Hippolyta
It doesn’t really get easier, he just learns to find ways around it. That huge hollow feeling in his chest that reminds him that he failed. That he always fails. He clings to Tina, the one who makes sense in this chaotic world. At night, it is the sense of her shifting constantly beside him that keeps him breathing deeply, allows him to approach sleep with only a modicum of fear.
He still can’t sleep well though. His nights are plagued by the smell of burnt flesh, the ground beneath his feet soft suction, keeping his feet still while distorting the tents and the mountains around him, bright lights flashing and his brother falling over and over and over again.
But he keeps moving, keeps trying to focus on the things he can see, things he can touch. The smell of Tina’s hair, the solid warmth and solid skin of her stomach, tracing silver lines with the lightest of touches while she sleeps and it’s grounding.
He had never needed anyone before, but he can’t imagine how he would have coped if Tina hadn’t been there to shout over the noise in his head to stay away from the edge.
So no, he isn’t better. He isn’t magically cured, he doesn’t suddenly not miss his brother. But Tina was right. Theseus would be asking “what next?”. He’d be asking “how do we punish those bastards?”. And perhaps more importantly “how do I help?”.
Newt Scamander asks those questions too. It gives him a focus. And it helps.
……………………………………………………….
Newt stops on the doorstep, and looks up at the grey brick house that his brother and his sister-in-law lived. It looked more imposing than the last time he’d been here, days before The Attack, and in a far more jovial disposition. He shivers, wonders idly if the dip in temperature can really be attributed to the turn of the season as the leaves turn gold in the parkland.
He knocks on the door. Waits, shifting his weight and pushing down the wild panic with a force that surprised him. Tina had offered to come with him, but he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He needed to talk to Hippolyta, apologise for coming home when Theseus hadn’t. Theseus and Hippolyta, by all accounts, had been a strategic marriage, a political alliance. It had taken years for Newt to understand that who Theseus and Hippolyta really were, that was hidden, that was secret. Newt, being someone who wore his heart on his sleeve, had struggled with the idea that loving someone needed to be kept a secret from your family as well as the rest of the world.
“Newton,” Hippolyta’s voice is deeper than he remembers, a little huskier. Her skin is paler, her eyes sharper, her cheekbones more prominent. “Come in.”
He’s surprised she’d been the one to answer the door, had expected their house elf. It’s a little disconcerting. Hippolyta had always been such a sticker for image.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come,” Hippolyta’s voice is devoid of emotion. “You didn’t need to.”
“I did,” Newt stammers, a little scared of his sister-in-law for the first time since Theseus had married her. “You’re my sister. I needed to come.”
“You didn’t,” Hippolyta says a little more firmly, sinking gracefully into her chair, head inclined just so, hands folded neatly in her lap. It’s harder than he thought it would be, to see Hippolyta like this again, after everything they’d all been through to make them closer as a family since mother’s illness. Hippolyta was treating him like an acquaintance, not a brother. “What can I do for you?”
“I…” He falters, stops, because he doesn’t know how to put into actual physical words how he feels. It’s impossible. There weren’t words enough in the universe to describe how he felt, how guilty and how sorry and how scared and how lonely and how wrong he felt knowing his brother didn’t have his back anymore. Newt exhaled and dropped his head into his hands. He’d never been good with words, he’d stutter and repeat himself and have to physically search for the words that made the most sense – but by the time he’d found the right words the moment had passed, the conversation had moved on, leaving him wordless.
“I know,” Hippolyta said quietly, her voice an octave from cracking. “I know you feel guilty, but you shouldn’t. I’ve not been the easiest person to be around this past month… but …Theseus’s job was dangerous, we were always…prepared for this…I just didn’t know how hard it would be…”
“Now, don’t be nice to me,” he ordered half-heartedly to the floor, Hippolyta huffed a half-hearted laugh in response.
“It’s no-one’s fault, Newt,” and she sounded so tired. “I’m leaving.”
“You’re what?” Newt looked up, clicking his neck “Where?”
“France.”
“Why?”
“I can’t sit here and mourn and have people feeling sorry for me,” Hippolyta stretched her neck up, “I am a Scamander, and I am a Malfoy and I am neither. I cannot stay here looking tragically pretty.”
“Hippolyta,” Newt started, and then faltered, because he understood her without words. “What will you be doing?”
“What I’ve always been good at,” Hippolyta shrugged, “I have contacts in the resistance groups out there, people who are supporting the government but can actually do things not restricted by the ICW.”
Newt nodded slowly, Hippolyta had always been astoundingly good at information gathering. She’d been a master of secrecy and finding out people’s secrets. She was a gifted witch.
“What about Helena?” Newt asked slowly, “Not to try making you feel guilty, or like you should stay, but, Lyta, she’s barely six months old.”
“I was raised by a nanny,” Hippolyta said stiffly, “And I think I turned out reasonably well. Mother says that Helena should be raised at their estate, but… Helena is a Scamander, not a Malfoy.”
It hangs between them, this knowledge that everything had changed more than bandages and murmured spells could fix.
“We’ll take her,” he finds himself saying across the silence.
“You and Tina will have your own in a matter of weeks,” Hippolyta reminds him forcefully, “And Queenie and Jacob are due theirs any week now.”
In fact, Queenie and Jacob were due by the end of October, a mere four weeks away. The newest baby Scamander wasn’t due for a further eight or nine weeks, closer to Christmas. Queenie may have been coasting through the last few weeks of her pregnancy with something approaching serenity, but Tina was struggling with her limited movement and lack of sleep. It was a fair argument.
“You’re family,” Newt reminded her in return. “Helena is family and if you think we will leave you, or her, then you are mistake. Very, very mistaken. And Tina wouldn’t have it any other way. Nor would Queenie and Jacob.”
Hippolyta fell silent, studying Newt’s earnest expression before nodding her agreement. The relief was visible on her face. No matter how bad a mother she thought she was, Hippolyta truly wanted nothing but love and warmth and comfort for her daughter, everything she was denied being bought up by a nanny in the cold Malfoy manor.
“When do you leave?” Newt ventured to ask, fingers tapping on his knee.
“Next week,” Hippolyta answered promptly.
“No,” Newt said firmly, startling her. When Hippolyta opened her mouth to argue her point, Newt jumped in with his own. “Talk to Tina, talk to Queenie. I would prefer it, personally, if you waited until the babies had been born, and there will be legal things to sort that will take time. And the more time you have here to prepare, I know it will hurt because Theseus isn’t here, but you always told me that preparation is the key. You need to prepare everything so they don’t catch you. Please, just a few more weeks.”
Hippolyta looked away, blinking furiously and shoulders stiff. “I can’t stay here,” she said firmly, “I can’t.”
“I know,” Newt had tear pooling in his own eyes. “I know it’s so much harder for you being here, being surrounded by everything, but Hippolyta, you haven’t had as much time to prepare as you have in the past. You once told me that you never go anywhere without a way out. Tell me what you way out is and I’ll let you go tomorrow. But you have to tell me before you go, so I know you plan on coming home again.”
Hippolyta opened her mouth, waited a second and then closed it again. She pushed herself up, moving restlessly around the room and rearranged the autumnal flowers on the sideboard.
“Have a plan to return home,” Newt pleaded. “Hippolyta you have to plan to come home, or you won’t.”
“You never plan a way out,” She shot back hotly. Newt laughed awkwardly.
“My plan is to always get back to Tina,” he admits softly, “And that was always Theseus’s plan – to come home to you. It was always to come home to you. You just need to find a new plan.”
Newt wasn’t manipulative enough to use Helena, if Hippolyta felt she couldn’t look at her infant daughter without seeing Theseus (and Newt himself had trouble sometimes) then he wouldn’t judge.
“Once you have a plan to come home,” Newt continued, “then you’ll be the most use to them. If you go in without a plan, all you’re doing is setting yourself up to lose. Go in planning to win. And I’d like to see them try and stop you Hippolyta.”
Newt looked away from Hippolyta, giving her the moment to herself, and studying the impersonal sitting room that Hippolyta and Theseus had always used for entertaining. It was a room designed to impress, and impress it did. It was dark coloured leather furniture, dark wood tables, glittering lights and imposing portraits on the wall that sniffed and looked down on people haughtily. The portraits were loyal to Hippolyta (Newt wouldn’t put it past her to use them as part of her extensive information gathering network) and right now there were some glaring at Newt for daring to speak against their beloved Hippolyta, and there were some nodding sagely, agreeing with his assessment.
One, an imposing woman Newt had seen loitering in the portrait that hung opposite the entrance to the MLE (he was fairly sure she was one of the proponents of the Statute of Secrecy, and using the aurors to protect wizards and muggles alike to maintain balance. Either that or why was she hanging outside the auror office?) caught his eye very pointedly, and then gestured at the room, full of little reminders of the Scamander’s life together.
“Would it help being away from this house?” Newt voiced a little unsurely, pleased he’d understood when the woman nodded approvingly and then resumed her glaring contest at the portrait opposite her. “Stay with us, or with our parents…”
“I’m sure it would,” Hippolyta said quietly, “But this was our home, and I will not run from it.”
She sounded so convinced that Newt dropped it almost instantly.
“Will you take Helena with you now?” Hippolyta asked, hovering by the window looking out onto the red and gold parkland, arms crossed tightly across her stomach and looking for all the world as if she was holding herself together.
“No,” Newt said, assuming he was being dismissed rising to stand next to her. “She belongs with you, and we won’t take her until you have to leave. Besides, I need to talk to Tina.”
“You’ll raise her as you will your own?” Hippolyta checked. Newt nodded.
“Of course,” he whispered, “And Queenie and Jacob would if they had to take her. You know this Hippolyta. Whatever happens, Helena will be safe, and she’ll be loved.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I need to be of use Newt, and here I’m just a mother, it’s all anyone will let me be.”
“Not us,” he disagreed emphatically. “Never us.”
Hippolyta nodded and they stood together, shoulder to shoulder, studying the landscape and understanding each other for the first time in their acquaintance, tied together in their grief and their determination to be of use.
If Hippolyta needed to leave, Newt would support her. He knew Tina would as well. In fact, most of them would.
“You’ll have to tell mum though,” Newt muttered a little impishly, knocking Hippolyta’s shoulder with his own. Hippolyta answered with a most unladylike groan.
“If that isn’t enough to put me off going entirely,” she huffed back, and while they weren’t better, it was a start, a step in the right direction and a little flicker of sun in this never-ending clouded sky.