie. “Do you think it’s possible that Credence could… could have survived?”
She looks at him and he doesn’t need to be able to hear her thoughts to know what she wants him to say. Her face begs him to give her hope, to tell her it’s possible.
“Be honest with me, Newt,” she says.
He swallows. “I don’t know.”
“The Obscurus,” he says, “can’t survive without its host, the Obscurial. If the host dies, then the Obscurus dissipates.”
“Oh,” Tina says. “And… Well, you were there. That’s what we saw. Dissipation. Wasn’t it?”
Newt nods, but he tries to keep his eyes on her because she’s looking at him. She might cry and he’s not entirely sure what he’ll do if she cries, but she also simply looks tired.
“But Credence,” he says. “I’ve never seen anyone quite like Credence before.”
He thinks not of the huge wave of darkness crashing against New York City’s skyscrapers with all the fury of the sea against Gibraltar. Instead, all he can think of are Tina’s own memories played out for him to see.
“So, who can say?” he says, trying to sound hopeful. He tries for a smile, but it falters.
“I wish you wouldn’t lie to me, Newt,” she says.
Then she looks away, while he’s still struggling for the words to apologize.
“I’m sorry, Tina,” he says, at the same time she says, “I suppose it’s for the best.”
“Sorry,” she says.
“Sorry,” he echoes.
They both look out of the window, though Newt watches her reflection more than the plumes of coal smoke and flocks of pigeons that fill the sky.
In the afternoon, Newt resumes his lecture. And Tina resumes answering the same questions.
“How long did you know Mr. Barebone was an Obscurial before you contacted an agent of MACUSA?”
“Did you have any reason to believe Mr. Graves had initiated contact with Mr. Barebone?”
“Were you aware of the nature of their relationship?”
“The nature of their relationship?” Tina repeats.
No one asked her that yesterday or the day before.
“What do you mean ‘the nature of their relationship’?” she asks, her voice growing a bit shrill. “I didn’t know they had a relationship.”
Marie-Jeanne Abegweit folds her hands carefully against the table across from Tina.
“Did you notice any changes in Mr. Graves’ behavior before your firing?” she asks. “Perhaps something that would indicate he was romantically involved with—”
“He’s my boss!” Tina says.
“Was,” she corrects herself.
Credence, she thinks, would be around Queenie’s age if President Picquery hadn’t ordered his death. That’s not really young, not much younger than herself, but…
But…
“Are you saying that Mr. Graves and Credence — the Obscurial?” Tina asks. She can’t pluck the words out of her mind to finish the question.
“I’m not saying anything,” Abegweit says. “I’m asking if you had any reason to believe there was something going on.”
“No!” Tina says, loud and sharp. “Not at all!”
Deep below the Woolworth Building, Gellert Grindelwald says, “Oh, yes, of course.”
He smiles. “You did find the letters, didn’t you? And all his notes?”
There’s a sheen of sweat across his face and blond hairs stick out of the skin of his face and scalp like bristles on a boar.
“Isn’t that against the law here?” he asks. “Consorting with, what do you call them again, No-Majs? And yet, here’s your Director of Law Enforcement consorting his heart away and writing it all down in his diary.”
“And it wasn’t you who wrote those letters?” an auror asks.
“Please,” Grindelwald says. “As though I would debase myself that way.”
“It wouldn’t be so far off your record,” a brit says. “Now, would it?”
“Seducing something like that?” he asks, in a voice that would probably sound falsely horrified if he had more energy. But they do not really let him sleep. His flair for drama has been flagging.
“It was barely even a human being,” he says. “I certainly never thought of it as one.”
He shrugs as best he can weighted down by chains.
“I wouldn’t have even kept it alive, except that Mr. Scamander so helpfully informed me that an Obscurus needs a host.”
That night, Tina Goldstein walks back to her apartment alone. When she gets there, her sister is already serving tea to Newt Scamander.
“I agree, we’ve really got to do something for poor Jacob,” Queenie says.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Tina says as she heads to the bathroom. She wants to wash the city grime off her face, put on some cold cream, and pretend that no one asked her about the possibility that Percival Graves was romantically involved with Credence Barebone.
She changes from her work clothes into her night clothes with the flick of her wand and steps out of the bathroom in very, very soft slippers.
“I kept dinner warm for you,” Queenie says, like she doesn’t already know that everything tastes like sawdust.
Still, she sits at the table and eats. Queenie is already in one of her silk nightgowns and Newt has a set of yellow striped pajamas and socks with little dancing badgers on them. There’s a hole in the toe of one sock and Tina thinks, “I could fix that.”
Queenie looks at her from the corner of her eye and Tina glares as she chews on some mushroom stroganoff that tastes like sawdust.
“I was thinking of giving him something he could use with the bank,” Newt says. “To get the money for his bakery.”
“I know, honey,” Queenie says. “But what?”
Over Tina’s shoulder, a little shadow slips through the window and joins the growing stain on the wallpaper. It’s been getting bigger by the day, growing like a mold that fidgets and writhes. It acts as though it just can’t get comfortable, if mildew could even get comfortable.
It moves the most when Tina’s home and in the main living area. But no one looks at that corner of the room. There’s no reason to.
“I’m afraid most of what I have only has value to fellow wizards,” Newt says. “Nothing I have is all that precious to muggles.”
“That’s such a funny word,” Queenie says. “Muggles.”
She giggles, but Newt only shrugs.
After she finishes the stroganoff, Tina gets up from the table and puts her plate in the sink to scrub itself. Queenie watches as Newt’s eyes track her sister’s steps. Tina waves open a cabinet and uses the teakettle to pour herself a glass of hot water, to which she adds some honey and lemon and a bit of imported firewhisky from the cupboard over the sink.
“You’ll never believe what they asked me today,” Tina says, even though she swore not to discuss the proceedings of her interrogation. Forget it, she figures, she’s already a criminal — or at least that’s how she’s being treated.
Queenie, who doesn’t need to be told, squeals and covers her mouth with both hands. Her curls bounce as she reels back in her chair.
Newt turns more toward Tina and leans across the table.
“What did they ask you?” he asks.
“They can’t really think that —” Queenie says. “Mr. Graves would never!”
“I can’t say I knew him well enough,” Tina says, waving her hot toddy through the air as she speaks. She swallows about half of it in one go and feels it burn all the way down.
“But he’s so boring,” Queenie whispers. “And strict.”
At that name alone, the stain on the wall moves with near violence. The wallpaper bulges slightly and there’s a light hissing sound that’s probably the pipes. No one looks into the sitting room.
“They think,” Tina says, and she stops to take another swallow. “That Director Graves was having — something, I don’t even know what, with Credence.”
Newt makes a face. “The boy.”
“I mean, he’s not — he wasn’t a boy,” Tina says. “I guess.”
She polishes off her drink and goes to pour more hot water into her glass.
“It wouldn’t be illegal,” she says. “He’s — he was Queenie’s age, I think. And Graves is an adult. He can — could make his own choices.”
“This is bothering you a great deal,” Newt says.
“Well,” Tina says, filling half her glass with whisky. “I’ve got to say it’s caught me a little off-guard.”
The patch of mildew — or perhaps a bad burn — in the sitting room is absolutely throwing a tantrum.
Tina has her drink stir itself with a small spoon, then downs the whole thing in six long swallows.
Newt watches her throat.
“Does it bother you because of Credence’s age?” Newt ventures. “Or because of your relationship with both of them?”
Tina sets down her empty glass before she throws her hands up in the air.
“I don’t even know!” she declares.
She goes back to her seat at the table, slouching forward.
“I guess,” she starts. “I guess, it’s because Credence… was my friend, or I wanted to be a friend to him. I tried. And the director is… shit, was my boss. I told him about Credence, I begged him. He didn’t seem to care. Thought it was just No-Maj business. Asked me all the time, ‘Are you certain, Miss Goldstein?’”
She drops her voice and scowls as hard as possible in an imitation of Percival Graves.
Then Tina sighs and drops her chin into her hands on the table.
“And now they’re acting like Graves was going behind MACUSA’s back to be with Credence all that time.”
Closing her eyes, Tina puts her face down against the table and lays there — the very image of defeat.
Newt very slowly, very carefully reaches his hand toward Tina’s shoulder.
Queenie watches him, silent, before getting up as quietly as she can from the table. Tina doesn’t even notice her sister go.
When Newt finally finds the courage to put his hand on Tina’s shoulder, she startles and looks up at him.
“Where’d Queenie go?” she asks, glancing at the empty chair.
“To bed, I believe,” Newt says, keeping his hand in place.
“Oh,” she says. “Is it that late already?”
“After nine,” Newt tells her.
“Shit.”
She sits up slowly, and Newt finds himself leaning forward so that his hand stays on her shoulder. It’s very warm and the fabric of her pajamas is very, very smooth under his rather calloused palm. Likely, she wouldn’t appreciate his touch directly against her skin. But this isn’t so bad, is it?
She looks at him and for a moment Newt worries that, perhaps, she’s a legilimens as well. In which case, he has a lot to apologize for. She blinks. He blinks. His breathing, he notes, has subconsciously fallen into rhythm with the rise and fall of her chest.
“I should go to bed,” she says, her voice very quiet.
“Yes,” Newt says, just as quiet. “As should I.”
“We should go to bed,” she says.
Newt feels — he feels like a much younger man suddenly, judging from the flush prickling in his face.
Tina shakes her head suddenly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s late.”
“Yes,” Newt agrees. “It’s late.”
When she rises from the table, his hand falls away quite naturally. She goes to bed behind a curtain of fabric, and Newt takes one last journey into his suitcase to bed.
Illustration by Ikkoros