Song
Much to their surprise, the girls find themselves singing for an audience of animals for the second time. Jacob’s absence is sorely felt by all three of them, but time forcibly moves on.
Besides, this time they’re doing it drunk.
There may be a prohibition going on, but really everyone has their ways of getting their hands on liquor. They’re not roaring drunk (though considering Newt, Tina thinks that he might actually indulge them with a mimicry of a nundu if she asked), just drunk enough to take off the edge of their grief.
Between the bright moments that Chanukkah brings them, Tina mourns Credence desperately. Newt does as well, but in a different way. Tina mourns the person, Queenie the mind, and Newt the obscurus.
Newt’s creatures were all fed and settled before the three humans started drinking, of course—it wouldn’t do to wander into a hungry beast while inebriated, no matter how tame. Whatever their grievances, they’re not drinking to numb each other—they’re celebrating.
They’ve situated themselves in the now empty thunderbird habitat with an eight-dollar quart of North Carolina Shimmering Moonshine thinned and sweetened with lemonade—it’s an expensive luxury the sisters can barely bring themselves to indulge in, but Tina was just reinstated as an auror and they’re in the good company of a friendly magizoologist and it’s Chanukkah. Today is special.
Newt had found Frank during his Egypt travels. A rural region of Upper Egypt in the south had suffered strange weather that brutalized their crops in the wake of the revolution in 1919. The leader of the region, a governor of sorts, sought an unusual solution to an unusual disaster: Frank. Thunderbirds could create and dissipate thunderstorms.
To someone with a rudimentary knowledge of magical beasts, it wasn’t an unreasonable solution to come to, really. However, no rescue plan ever was so simple as it seemed and neither were beasts, particularly XXXXX class magical eagles that could influence the weather. So, of course, nothing had gone according to plan for the man or his citizens. Frank wasn’t about to comply,
“So, the punished him into submission.” Newt’s voice cracked when he said this.
Tina felt her heart clench with dread. She had to swallow the lump in her throat before she could speak. “W-what did they do?”
Newt had to toss back another drink of shimmering moonshine before he could go on. His jaw clenched and his eyes raw. Queenie, reading his thoughts, grimaced and took a swig from the bottle. He lifted his hand up to his nose and dragged his finger down the length of it.
“They broke the front half of his beak off and starved him.”
And that was the state that Newt found him in.
Newt doesn’t explain, exactly, how Frank came to be in his possession. Tina supposes some things are better left unsaid—particularly ones that involve breaking the law (not that Tina would snitch on him ever, ever again).
Rehabilitating Frank took months upon months and it was complicated by Frank’s inability to eat on his own. Frank would keep Newt at bay until he became too weak to resist having mashed guts poured down his throat—Newt could not use a potion, as there was no telling how the creature’s physiology would react to medicines meant for humans.
So, when Newt attached the prosthetic he designed, Frank was painfully awake, and painfully too weak to put up much of a fight. Frank’s fragile trust in Newt had almost been broken by it, but Thunderbirds are incredibly intelligent beasts and the gift of a fully functional beak was not easily ignored. After that, Frank’s recovery began in earnest.
“I didn’t know Thunderbirds lived in Arizona,” Queenie says, her cheeks reddened by alcohol, “We didn’t have much of a Magical Creatures class in school, but Thunderbird is one of the school houses, so they were part of the curriculum.”
“Yes,” Newt concedes, “They’re more of a northernly bird—found in the Pacific Northwest, New England, and around the Great Lakes. They’re less common in Arizona, but the season is off, you see. If I had come in summer,” he pauses and puts his thumb and forefinger together thoughtfully, his thin mouth pursed, “If I may—what is the name of that northern Midwestern state—It sounds similar to Arizona, but it’s not.”
Tina’s thoughts spin for a moment, her thoughts made softer and slower by liquor. “Ah… Minnesota?”
“That’s the one, yes. If I had arrived in summer, I would have released Frank in Minnesota. Instead, we are in the middle of December and Arizona was as close to Mexico as I could manage.” Frank has left a single, golden feather behind, and Newt twirls it idly between his palms. It’s so big it looks like it could serve as the paddle for a canoe. “Thunderbirds are migratory. They spend our winter months soaking up the summer sun in the South American Andes. Unfortunately I found either crossing the Pacific or traversing the Amazon Rainforest to be too great a task to accomplish alone in a short frame of time.
“So, here I am instead. Celebrating Chanukkah.” He looks up at Tina through half-tamed copper curls. “With you.”
Tina sips her moonshine.
“Chanukkah, oh, Chanukkah!” Queenie sings, slightly off key, but unfailingly sweetly.
“Come light the menorah
“Let’s have a party
“We’ll all dance the hora!”
Tina chuckles as her favorite-only sibling wobbles to her feet, uncaringly tearing holes into the soles of her stockings, as she slowly and half-drunkenly dances the hora around the enclosure.
“Gather ‘round the table, we’ll give you a treat,
“A driedel to play with and latkes to eat.”
Tina encourages Newt to rhythmically clap along.
“And while we are playing
“The candles are burning low
“One for each night, they shed a sweet light
“To remind us of days long ago.”
There is a murmur of approving noises from the nocturnal animals in the case as Queenie’s singing rolls to a stop, chirping, cooing, and purring. Tina and Newt applaud softly.
“Do you sing, Newt?” Tina asks, suddenly curious.
He coughs into his drink, surprised. Moonshine sloshes out of the glass to drip over his fingers. “Me?” He awkwardly shakes a yellow handkerchief out of his pocket with his free hand.
“Oh, yes!” Queenie is immediately on board. “Sing for us, Newt!”
He raises one long finger and points it skyward, his eyes on the earth. “I am not nearly drunk enough to sing for humans.”
Tine rests her hand on her chin and gases at him imploringly. “I’ll bet you’re a decent singer; animals are vocal. I bet you can whistle the birds down from the sky to sit on your shoulder.”
His ears redden. “As a matter of fact…”
Queenie’s grin is akin to a Cheshire. “Ohh, I’m not letting you out of this now. You won dreidel—consider this my vengeance!”
Newt chuckles and stands, tossing his drink back and brushing his hands off on his thighs. “All right, you win this time—but if I have to sing, my best girl is going to be in the audience.”
Catching a glimpse of his mind’s eye, Queenie goes wide-eyed and pale. His smile is utterly wicked. “Oh Tituba, you can’t be serious!”
Newt’s best girl is the Runespoor.
Iris, Isis, and Cecil is the largest Runespoor ever discovered and thus the oldest as well, though she has yet to be officially recorded. Newt has her estimated at some two hundred years or so, judging from her immense size. Runespoors typically only grow to be six or seven feet long—Iris, Isis, and Cecil is well over sixty feet in length.
“I’m not sure we’re sober enough to do this. Or drunk enough.” Tina says drily. Her voice echoes softly in the cavern, bouncing off the creamy stalagtites high overhead.
“To be honest with you, I wasn’t brave enough to do this without a bit of inebriation when I first charmed her myself,” He turns his back to the witches and faces the depths of the cavern. “But I’ve yet to meet a creature that doesn’t enjoy a bit of music.”
Newt pulls a simple reed flute out of his waistcoat pocket. It’s well worn and when he places it to his lips, a series of lifting, playful notes taking wing into the air; he plays it like a master snake charmer. Tina thinks about how he has obviously charmed far more than the birds from the sky.
“Oh,” Queenie whispers softly, “He’s playing her a love song.”
The smaller Runespoor, Sean, Seth, and Sasha, dips his three heads into view curiously, tasting the air—he loiters closer to the cave mouth, ever the hungry, growing adolescent. Unlike his mother, he is mischievously active. Iris, Isis, and Cecil spends the majority of her time sleeping. She’s old, old, old and, like most large snakes, only eats a couple of times per year. It’s just as well; she’s terrifying, no matter how fond of Newt she may be. Tina is quite anxious about the idea of deliberately waking her up. Queenie, more in tune with Newt’s confidence, is a bit less antsy.
The music Newt plays with the reed flute is surprisingly, distinctly Hindi. His voice cannot compare to Billy Murray’s high notes, but he is a pleasant enough falsetto. It’s not surprising to hear him speak in another language once he begins to sing, for all of his travels, it makes sense for Newt to be multilingual at some degree, but his Punjabi is shockingly fluid and natural. There is no way Newt picked up that language within a few months unless he is a linguistics genius.
While the girls only asked him to sing, once Iris, Isis, and Cecil sway cheerfully, but frighteningly into view, Newt also begins to dance—East Indian music is meant to be danced to, of course, but the girls have never seen it and rarely heard such music. He’s adopted the feminine role of the song, the hard-to-get beauty teasing the infatuated suitor—in this case, the Runespoor. Newt rolls his hips girlishly, the motion smooth despite his crooked leg, and Tina blushes furiously, her breath catching. The enormous Runespoor sways in kind, elegant for all of her girth.
Newt and the Runespoor begin to dance in earnest then in a beautiful coupling (quadrupling?), and though Iris, Isis, and Cecil take up the majority of the view, it is Newt’s motions that Tina cannot take her eyes off of.
Sweet Sarah Good, she’d had no idea men could move so effeminately.
“Who’d’a thought you and I would end up being keen on a couple’a fellas, huh, Teenie?” Queenie says softly.
Just peachy keen. Tina’s throat has a knot in it.
The rotation and undulation of Newt’s arms and hips mimics not only the Runespoor’s motions, but also those of a woman. Tina hasn’t felt this enchanted by a man since her grandfather sold his owl business to Abraham Pole in 1917. She’d like to brush it off on the fact that she hadn’t taken a lady to dinner since before her demotion, but the excuse feels hollow.
Iris, Isis, and Cecil is incredibly graceful, swaying in a non-existent breeze, braiding and unbraiding around herself and forming lovely shapes with her three necks. Four of her six steel-gray eyes are closed in delight. Her rough, spiny, red dorsal scales give her a deceptively soft, feathered appearance. Tina supposes that the massive serpent enjoys dancing in part because of her captivity; snake charming is probably the most exercise she gets. It is uncertain of Newt will ever reintroduce her into the wild; her great size makes her as much of a target as she is a threat and her prickly hide is riddled with all sorts of mysterious scars as a testament to that. Dancing the role of enamored suitor, she corrals Newt around with her great heads, hunting him down and cornering him only to have him slip away temptingly.
Newt’s song slowly comes to a heart-rendering end, the last notes of his voice and flute lingering sweetly in the damp cavern air.
“Where didja learn that, Newt? India?” Queenie wonders aloud.
“Actually, I learned from my mother. But now that we’ve all bothered to wake up Iris, Isis, and Cecil, it’s your turn to sing for her.”
“Us?!”
“She only gets up to feed every four months or so—so we might as well keep her entertained while she’s up! She’d be most cross with me if we only danced with her the once.”
Tina can’t read the Runespoor’s facial expressions; they’re too alien, too strange for her to decipher. Watching Iris, Isis, and Cecil dance is one thing, dancing with her is quite another. Yet Newt is looking at them expectantly and Tina wants to show him up. She takes a steeling breath and throws back the bottle of moonshine for liquid courage. She grabs Queenie’s hand before she can lose her nerve and yanks her sister into her arms, her hand at Queenie’s slender waist and the other knotting their fingers together.
S’vivon!
Queenie grins.
With the older sibling leading, the Goldstien girls walk through the steps of the S’vivon dance, and simple box-step with little arm movement. Queenie’s festive voice leaps into the air.
“S’vivon sov sov sov,
“Chanukkah hu chag tov!
“Chanukkah hu chag tov,
“S’vivon, sov sov sov!”
Tina’s steps and Queenie’s voice take on a tone that is a little less traditional and a little more jazz-inspired. Though the hair on her neck is standing on end due to the triplet stare of what may be the largest living snake in the world, despite the tickle in the back of her head that tells her that Iris, Isis, and Cecil could swallow them in one snap if she so pleased—Tina finds a smile growing on her face. Her voice joins Queenie’s. It’s Chanukkah—what room in her heart does she have for fear at a time like this?
The Runespoor seems to be enjoying the melody, if her swaying and attention is any indication. Tina can’t bring herself to look for Newt’s expression.
“Chag simcha hu-la-am
“Nes gadol ha ya sham
“Nes gadol ha ya sham
“Chag simcha hu-la-am!”