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TO HAVE YOU HERE
Silvered Scars and Goldenrod
June 1935
There is a period of time in June when Tina is not sure things will ever be the same.
Newt does not have nightmares, at least not exactly the way she expected he would. He does not get that particularly glassy, far-off look on his face like she has seen in men in her department, or even—for a time—in Queenie. He doesn’t flinch or seem fazed when discussing Grindelwald or their work or the resistance, as if his own suffering is already some thing far away.
And yet —
He is still economical with his speech, and he clings to routine more than she’s ever known him to do (far beyond the normal clockwork of his menageries’ rhythms). He jumps worse than ever when disturbed; and he curses through clenched teeth when he fumbles something in once overly dexterous fingers, or winds himself running up the stairs. She has watched him slowly repurpose all his white hand towels—too reminiscent of his niffler’s makeshift shroud—into work-rags for the habitats. Every time she looks up from whatever she is doing, she registers a flash of him turning sharply away, as if he’s just been caught staring (perhaps making sure she is really there and hasn’t been replaced by a mirage, spirited off somewhere he simply cannot follow).
Considering the memories he’d finally let Albus pull into a pensieve to replicate and save just weeks before—that she’d somewhat broken his trust in choosing to watch without him—she is not exactly surprised by that.
To think he was as terrified for her as she was for him, those weeks no one could find him…
It breaks her heart, and Tina does not often allow herself to be broken. But Newt had let himself break over and over again for the sake of his love for her, for his commitment to Dumbledore, for all those things he believed—in his bottomless heart—to be right...
And so, sometimes—in the dark of night, while he sleeps or labors away in the basement (and sometimes even when he’s just lost himself to drawing, lit by shafts of light in the front window, while she sits at the kitchen table mere meters away, and watches)—she lets herself break.
August 1935
It is August now, and nearly her birthday.
The air thickens as the liner moves up the river, and soon it smells like summer in shoreside London: stuffy and diesel with a distinct scent of fish. From somewhere far away, a suggestion of honeysuckle wafts in on the breeze.
As always, Newt is there to meet her at the docks.
She watches him from the railing as the ship settles in:
Uncharacteristically clad in casual linen trousers, a pale green camp shirt with a garish gingham scarf she recognizes as field protection from the sun (and a pair of sandals he could not have possibly bought anywhere north of Crete), he is listing slightly to one side as he fidgets with something in his pocket. She can’t help but notice the bouquet pinned upside down beneath one arm; and she immediately feels, simultaneously, both over- and under-dressed.
When she finally shoves her way off the boat, they stare at each other for a very long moment.
He stands there rocking slightly on his feet, and she wonders if he is going to move at all. She is frowning—maybe she should meet him halfway?—when he is, suddenly, a blur.
He’s flung himself about her neck, then, and—even though she can’t actually see him (for the way they’ve pulled one another so desperately close)—she knows it is the best he has looked in months. She snakes a desperate hand beneath the cotton scarf—gentle against the vulnerable length of his neck—when he finally pulls back.
Newt has studied her long enough to know not to move when she does this, to let her feel the thrum of his blood rushing steadily in veins just beneath his skin, to breathe deep enough she can hear it pull in his nose and hush out his lips: so she can sense his whole body move— alive —beneath her fingertips—
Eventually, she cups a hand about the scar at his temple, brushes hair out of his eyes, and lets him lean in with hands pressed to either side of her face for a kiss.
He pushes the flowers on her, then, with a quiet insistence; he tugs her trunk from her, with a smile; he sets off for Wizarding Immigration with a querulous quirk of his head when she doesn’t seem inclined immediately to follow.
How they came out the other side of that with nothing more than scars, a monitored heart, lingering pain, and a reduced grip (him); four months of nightmares and a caffeine addiction (her); an increased fear of distance and of loss (both of them)…? She does not think even G-d could know.
“Tina?”
When she looks up from where she’d been staring at the gifted goldenrod and sunflowers (how they glow in brilliant contrast to the plain black leather of her boots, to the oiled gray dock beneath), Newt has stopped at the Muggle-proof entrance to the immigration shack, expression fixed somewhere between hopefully fond and confused.
“Sorry, Newt — sorry, coming.”
He extends a hand to her and she hurries to take it, slips her fingers through his (those digits he’d worked so hard, for weeks, to be able to move).
When they get to the front of the line and the officer asks Tina her reason for travel, she firmly and unequivocally states pleasure , and she does not use her MACUSA ID. She pretends not to notice Newt flipping the newspaper on the officer’s desk so she doesn’t have to see the headlines about Grindelwald or Germany, as if protecting her heart from the horrors of their past—their present, their inevitable future—is the most important thing in the world.
After, when they step onto the apparition point, he tugs her along in a spinning rush before she even has a chance to ask where they’re headed. She guffaws when they stumble into pebbled sand on a proper beach instead of the hardwood of his flat—there’s a picnic already set out before them, spelled subtly into place.
He casts a shade charm, awkwardly ushers her to sit, and then says nothing at all as she stares at him. He busies himself with preparing her food and pouring her wine. And then—
“Happy birthday.” And he lets her catch his eyes, hold them in that steady way he desires from so few else.
She takes the bottle to serve him as well—allowing them both a moment to sit in that blissfully shared silence—until his gaze has drifted to the curl by her ear, head tilting to take in the rhythmic crash of the waves.
Finally, he accepts the glass from her and smiles, and something breaks inside her at how much firmer it looks now than it had when she left, how relieved he is to see her—
“You have no idea, Tina,” he says then, as if he’s read her mind, and there is something desperately full and quaking in his voice that sounds very much like the stress that had just shattered in her chest. “You have no idea how happy I am — how grateful — to have you here. To - to be watching you turn thirty-four.”
She bites her tongue and swallows hard, but it doesn’t work so she is crying, very quietly, and then she realizes—out of nowhere—he seems to be, too. (Those silent tears that come on him sometimes, so light and so quick they’re only noticeable when he’s slowed enough to let you look.)
“Newt,” she manages after a moment. “Newt —you have no idea how happy I am, too.”
He hmms, and leans back on both hands, watching her wipe rough at her face before pressing lips to the rim of her wine. She thinks it is as if he is committing her to memory: painting a picture of her in his head, drinking her in so he can pull her out should there come another time he needs something precious to grasp onto.
She lets him watch, and she watches him back; and eventually he shifts with the kind of speed it is easy to forget he possesses, tossing himself onto his stomach and flailing toward a plate.
When he absentmindedly kicks his feet in the sand behind him while reaching for his glass, she cannot help but laugh.
He looks up with a grin once he’s secured his lunch, and she knows in that moment—(as she has always hoped and imagined—always thought—but never known quite like this)—that she will love him, and he will love her, for the rest of their lives.
When they are done, Newt pulls a net out of a humorously small pocket, kicks off his sandals, and tugs her to the surf. Words trip off his tongue as he instructs and she smiles—quips, argues, teases—and it is also, somehow, very much like nothing has changed at all.
She glances up when her poorly aimed swipe at a brown crab sends her stumbling, only to find him watching her fondly, hands loose in his pockets, warm sun pearly-white on the scar at his temple:
Happy and alive, he smiles as if she is his whole world.
They’ll stay in a small cottage Newt has rented that night, and he’ll patiently listen to her rant about the past month’s worth of intra-office stress and inter-regional drama—appropriately biting his tongue to prevent unfettered remarks about what exactly she expects ‘from a bunch of hex-happy aurors’—over dinner.
Later, she’ll slip into the bathroom and transfigure the white towels a light fern green that matches his shirt. She’ll tug him outside to look at the stars.
Silvered by the moonlight, she’ll remind him, then—every way she knows that he’s willing to allow (his propriety and ironic displeasure of pebbles and sand permitting)—how exuberantly glad she is they are both alive; and, when they’re done, Tina will pin him with a look and ask how he feels about marriage.
Newt will stare at her blankly, stutter a confused but enthusiastic response—peppered with admissions of his own most distant dreams—and then they’ll turn away from each other again and go back to watching the waves.
Leaning against one another’s shoulder as the moon moves overhead, his fingers’ renewed grip grasps hers just almost too tightly, until they loosen in degrees, to smooth over the callous on her palm.
Four months later, Newt finally formally asks her himself, a cup of wine in his hands, the ring he hopes to give her slipped onto his pinky. (It chitters against the glass as he nervously awaits her response.)
He has admirably tried his best with tradition, even if he’s gotten it wrong.
(And as she looks into his eyes, the room bursts brilliant as those sunflowers on the dock, as his smile over that picnic at the seaside, and her soul is so full she thinks she could shatter—)
Nevertheless, she is far more eloquent in her reply than he had been in August, and there is no mistaking her resounding yes.
(It will be an autumn wedding: 1936 in upstate New York. The world will still be falling apart, but they will have found ways—by then—to hold their hearts together.)