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The sound of snapping and the sharp, whip-like CRACK of apparition is still echoing in his ears. Credence slides down, slumping against a dirty, slimy wall in a damp, warded cell feeling wrecked and hopeless.
He'd lost his hard-won control, hours and hours of Newt's careful attention proven useless against the terrible, sawing grit of loss. The forces at work against them had won and left him buried, alone with only the echoing memory of Newt being struck down, his body, thrown back by the bright slash of light, doll-like as it hit the ground. Credence had screamed with his voice instead of wind, had fallen to his knees like a child, had been apparated away by Grindelwald’s followers and thrown into an underground cell, his bones still cracking into existence from his obscurus form.
Aurelius, they’d called him. Credence screams and digs his nails into his scalp, torn by grief and rage. What did names matter? It couldn't reclaim what was lost.
‘Small steps, there we go.’
Credence chokes on a sob, Jacob so clear in his mind's eye, hoisting him up days after he'd floated out of the subway in pieces and then limped into an alleyway a broken mess.
‘Ya doing great, kid.’
“Mr. Kowalski-” he remembers the other man, kind and brave waving him onto the boat to England with Newt. It breaks his heart, the trust of the other man’s face.
‘Yous take care of each other now, ya hear?’
“I don't know what to do.” Credence feels the obscurus coil violently in his gut, feeding off his turbulent emotions. He explodes out in all directions a cyclone of dark sand and shrieking winds and almost gets out. The wards shine brightly for a moment and then slam him back into the confines of the still intact room, leaving him seething.
‘Baby steps, kid. Let those guys help you before you go off on your own.’
Credence eventually falls to the ground mostly human again, the dark ashy grit of his obscurus sliding over and under his skin, as he stares listlessly at the dripping ceiling. He hears the memory of Jacob's voice call to him from across the man’s bakery.
‘You're a good kid, Credence. You work hard but you gotta reign it in a little. Take care of yourself.’
His hands skitter across the floor as the obscurus pulsates around him, breezing past the du into the cracks in the stone, prodding at the wards, testing, tasting.
He feels the grit of dirt under him, puffing up with every increasingly harder thrash of Credence's power.
How dare they. How dare they steal what little happiness he's cobbled together. He flips over onto his stomach, staring down now. He wipes dust from one area of the floor, much much softer than sand, and concentrates.
There, where the magic smells like fear, where it feels like a spell cast with doubts, where the dark shimmering tendrils can weave like smoke through the wards and tear it like fabric. That's where he starts. The fury builds. Sinking down into the ground and bubbling up to surround the cell. He hears a scream, savors in his mind's eye the memory of a sunburnt Newt Scamander smiling at him from atop a sand dune half a world away, and rips his way out of the prison. He leaves behind a rain of stone and earth, no longer human but full of very human regret.
The air crackles with danger, wind whistling as a dark shape rises into the night sky. Bright flashes of light strike out at it as dark cloaked figures rise on brooms to try and bring the boy down. They drop like stones at a touch, the monstrous storm cloud blotting out the stars as it reaches out in all directions like a scream.
Eventually, there is silence. All nearby wildlife having fled. The obscurus sings a low, haunting cry as it glides aimless and hollow over the horizon.
[
Tina steps out into the garden with a sigh. She loves Newt’s family, loves how welcoming they've been, but she needs a breather. She takes in the cool spring air and starts down the path towards the small hedge maze Theseus had shown her earlier.
Behind her, the sounds of Queenie and Jacob laughing are abruptly cut off as the door swings shut. Before her, the stone walkway winds down the estate grounds, down towards the maze’s meticulously kept entrance. She can see a running fountain and the stone keeper of the grounds, a tall, handsome hippogriff Newt had named Ares as a child.
Halfway down Tina pauses, a dirt path cuts through the grass and into a small crop of trees that frame the maze and she wonders if a young Newt had wandered this way over and over as a child in the way the man he now has to cut his way through the stares of other witches and wizards.
She steps off the stone walkway.
Queenie would say that Tina never needed legimancy, that between the two of them she was better at reading the emotions and even the intentions of people around them without innate magic. Tina had always appreciated Queenie saying such things when they were kids even if it didn't always feel true. It brought them closer as sisters and as people.
There is another opening in the side of the maze. She can see Newt through it, hunched beside one of the walls, calling out to something. The closer she comes the clearer it becomes that someone has hidden away from Newt's beseeching hands.
“Now Pickett, this is completely unnecessary. Mother was just joking about the tree thing. Everyone knows you take wonderful care of me.”
She laughs a bit and Newt falls back in a sprawl, surprised.
“See, now you have an audience for your tantrums. I bet Ms. Tina would love to hear you complain about me.” He reaches in again, two fingers gently crooked. When he pulls them out of the hedge little Pickett is clinging on and squeaking with indignation.
Tina kneels closer, holding out her own hand.
“Shall we, Mr. Pickett?” The exchange goes smoother than she would usually expect. Pickett settles under the folded collar of her blouse, still raising a bit of a fuss. She meets Newt's somewhat sad eyes with another smile.
“You are absolutely right, Pickett. He is a handful.” Her eyes drift down, past scars peeking out from a much nicer shirt collar than he normally wears. She looks down to his surprisingly still hands and asks the question that's been on her mind for weeks.
“How's Credence?”
Newt lets his eyes drift back to the maze, silent.
[]
“It's summer, back home.”
Credence looks up with a cautious smile. They are quietly picking their way across the desert, looking for a specific type of giant sandworm to observe. It was a pain getting permission from the locals to be out in such a dangerous area. In all directions all Credence can see is sand.
“What happens there in summer?” He's getting better about asking questions, and Newt always appreciates his genuine interest.
He listens to Newt speak, even as his skin feels tight under the relentless heat of the sun. He feels the distant churning of his lingering obscurus deep inside.
“ -she usually takes Marco with her, he's her favorite at the moment if you count five years a moment, which in the hippogriff breeding business you-”
Newt’s eyes dart between Credence's face and the horizon, checking the monotonous landscape for the telltale swirls in the sand. Credence feels calloused fingertips dip into his palm and lets the other man lead him further into nowhere, sand beneath their feet hissing with each step and his heart thumping painfully in his chest.
“There!” They slide down a dune a few hundred feet from the edge of a whirlpool of sinking sand. “If we stay this far back it should take the bait and we can see it rise.”
“You’ll get better at seeing what gets you feeling the way you do, don't stress over labeling it. Just feel it.”
Jacob’s voice has a tendency to chime in at the worst moments. Credence stumbles forward a little too far, nearly toppling them both head first into the sand.
Newt's smile, as he sends over the pile of plant matter and desert animal carcass laced with a tranquilizing potion, nearly stops Credence's heart in its tracks. But he skirts the implications of his feelings and just lets the affection grow while it can. They spend a few moments watching the sandworm rise up out of the ground and onto its side, peacefully, and then spend the next few hours carefully cataloging signs of a disease the locals have been trying to halt the progress of.
Newt’s wondrous expression drops as he examines the enormous creature. Credence takes detailed notes for the local potions master, a jittery older woman stretched thin trying to come up with a treatment for the illness even as its reach crosses the species divide. His heart grows heavy with what they find.
It's a stressful season, two people die along with an unfair and untallied amount of wildlife before a treatment is found. The sandworm survives, oddly enough. After they've done all they can they move on, promising to return together in another year, or sooner should she need them?
Credence tries not to think on it too hard, where he'll be in a year, what he’ll be doing, who he'll be with. Newt makes the offer with surprising confidence. As if the idea that the younger man might be somewhere else hasn’t occurred to him, as if the question didn't haunt Newt the way it did the hunched and weary obscurial beside him.
“Aw, honey.” Queenie’s voice pipes up softly from a memory tucked away in the corner of his mind that Jacob’s bakery occupies.
“We heading to Britain next, Mr. Scamander?” He hates that he still slips up but Newt doesn't seem bothered, only surprised and a little somber moment later.
“Love doesn't always look or feel like elation.”
“A little ways south of that actually.” Newt shuffles the onto a train, snagging a seat in a private corner of a very open car system. “A friend of Theseus reached out for help with a creature. He thinks it may be a lethifold.”
The journey is quiet and their voices eventually lose the edge of strain that had been festering for months. Newt recovers first. Credence has mostly gotten his head wrapped around his love for Newt Scamander when they fall into the clutches of Gellert Grindelwald in the lonely outskirts of a small village in the south of France.
“Sometimes it's a longing, a yearning for someone to stand beside you.
[]
He can feel Grindelwald. He tastes him in the air and his magic stands on end, electrified. The lonely howl shifts into a shrieking cry, they are not far.
newt
not far
newt
newt
The obscurus slams into the middle of a battle. It screams. Everyone freezes.
Newt’s body is probably nearby.
It lights the monstrous cloud up like a match to a leaking gas can. The obscurus swirls like a force of nature. It feeds on his grief and grows
and grows
and tears
and rends
Until with one spell, Grindelwald is brought low. A man, as weary looking as Credence feels, stands over the other with his wand slashing once, twice three times until Grindelwald is securely bound.
“Aurelius,” He hisses through bloodied lips and teeth, “you were meant for greater things.”
He is still a swirling mass of bleak blackness, waiting for a break in the bystanders for space to tear the breath from the man's lungs, to congeal the blood in his veins.
“CREDENCE!”
And then the break happens. Tina parts the wall of wizards and witches and runs to him without hesitation. Something in her watery eyes and fierce expression releases something. He drifts down and reforms himself, right into Tina's arms.
Skirmishes are still happening, she drags him along, wand raised until he's off the field and behind a grove of half destroyed trees.
“They're starting to disapparate, stay with Newt!” and like Joan of Ark, she throws herself back into the fray, absolutely relentless.
Credence stares at the dead body of his dearest friend and falls to his knees, unable to breathe.
He feels fingertips against his jaw and opens his eyes to see the watery impression of Newt reaching out for him.
“You had me so worried.”
And it's such a ridiculous thing for Newt to say that Credence can only laugh as he's pulled in, fingers scrambling to feel Newt’s heartbeat to reassure himself. There is a bloodstained cloth binding Newt's neck.
It takes weeks for the cursed wound to heal and when it does it leaves him scarred but no less the man he’d always been. Credence hovers during the healing process and Newt cheerfully drags him out of his family’s estate against the wishes of everyone involved enough to care.
Grindelwald has become a painful memory that everyone hopes will stay just a memory. Credence remains vigilant. The other wizard still has supporters out there and they take great offense to the part he and Newt played in his capture.
Quietly one morning many months after the night of Grindelwald’s capture Credence slips out onto the grounds of the Scamander estate. It's early enough that mist is still creeping over the dewy grass, swirling around his ankles.
“Something came of it.”
They’ll leave soon, he can feel it. There is a tension under Newt's bare skin that can be felt even when he is otherwise slumped against Credence.
“We can't always come to obvious conclusions by having near-death experiences, Newt.”
Credence can't help but smile, happiness is hard won and oh so sweet on his tongue. It is grotesque and painful to touch. It grows and tears and rends his heart until he can't breathe for the smoke and ash of it in his lungs. It may kill him one day, this love.
“We would have come to the same conclusion eventually. Adrenalin just has the tendency to speed things along. I'd wager it would have taken years otherwise.”
Credence agrees. It probably would have taken years. He is many things if not extremely cautious in everything he does.
He is vigilant even now behind the protective ward of the Scamander estate, walking softly between the hedges of the maze, wand drawn and careful to check every corner before turning it.
When he finally comes to the center he sees Tina and Newt speaking softly to each other.
Tina sees him first and nudges Newt. He and Credence make eye contact and simultaneously flush red. They aren't sure how much the others know, considering Queenie abilities.
“We're about to start breakfast, hope you boys are hungry.” Tina walks over and slips her arm into the crook of his elbow, pulling him back towards the house. “They made quite a spread.”
He grabs Newt’s hand as he passes him and drags him along as well. Tina sees this and pats his arm comfortingly.
“You can tell us all about how that happened over breakfast.”
He tries to prepare himself for the onslaught but feels like a feather caught helpless in a gale of wind as he gets unceremoniously tossed into the general chaos of the dining room. The shuffling of seats commences until by Queenie’s divine intervention he finds a place right next to Newt, near the head of the table.
Credence can barely breathe again, Newt takes his hand under the table, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“I'd take years with you any way I can have them.”
END