𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐞 𝐚 𝐡𝐨𝐜𝐡𝐭 // 𝟐𝟖
For the better half of the remainder of that year, Tara worked almost exclusively in the shadows. The only time she was found within the walls of the Ministry, was when she was expected to be. Training sessions went on, as per usual. But outside of that, she was actually hard to be found.
In the time that had passed since the incident in Germany, Theseus found himself and his office consumed by increasing levels of responsibilities. And that, gave Tara a bit more freedom in the sense that he hadn’t been able to physically worry over her as much as he might have wanted to.
Now Tara, in all that time, had never been approached by Dumbledore in person. But she had become a sort of errand-runner for the professor. She fed intel when, where, and to whom she could. Passed along messages as requested to bodies both inside and outside of the Ministry, and much more.
She felt like a proper spy. And for the first time since she had been given the position of Director of Lawmen Training, she felt like her actions were actually making a difference.
Tara had also become result in the time since Theseus had gotten hurt that nothing like that was going to ever happen again. Not while she was alive at least.
The two of them were still doing fairly well at hiding their relationship while at the Ministry, thanks to the combined business of their schedules. Oftentimes, the only place they were able to catch up, or even catch glimpses of one another, was back at home.
It quickly became a near-sanctuary for them. She could admit that to herself. And she appreciated the hours that she had there with him above everything else.
“Chester said you were late to training today.” Theseus had dared to bring up one day as he finished cooking. The Auror glanced over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow, staring back at where Tara was perched on the counter a few feet away from him. “Anything you want to tell me?”
The witch shrugged in response.
“Just lost track of time.”
Theseus hummed as he placed the two plates of food down onto the small table that sat in the center of the kitchen. He then turned back towards her, a single hand resting on his hip.
“‘Lost track of time’…running around and hunting down dark wizards?”
Tara gnawed at the inside of her cheek, immediately looking away from him.
Theseus heaved a sigh.
“I just want you to be careful.” he added after letting a brief silence fall over the space.
“I am being careful.” Tara quickly fired back.
A dismissive scoff fell out of the Auror’s throat.
“If I know Tara Kelly, I know careful is the last thing that she is.”
Rolling her eyes, Tara pushed herself off of the counter without saying another word.
Seeing this, Theseus sighed again, pulling out the two lone chairs that populated the table.
“Let’s just eat.” he relented quietly. “Forget I said anything.”
“Theseus…”
Before the wizard could sit down in his seat, Tara had grabbed a hold of his wrist, all but forcing him to turn back towards her.
“They tried to take you away from me.” she whispered. And immediately watched Theseus’ expression softened tenfold. “I’m not going to let them win. I can’t. I won’t.”
The man was still and quiet for a long moment after she spoke, Tara’s eyes continuing to dance across his expression, searching and silently pleading for his understanding.
Finally, Theseus leaned down just enough to press a quick, but purposeful kiss to her forehead, his free hand coming up to gently rest against the side of her face.
“Yeah. I know.” he whispered in the end, eyes finding hers again. “Come on. Eat.”
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* : ｡☆ﾟ.･ ───
One evening, while Tara had found herself trapped behind her desk by a fairly large pile of paperwork, the door to her office had rather abruptly swung open.
Her head shot up in an instant, secretly grateful for whatever kind of distraction from her work it could be.
Theseus quickly shut the door behind him before striding over to her desk with what appeared to be an urgent purpose.
Tara’s eyebrow raised in greeting as he came to a stop directly in front of her desk, placing his palms down on the surface in order to lean over it slightly.
“I just had a visitor.”
Tara tilted her head to the side.
“This late? Should I be worried?”
If Theseus had registered that she made a joke, he was purposefully not reacting to it, as his expression didn’t appear to change in the slightest.
That made Tara sit up a bit straighter.
“Theseus?”
“It was Dumbledore.” he quickly continued, causing the witch’s eyes to widen in surprise. “He was waiting for me outside.”
“What did he say?”
Theseus anxiously rolled his lips over one another.
“He told me I should check up on my brother,” he said. Then, with a sharp scoff, he pressed himself back up into a standing position, removing his hands from her desk. “And that was it. He disapparated right after.”
Tara reached up to drag a hand across her forehead.
“You promised to tell me if things went awry.” Theseus reminded her.
The witch shook her head.
“I didn’t think they had…” she admitted quietly. “But now that I think about it…I haven’t really heard from anyone in a couple of weeks.”
A silence quickly befell her office.
Tara placed her quill down on the surface of her desk sliding the pile of paperwork away from her before rising from her chair. She then snatched her coat up from where it was laying over the arm-rest.
“Let’s get outta here.” she huffed.
Theseus didn’t protest, and the two of them quietly slipped out of the Ministry early.
The following morning, the couple made the trip across London to Newt’s apartment.
Immediately upon their arrival, Tara had made her way up the staircase, trying for the doorknob in lieu of knocking. Before Theseus could so much as question her thought process, she was already pushing the unlocked door inwards.
“He really needs to stop doing that.” she mumbled before disappearing inside.
Theseus followed in her footsteps after only a moment’s hesitation.
On the inside, Newt’s apartment was a bit of a mess. But that fact on its own wasn’t totally out of the ordinary. The Magizoologist wasn’t usually the kind to care about what people thought about the state of his living quarters, for he wasn’t exactly prone to having guests. And more often than not, he himself would be out on a long adventure of his own.
As the two wizards continued to search around the house itself, a soft trilling suddenly reach their ears. Peeking their heads around the corner and into the small living room at the front of the house, they found a small, doe-like creature tearing about the room. It was gleefully dipping and diving beneath the coffee table and around the sofa in continuous speedy laps.
“What the-?” Theseus breathed out.
Tara glanced back over her shoulder, glancing down the hallway to their left, immediately honing in on the sight of the wide-open door that revealed the passage down into the basement. At her side, Theseus cursed underneath his breath before instructing her to keep an eye on the creature while he went down to look for his brother.
The witch immediately got to work on corralling the creature into the back-most corner of the living room. It wasn't a particularly difficult task, for it was rather small in size. Just a tad bit rowdy, as she imagined any creature its, assumed, age would be.
It was a fair amount of time before Theseus returned from the basement, and by that point, she had gotten the creature to hop up and onto the living room bay window-sill. There, it had trotted around in continuous circles, occasionally looking back up at Tara and letting out soft, high-pitched whistles. Almost as if it was attempting to speak to her or something of that ilk.
“Who are you, little one?” Tara had asked out loud at one point.
The moment the words had left her mouth, the creature had paused its trot. It glanced back up at her face, this time with a much more calm and almost thoughtful disposition.
Tara blinked in surprise, but at that very moment, Theseus emerged back into the living room, therefore managing to steal her attention back.
“Did you find him?”
Theseus nodded, slipping his jacket off of his shoulders and tossing it over the back of Newt’s couch.
“He’s asleep in a hammock down there,” he reported. “Had a real gnarly cut on one of his hands so I wrapped it for him. But…I didn’t really wanna wake him.”
Tara hummed her understanding, glancing back at the creature in the windowsill, who had since gone back to trotting about in a circle.
“I don’t really know what to do with her.” she admitted in a quiet whisper.
She heard Theseus let out a soft laugh.
“Here, let me try.” he said, walking out from around the couch to join her.
Tara watched him with interest as he carefully lowered himself down into the small outcropping. As he did so, the creature stared up at him with wide, curious eyes. Theseus then slowly reached out his hands, gathering it up and into his arms.
And it let him do so.
Holding the creature to his chest, Theseus then began to rock it gently, as if he was cradling a human infant.
Tara stared down at the sight with awestruck wonder for a prolonged moment, before eventually moving to sit herself down at the man’s side. She peered over his shoulder to get a better view of the now content-looking creature.
At some point, she wasn’t sure how long exactly, as they continued to sit there in the windowsill, Theseus had begun humming a soft tune. The creature had responded to that by visibly calming down a tenfold, nuzzling its head even deeper into the wizard’s chest.
Tara let out a quiet scoff in disbelief, causing Theseus to look over at her with a smile.
“Not bad for a Ministry brute, eh?”
Her eyes quickly flickered back up to meet his, and any witty comment that she had been conjuring up instantly died on her tongue the moment that they did.
Theseus still had a soft smile on his face, but his eyes themselves were continuously dancing across her expression. She couldn’t really tell what she was seeing in his own, but she knew what she was feeling inside of her chest. It was a very familiar warmth that quickly went on to encapsulate her entire torso. She suddenly caught herself thinking back to the three times over the past five or so years that Theseus had asked her to marry him.
Specifically noting just how long it had been since he had done so last.
Theseus opened his mouth, as if to begin speaking, when suddenly the creature in his arms began to make its odd, purring sounds again, ripping his focus away.
“All right, all right.” he cooed, going back to rocking the creature. “Yeah? All right.”
A smile resurfaced on Tara’s face. Leaning to her right, she absentmindedly rested her shoulder up against Theseus’ as he continued to work on calming the creature back down.
About halfway through his attempts, they both heard the soft sound of footfall against the wooden floors of the homestead.
Glancing up, Tara immediately noticed a rather disheveled-looking Newt peering out at them from around the wall of the living room’s entryway. Her eyes widened, and she all but sprung up from the windowsill.
“Newt-” she called out as the wizard slowly wandered deeper into the room. Her gaze quickly fell to his right hand, which he had been cradling, easily noticing the haphazard wrap job that Theseus had done.
The Magizoologist’s attention lingered on her for a moment before moving back to where his brother was still sat in the window.
“I don’t know what got into her. I thought I’d gotten her good and settled, and then…” Theseus sighed, looking up at his brother with a shrug. He then nodded his head towards his hand. “It’s a nasty scrape that, and by the looks of it, it needs changing.”
Newt said nothing, and Tara continued to carefully watch his every move. But his attention was seemingly fixated on the creature in Theseus’ arms. Which at that point, had fallen quiet again.
“All right, all right.” Theseus hummed as he finally stood up, gently laying the creature back down onto the collection of blankets in the windowsill.
Newt swallowed audibly.
“So, in my case, right next to the Dittany, there’s a blue bottle with some crushed Yerba leaves.” he quietly explained.
Tara nodded her head in understanding.
“I’ll get it.” she said, moving towards the back corner of the living room, where she had earlier clocked the briefcase’s location, locked and propped up against the wall.
Bringing it back over to them, she placed it down on the surface of the coffee table and flicked open the copper latches. As she did so, a small, green, stick-like creature appeared at the top of the couch cushions.
“Pickett. Morning.” Newt greeted tiredly. “You alright?”
The Bowtruckle squeaked in response.
“You know, I was trying to recall the last time when I was here.” Theseus mused out loud as Tara began to rifle around inside the bottomless briefcase, searching for what Newt had described. The Auror then threw open the curtains of the bay window, allowing a bit more sunlight into the room.
That ultimately had been the thing that helped her locate the serum.
A long quiet had followed the elder Scamander’s comment, one that was only broken when Tara had resurfaced with the bottle. She passed it over to Theseus who took it with a quiet “thanks.”
Newt had since sat himself down in the cushioned recliner adjacent to his couch. And Theseus crossed the room to crouch down in front of his little brother.
“Let’s take a look, shall we?”
Newt hesitantly offered him his wrapped hand.
Tara sat herself down on the couch in order to glance at the wound herself as the Auror carefully removed the bandage.
It was pretty grisly, stretching clean across the center of Newt’s palm. And from what she could tell, ran fairly deep into his skin and muscle. Blood had saturated both the bandage and the rest of his hand by that point as well.
“Well that’s coming along brilliantly.” Theseus said with a heavy splash of sarcasm.
Newt managed a shy laugh at that.
Theseus dropped the bloody bandage onto the surface of the coffee table before picking up and shaking the small vile of liquid a few, purposeful times.
“Do you want the leaves here?” he joked once more before placing the cork in between his teeth and smoothly ripping it out. He wasted no time before tilting the bottle over, carefully pouring its contents down and onto Newt’s waiting palm.
Theseus kept a tight hold of Newt’s wrist as the younger Scamander quietly hissed in pain. A small puff of green smoke billowed up from the center of the cut.
“Enough?” Theseus finally asked after a few more moments.
“Hm. Yeah.” Newt said, noting how much of the wound itself had already begun to dissipate.
Theseus reached back over for the roll of bandages that he had brought up from the basement earlier, quickly unwrapping some more of the material.
“So, exactly how is it that you came to be here?” Newt asked, his eyes not so subtly sliding over to glance warily at Tara.
The witch winced.
“Dumbledore suggested that I pop by and look in on you.” Theseus answered as he carefully re-wrapped Newt’s hand. “Very mysterious about it too…I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what you all are up to?”
“Huh?” Newt coughed awkwardly. “No.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“Well, you know Dumbledore…”
Theseus scoffed.
“He’s full of secrets.” he noted as he tied the bandage tight around Newt’s wrist. “Like you. And this one over here.” he added, nodding back at where Tara was still sitting on the couch.
Newt didn’t respond to that, simply pressed his lips into a tight line.
“She’s a Qilin, isn’t she?” Theseus suddenly asked as he dropped his brother’s hand. Instead, gesturing at the creature that was now lounging peacefully in the streams of sunlight coming in from the open window.
“No she’s not.”
A rather large smile appeared on Theseus’ face.
“I believe she is.”
“She’s not.”
“She is.”
“She’s not.”
Back over in the window, the creature suddenly picked up its head, letting out a soft but purposeful trill. Almost as if attempting to interrupt the brewing argument.
Newt sighed, finally forced to relent.
“She is.”
“She is.” Theseus repeated in confirmation. “What are you doing with a Qilin, Newt? Hm? Or is she another one of your secrets?”
“Yes. And you mustn’t tell anyone you’ve seen her.” Newt replied quickly. “I’m quite serious, Theseus.”
The older Scamander nodded his head.
“All right.”
As Theseus straightened out his back, Newt jutted his chin forward slightly.
“Just out of curiosity, how did you get her to settle?”
A smile flickered across Tara’s face.
“He sang to her.” she replied before Theseus had a chance to, earning her an embarrassed glare from the Auror in response.
“But…Excuse me?” Newt coughed.
Theseus turned back to him with the smallest of smiles.
“You know that song that Mum used to sing, the one about the Muggle who fell down the well?”
Newt stared back at him blankly.
“There was an old Muggle who fell down the well-” Theseus began to sing, adding lyrics to the tune that she had heard him humming only a few minutes earlier.
“But along came a witch, who did do him a spell-” Newt continued, almost instinctively, as a genuine smile appeared on his otherwise guarded expression.
“When the Muggle awoke he said ‘Dear woman, do tell. Is it heaven I’m in, or have I gone straight to-’”
The Qilin let out an even louder, happier noise in response to their singing, rolling around in the sun-lit blankets.
Tara let out a soft laugh, feeling her eyes beginning to water ever so slightly.
Theseus glanced back over his shoulder, staring at the Qilin for a long, thoughtful moment.
“Come to think of it, that might have been one of Dad’s old drinking songs.”
“That’s remarkable.” Newt noted breathlessly.
The Qilin squeaked again.
“They rarely consent to human contact, you know. Unless they sense an affinity.” Newt had been quick to add.
Theseus turned back to his brother.
“And she senses an affinity with you, does she?”
“Yes.”
Tara looked back and forth between the two wizards with a wide smile.
“Well, there you have it.” she piped up, causing both their heads to turn towards her. “You are brothers after all.”
Theseus smiled back at her warmly.
Taking in a deep breath through her nose, Tara slowly pushed herself up from the couch, turning her head towards Newt.
“Could I use your bathroom?” she asked politely.
The Magizoologist nodded.
“Of course.”
Tara nodded her thanks before quickly disappearing down the hallway.
Once she was out of earshot, Newt immediately turned back towards his brother, who was still semi-crouched in front of him. There, he found Theseus’ eyes lingering on the last spot that Tara had occupied.
“You two are together. Aren’t you?” he asked bluntly.
Theseus’ head snapped back towards him, his eyes resembling that of a wild animal.
“Wha-” he coughed, shaking his head. “How did you-?”
Newt tilted his head to the side.
“I was with her the night that you woke up in the hospital.” he explained carefully. “Did she ever tell you that she collapsed on the stairs out front because of how worried she had been about you?” he asked, only a little bit accusatory.
At the sound of his words, Theseus’ expression had immediately turned crestfallen.
“She…what?”
Newt hummed, looking down and tugging absentmindedly at the new wrappings on his hand.
“Yeah, so, I’ve had my suspicions since then.” he concluded before daring to glance back up at his brother. “Plus, you’re a pretty terrible actor.”
Heaving a fairly large sigh, Theseus pressed his palm to the center of his forehead.
“She’s gonna kill me.” he mumbled.
Newt couldn’t help but scoff at that.
Theseus took another moment, refilling his lungs with oxygen, before reaching out to gently pat Newt’s knee.
“Well, at least I don’t have to hide it from my little brother anymore.”
“And why were you hiding it? If you don’t mind me asking.” Newt pressed.
Theseus’ expression turned serious.
“Grindelwald.” he replied quietly. “She’s worried that…If he found out, he’d…And she has every reason to be. You know everything she’s been through already.”
As the younger Scamander nodded his understanding, a brief bout of silence passed between the two of them.
“How long?” Newt finally asked, keeping his voice purposefully quiet.
“About five years now.” Theseus replied, this time unable to fully hide his prideful smile upon admitting that fact out loud.
“Wow.” Newt whispered, blinking in what appeared to be genuine surprise.
“Yeah…” Theseus said, reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck as a bashful laugh escaped his throat. When he dropped his hand back down to his lap, he shook his head a few pointed times. “You know, I keep asking her to marry me.”
“And what? She says no?”
Theseus let out a heartier laugh at that.
“Not exactly,” he replied. “She wants to wait. Until we stop him for good.”
There was a particularly long pause after that.
“Can’t exactly blame her.” Newt whispered.
Theseus let out a huff of air through his nose.
“No. I suppose not.”
Tara eventually slunk back into the living room, and after a few more minutes of Theseus making sure that his brother was in fact alright, they finally let him be.
Bidding the younger Scamander goodbye, Tara and Theseus began their journey back across the city. Opting to walk instead of apparating.
Once they had crossed the unseen border into the more Muggle-populated neighborhoods, Theseus had made a silent point to slip his hand into Tara’s for the remainder of the trek.
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* : ｡☆ﾟ.･ ───