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That Leta will stay with Newt and Tina whenever Theseus is away has been a given practically from the first day after her return from Grindelwald’s clutches. She doesn’t like to be alone – and who can blame her – and she no family and few friends. Of course she prefers to stay with two of the only people in the world who truly understand what she’s been through. And Theseus seems perfectly content to encourage the habit – he doesn’t like to think of his wife alone at home whilst he’s away any more than she likes the reality.
Whether or not he knows that when Leta stays with Newt and Tina, she stays in their bed, is… another matter.
“Theseus and I have an understanding,” is all Leta will say when Newt broaches the subject, just once, over breakfast. Newt isn’t sure he wants to know anything more than that. Certainly he has no desire to ever, ever raise the matter with his brother.
Still, he can’t say that he finds the arrangement unpleasant.
Newt has been medicating an especially grumpy augury when it finally occurs to him that it is now, in fact, the middle of the night (…the small hours of the morning), and makes his way to bed.
The room is warm, dark and quiet. Newt began fondly referring to it as ‘the nest’ not long after he and Tina moved in – it’s round, and at the very top of their home, just under the roof. Not especially large and taken up mostly by the bed (what need is there for anything else in here?) It’s become their retreat – and when she’s here, it’s Leta’s, too.
Newt doesn’t turn the light on, slipping through the door to close it silently behind him, feeling his way across the room by memory, listening for the other occupants. He can tell Tina and Leta apart by sound alone by now – Tina breathes slow and deep and only ever snores when she’s turned on her left side; Leta snuffles and sighs like a child. When he draws closer to the bed, by the dim light of the moon making its way through a crack in the curtains, he can see the tangle of their bodies amongst the bed clothes.
Leta is tucked in against Tina’s chest, her fingers curled at the neck of her pyjama shirt, one of Tina’s arms still tight about her shoulders.
He thinks they must have fallen asleep like that – probably in the midst of some half-whispered conversation about Newt or the nifflers or whatever Leta has been reading lately. That’s usually how Newt falls asleep, anyway – listening to them, comforted by the knowledge that they are both safe and sound and giggling about how badly he needs a haircut.
Newt undresses as quietly as he can, though he’s not entirely surprised when he wakes Tina anyway.
He hears her stir, sees her eyes flicker as she shifts and settles, not quite sitting up – she won’t disturb Leta. She’s patient like that. Newt has accidentally kicked them both awake more than once, much to Leta’s chagrin – but Tina has perfected the art of waking without disturbing either of them.
Newt discards his clothes in favour of the pyjamas one of them – Leta, most likely – has left neatly folded for him at the foot of the bed – feels cold air hit his skin with a shiver and is only too glad to scramble beneath the covers a moment later.
He slides in on Tina’s other side, automatically nuzzling in close against her, pressing his face to the back of her neck – under the covers, her hand finds his and squeezes tightly.
“Good morning, Newt.” Her voice is rough with sleep but still somehow teasing.
He smiles against her shoulder, pulls down her pyjama collar to kiss the bare skin there because he likes the way in makes her sigh. “Good night, my love.”
He strokes his fingers along her arm, slow and rhythmic, until he’s sure that she’s falling asleep again, then reaches for Leta’s still unconscious form, gently, so as not to disturb her – he only wants to feel that she’s there, real and warm and safe. Her breath skitters softly, and Tina stirs again, so he stops.
They’re all light sleepers, especially these days – Leta has nightmares, Newt has creatures to feed – but Tina… Tina may simply refuse sleep entirely for days at a time. It’s one of the few things they ever truly argue about – Tina’s refusal to rest when she should – all the ways she refuses to care for herself whilst her work consumes her.
This is the first week during which she’s consistently slept through the night in a month or so – and it’s largely because Leta is here, and she won’t go to bed until Tina does, so the American is obligated to keep civilised hours.
If he wakes either of them up properly at this time of night (…morning), Leta is going to be very, very cross with him indeed, and he has no wish to induce her ire.
So he lies still and quiet, and lets sleep take him.
+++
The first Newt is aware of daybreak, it’s because someone is crawling across him to get to his trilling alarm clock.
Leta. Leta because he recognises the scent of jasmine lotion on her skin and because only she can swear quite that virulently. She’s possessed of expletives that can take even Tina by surprise.
“Satan’s – rotting – ballsack – ” Leta hurls his alarm clock across the room so that it hits the nearest wall with a crack.
Tina groans, burrowing down under the covers.
“Was that – entirely necessary?” Newt blinks at Leta blearily from the edge of the duvet – Leta turns a formidable eyebrow on him.
“Was it necessary to set an alarm for six in the morning on a Sunday?”
“The ZouWu gets most disagreeable if she isn’t fed on time.”
“And I get most disagreeable when I’m woken at an ungodly hour.”
“Yes, I’d noticed.”
Leta swats at him, though her outrage is somewhat undermined by the gentle tug of her mouth into a smile.
She leans down and kisses him on the forehead. “Good morning, Newt.”
“’Scuse me,” Tina holds up a hand, without opening her eyes. “Where’s mine?”
“Sorry, darling, how rude of me,” Leta crawls back over Newt (Newt tries and fails not to make an undignified sound as she knees him in the stomach), and kisses Tina on the forehead too. “Good morning, Tina.”
“Morning,” Tina sighs, reaching sleepily for her – Leta obliges with a smirk, wriggling back down beneath the covers, situating herself between Newt and Tina, her small form a comfortable fit between each of their bodies.
She slots in there as if she has always belonged. Newt remembers being startled by the familiarity of the sensation the morning he’d woken up in the aftermath of their first, giddy, somewhat drunken escapade as a trio, to find Leta clasped between himself and Tina, as snug as if she had never been anywhere else. How pleasant it had been, to hold her so close and feel Tina content to do the same – to catch Tina’s eye over the top of Leta’s head and exchange the same small, conspiratorial smile – to understand in only a single glance that his wife was as bemused and delighted to find herself in this situation as he was.
Now, Leta arranges each of them to her liking – as is her custom – pulling Tina tightly against her back, squeezing the American’s arm about her waist, tugging Newt onto his side to face them both. He obliges her, laying an arm across her shoulders, draping his fingers so that they’re brushing Tina’s neck.
Leta likes to be held more than she likes almost anything else in the world – perhaps second only to clotted cream and orgasms. Here, clasped between them whilst Tina strokes her hair, Newt’s quite certain that Leta would start purring if she could.
“That’s the advantage of you Scamanders,” she’d remarked, once, whilst lazily draped across both their laps of an evening, “so tall you could each wrap yourselves around me twice over and still have limbs to spare for each other.”
+++
Newt isn’t sure exactly when he truly understood what was coming. It feels as if it may have always been an inevitability – a tide coming in. A rock fall down a mountainside.
In the first weeks after Leta’s return she had been accompanied almost everywhere by at least one of them – Theseus, or Newt, or Tina. Most often, Newt and Tina, together. Since Theseus’ hours at the Ministry meant that, however much he wished to, he couldn’t simply dedicate his time to escorting Leta around London.
Then Tina got herself assigned to Leta as a bodyguard, of sorts. The Ministry (and, indeed, Theseus) was insistent that someone ought to be watching Leta in an official capacity, to make sure Grindelwald’s agents didn’t attempt to reclaim her. Leta, of course, hated the idea immediately and protested vigorously.
Tina was the compromise.
Leta certainly preferred to have woman close by rather than some strange man, and the fact that Tina and she were already at least partially acquainted by this point helped a great deal.
So Tina accompanied Leta everywhere for three months solid, and Newt, having very little else to do outside of his routine animal care, accompanied his wife. They were so frequently seen all together that when Newt went about his day alone he began to feel as if he were missing something – a hand, perhaps – or his heart.
And once upon a time he’d been so entirely accustomed to his own company that other humans had felt burdensome to him.
Still, somewhere in there, it became inevitable that they should all three take to bed together.
He remembers catching sight of Tina and Leta seated together at the back of a bar one evening – they had sent him off to bring their drinks, and while they waited for him, they had bowed their heads together over their table so that they could hear one another over the din of the crowd. Leta’s delicate little fingers had crept across until her knuckles were brushing Tina’s wrist. By the time he’d got back to them, their foreheads had been close enough to touch and he felt as if he was intruding on something.
On another occasion, walking the length of tower bridge late one evening, Leta had paused to take in the view, gazing stoically out over the slow length of the Thames, London glittering in the gathering twilit gloom. And she had reached back for Tina to draw her close against the chill of the early Autumn breeze – and Newt had watched her lean into his wife with the sigh of someone sinking into a hot bath at the end of a long day and had known in his gut exactly how Leta felt. Because being close to Tina was rather like that – like coming into the safety of a harbour out of the churning sea.
Then, in a crowded theatre foyer, Tina had slipped an arm around Leta’s waist, ostensibly to anchor her amongst the press of bodies making their way out during the interval, but Leta had closed her fingers around Tina’s wrist and prevented her from letting go – and reached for Newt’s hand.
And Newt had felt a strange sensation spreading through his chest as he’d taken it. His wife holding his closest childhood friend, protecting her from the crowd, and Leta reaching for him anyway – drawing him in as well – her eyes wide under the dim lights.
“Stay close,” she’d said.
“I promise,” he’d replied.
He’d met Tina’s gaze over Leta’s head, and knew that she understood.
It was Tina who had first made an affectionate joke out of making room between her and Newt’s palms when they held hands, for Leta to slide her hand into the middle.
“So we can’t lose you,” she’d told Leta, taking her wrist and securing her fingers between her husband’s, then closing her own hand on top with a wry smile.
Leta had laughed. “Oh, so you can both tow me along behind you like some lost little duckling?”
“More of a hobbit, really,” Newt replies, having recently read and enjoyed the book by Mr Tolkein – Leta flicks him in the ear, feigning more outrage than she truly feels.
Somehow, though, it becomes their habit – under the tables at the backs of darkened bars, in theatres and quiet libraries, he holds both their hands in one of his. Tina’s fingers always knit with his exactly as he’s used to, and Leta’s hand is secured between their palms, her fingers curling over Newt’s thumb, safe, warm.
Certainly by the time this is a regular occurrence, he understands what he is doing – what they are all three doing. That this is a strange sort of dance, leading toward only one possible peak.
“Did you ever kiss her, when you were at school?” Tina asks her husband, softly, one night whilst they are in bed together, wrapped around each other, sweat cooling on bare skin, enjoying the lingering heat of their nocturnal activities – Leta has gone home to Theseus, but Newt doesn’t need to ask who ‘her’ is.
“No,” he replies, honestly. “I thought about it a lot, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to venture over that particular horizon. I was worried she’d slap me.”
“I don’t think she would’ve,” Tina’s mouth quirks, “or that you wouldn’t’ve liked it if she had.”
Newt snorts. They each discovered how much he likes the occasional, well-timed slap (…amongst other things) during their lovemaking early in their marriage – it’s an avenue of exploration in their physical relationship that has turned out to be something of a delight for them both.
“Don’t tell Leta that – you’ll give her ideas.”
Tina laughs. “You sure you don’t want that?”
And Newt falls silent, feeling abruptly caught out.
Tina gazes at him for a moment, her eyebrows raised.
“Tina, you must know, I would never – ”
“I know,” Tina smooths his hair out of her eyes, “but I know how you feel about her. Maybe because I have a little bit of it too, I think.”
It’s the first time either of them have said it outloud. Newt swallows.
“She’s just that sort of person, I guess, isn’t she?” Tina goes on, avoiding his gaze, “hard not to feel some sort of way around.”
“Yes,” Newt’s mouth is dry, “hard.”
There’s a heartbeat’s worth of silence before they both dissolve into fits of giggles, Newt burying his face in his wife’s shoulder as she tweaks his ear, affectionately.
“That’s a terrible pun, Mr Scamander.”
“I swear to you, I wasn’t trying to imply anything untoward – ”
“We’ll scandalise her.”
“I don’t think we will.”
He meets her gaze again, and sees the storm of new possibilities brewing there.
+++
Then Tina is hit with a curse.
Well – the curse hits a wall and glances off her. If it had hit her directly she would have come out far, far worse for wear than she does. And she doesn’t come out of it well.
Newt isn’t there. He doesn’t see it.
But according to Leta, there’s the most horrible crack and then the smell of burning human flesh, and Tina has been thrown across the street and comes down with a choked-off yelp of pain, lands in a heap of limbs, one arm clearly broken, her legs twisted out beneath her.
Tina doesn’t remember much of that. She does remember Leta bolting after her – Leta lifting her head off the ground to pillow it in her lap. Leta ripping off her coat to hold it to the cruel, gaping slash left in the flesh of Tina’s torso.
“No, no, no, no,” Leta chanting, over and over, holding the coat in place and gripping Tina’s hand hard enough to bruise. “No, no, Tina, no, stay with me – Tina – ”
Newt is met by Leta sobbing at his wife’s bedside in St Mungo’s – Tina is small and pale and unconscious against the pillows.
“It’s my fault, Newt, I’m so sorry,” she’s shaking worse than she was when she first came back from Grindelwald – worse than when she faced the bogart at school, worse than when she’d confessed the truth about Corvus in Paris. “He was aiming for me, Tina pushed me out of the way – ”
“Don’t tell yourself that,” Newt clasps her shoulder, his stomach churning – he’s never seen Tina look so fragile. “Did – did they catch the man responsible – ”
“He’s already being taken to Azkaban,” Theseus is lingering stiffly in the doorway to Tina’s room, “we’ll interrogate him there. Though I don’t think there’s much doubt about who he must be working for.”
Leta radiates misery, her shoulders hunched, her eyes swollen from tears. The front of her dress is still soaked with Tina’s blood.
“Tell her to stop cryin’,” Tina mutters, from the bed, apparently not quite as unconscious as was previously thought, “s’givin’ me a headache.”
Leta gasps, sniffling, a hysterical hiccup of laughter escaping her chest. “Sorry, dearest.”
They take Tina home the next day – her bones are mended, her flesh knitted, but the curse that hit her was a nasty one, fragments of it still clinging to the silvery scar tissue arcing across her ribs. It will need careful treating with charmed dressings and an ointment that smells strongly of peppermint before it has been fully dissolved, and until then it’s important that Tina rests.
Tina takes to this about as graciously as can be expected.
“I ain’t made a’ porcelain,” she informs them, sharply, as Newt and Leta put her to bed. Her accent gets noticably thicker when she’s cross, which Newt finds rather charming. “I don’t need fussin’ over!”
“You decidedly do,” Leta retorts, “now stop squirming.”
Tina makes a disgusted sound in the back of her throat but begrudgingly tolerates Leta’s insistent fluffing of pillows and Newt’s layering of blankets.
She’s also obliged to at least let her husband attend to the dressings on her wounds, since she can’t change them herself. Leta keeps her gaze averted whilst Newt helps Tina unbutton her pyjama shirt, but is ever the attentive nurse, standing by with ointment and gauze and encouragement.
“Do they look any better?” She asks, anxiously, over Newt’s shoulder.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Tina replies, shortly.
“There’s no sign of infection, which is good,” Newt adds, more cautiously, massaging ointment into thin scar tissue. “This will sting a little, I’m sorry.”
Tina grits her teeth, inhaling sharply as her scars protest the interference – remaining fragments of curse spark and gutter and burn away – Leta bites her lip, then reaches across to hold Tina’s hand.
Of course if Tina can’t leave her home then neither can Leta and Newt, so they keep her company.
Theseus comes by to pick Leta up that evening, and finds Leta lounging on Newt and Tina’s bed with her hosts – Tina in her pyjamas and dressing gown, Newt in just his vest and trousers, reading to them both from the Tales of Beadle The Bard.
Theseus arches an eyebrow at all three of them. “Be glad that the Dailey Prophet can’t get photos of the domestic life of Newt Scamander and his – wives.”
Newt goes bright red.
Leta only waves a hand at Theseus dismissively. “Oh hush. Take me home, darling.”
“Alright.” He scoops her up off the bed, and she laughs, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Good night,” Leta kisses her fingertips, then taps them to Tina’s cheek and Newt’s nose, before Theseus disapparates them both away.
“Your brother took that well,” Tina mutters, sliding into the spot Leta was occupying moments ago and nestling up to Newt’s side.
“Yes, Leta says they have an understanding,” Newt replies, “I’m not sure I want to know what that means.”
“Mercy Lewis, me either.”
+++
Newt is tending to an infection in the Kelpie’s leg, when one of Tina’s scars starts to burn.
She rolls over in their bed, wriggling uncomfortably against the duvet – Leta, who has been reading next to her, drops her book.
“Are you alright?”
“Fine,” Tina reaches back, under her pyjama shirt, trying in vain to get at where the scar is searing the skin just above her kidneys.
“You’re in pain,” Leta sits up properly, “let me help you.”
“I’m fine – ”
“Tina,” Leta fixes her with an especially penetrating look, and Tina subsides, grumpily.
She rolls onto her stomach, waving vaguely at the small of her back. “It’s round there. Burning.”
Leta hesitates only a moment, before pushing Tina’s pyjama shirt up to her shoulder blades, exposing the pale, narrow plain of her back, inhaling sharply at the sight that greets her. The scar is a wicked smile sliced diagonally from her kidneys round toward her ribs, where Leta knows it wraps around her torso and most likely up between her breasts (…not that she’s thinking about Tina’s breasts). And the lowest point of it has gone from the shiny, silver-white that it was yesterday to an angry crimson, the skin around it beginning to grow inflamed. Glittering shards of the broken curse glint poisonous green just under the surface of her flesh.
“Oh dear,” Leta sighs, then scrambles off the bed in a hurry, “that doesn’t look pleasant. I’m going to get your ointment.”
“Okay,” Tina folds her forearms under her chin, shifting uncomfortably.
“No scratching!”
“I’m not scratching!”
“You’re thinking about it, I can tell.”
Tina snorts – then gasps as another searing pain slices across her back.
“Alright, alright,” Leta hops back onto the bed, “here we are.”
“Hurry up!” Tina grits her teeth.
Leta hastily uncaps the little jar they were sent home from St Mungo’s with – its translucent content sparkles faintly and immediately fills the room with the sharp, sweet smell of peppermint. She collects a thumb-nail sized globule and then smears it across Tina’s skin where her wound looks the most painful.
Tina exhales harshly at the contact.
“Sorry,” Leta hesitates, “am I hurting you?”
“No,” Tina hisses, “it’s just – it’ll get better, keep going.”
Leta furrows her brow, but works the ointment into Tina’s back as gently as she can, concentrating on applying a layer of the faintly sticky, oily gel evenly, focused on the most inflamed patches of skin.
Tina flinches and shivers under her fingertips, but the ominous green shards of the dying curse are receding almost before Leta’s eyes – a faint, damp spark flares and dies beneath her skin and Tina lets out a relieved gasp – the red, angry sections of scar tissue are lightening again.
“Better?” Leta asks, softly, smoothing her palms in gradually widening circles across Tina’s skin – she gives into temptation and runs her fingers up Tina’s delicate spine, reverently tracing the wirey length of flesh and bone, feeling the heat of her.
“Yes,” Tina sighs – and Leta can feel her relaxing again, the tension leaving the taught muscles in her shoulder blades. “Don’t stop.”
Leta freezes, and can tell by the abrupt hitch in Tina’s breathing that the other woman knows as well as Leta does exactly how that sounded.
“I mean – only – ”
“Tina,” Leta takes a steadying breath, as much for her own benefit as for Tina’s. “Hush.”
Tina does – she lays there, and lets Leta touch her. The silence is deep but for the rush of the blood in Leta’s ears and the rattling of her heart against her ribs – she’s been walking this line for weeks, she knows. Examining the edges of this particular boundary.
She presses the heels of her palms into the small of Tina’s back and then slides them slowly up – feels rather than hears Tina make a low, shaky sound of pleasure – and decides that she can’t resist any longer. She trails her fingers back down, to the waist of Tina’s pyjamas and then, just a little, beneath them.
Tina flips onto her back so quickly she almost knocks Leta off the edge of the bed, and for one horrible moment she thinks she’s misread the situation entirely and that that wasn’t what Tina wanted at all and oh god she’s just attempted to molest her childhood friend’s wife in his bed –
And then Tina takes a handful of the front of Leta’s dress and pulls her down to kiss her.
Warm and soft and perfect, entirely – the smell of peppermint fills Leta’s head alongside the heat of Tina’s mouth, the clasp of her hands against Leta’s chest –
Which, of course, is the exact moment that Newt walks back into the room, carrying three mugs of tea.
“Ah,” he blinks at the pair of them, “should I leave you alone?”
There really is no disguising what they were just doing. Leta is practically on top of Tina. Tina’s pyjama top is still hitched most of the way up, the bare skin of her naval warm under Leta’s fingertips. She sits up, guiltily.
She had meant to ask Newt before she attempted to seduce his wife. Really, she had.
But Tina only stretches out a hand to Newt from the bed with a small, wry smile.
“No,” she says, softly, “you don’t have to leave us alone.”
So Newt comes and sits on the edge of the mattress nearest to Tina, carefully places the mugs on the bedside table, conducting himself in far calmer a manner than Leta would expect for a man who has just walked in on his wife and his friend in rather a compromising position in his marital bed.
He reaches for Tina, drawing her gently into his lap, pressing his nose to her hair. Leta watches them, feeling something she has no idea how to express.
“As two of perhaps the four people who know me best on this planet,” Newt begins, into the lingering silence, “you can’t possibly expect me to do the talking, here.”
Leta gasps, her laughter sharp in her throat. Tina wraps an arm around her husband’s shoulders, eyeing Leta brightly from his lap.
“Will one of you,” Leta folds her arms, “explain yourselves?”
“We may have been holding a series of – hypothetical – conversations,” Tina offers, after another quick, shy exchange of glances between herself and Newt. “About – well.”
She hasn’t pushed her pyjama top back down. It’s rather distracting.
“We were really only… what’s the American term? Spitballing?” Newt adds, gently.
“Spitballing with benefits.”
Leta snorts. “About what?”
“About –“
“Well – ”
They both start at the same time and then stop again. They’re both very pink, and very pretty, and Leta can feel something within her beginning to hum with a dawning kind of joy.
Newt clears his throat. “Did you know that bowtruckles, they – instead of forming pairs they form – triads and sometimes even – quads of unrelated adults to – ”
“You’re suggesting,” Leta considers, momentarily, “that the three of us – ”
“Only if you truly want – ”
“Yes,” Leta says, because she doesn’t even need Tina to finish that sentence, “yes – yes.”
Leta stays with them that night.
+++
They don’t have any set routine, of course. It’s all a tangle of limbs, chaotic and clumsy and cosy.
Because there are three of them, they can do things together they can’t do apart, though. With Newt lying between them, sometimes, Tina and Leta will work him together – touch him together, grip and squeeze and move him together –
“Oh – Merlin –“ Newt is a gasping, sweat-slick mess. Tina meets Leta’s gaze over his head and her mouth quirks.
“Bite him.”
“What?” Leta isn’t sure she’s quite heard her – everything else about this situation is rather distracting as it is.
“Bite him,” Tina repeats. “Just here.”
“Yes!” Newt clamps his eyes shut, “yes, please.”
Leta allows herself a wry grin – because of course Newt Scamander enjoys being bitten – before she does it, leaning into the place Tina indicated, just below Newt’s ear, biting down on warm, soft skin just hard enough to bruise. And Tina does it too, on the other side – and Newt comes apart immediately, his body shaking hard enough that he might actually be about to fall to pieces on the bed.
Leta grasps his chin, turning his face toward her so she can kiss him, smoothing his hair back off his face were it’s damp with sweat. He sighs, exhausted, trailing his delicate fingers down her arm, his mouth curling into a wondering smile.
Tina curls herself in behind him, pressing her chest to his back, propping her chin in the crook of his neck.
“Told you,” she murmurs, “you bite him, he’ll do anything you want.”
“Duly noted,” Leta pinches Newt’s ear affectionately and he groans.
“Neither of you are ever allowed to use that technique outside of this room.”
“But where’s the fun in that?” Tina asks, kissing the spot on Newt’s neck that still bares the imprint of her teeth.
Leta falls asleep against Newt’s chest, waking only momentarily when she feels Tina climbing across to lay down behind her – feeling herself folded into the space between these two, as safe and snug as if she has never been anywhere else.