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Tina comes to him on the train.
They’ve converted the compartments on the Hogwarts Express into sleeping quarters for the trip from Hogwarts to London, because those among them that aren’t exhausted are depressed and want to be alone. Newt, for his part, is both.
Still, he does not object when a tentative knock on the door and a call to enter reveals Tina standing in the corridor.
Newt, who’d been lying down, sits up immediately, clumsily, long limbs banging the wall and window. “Tina,” he says.
“Newt,” she responds.
The niffler sits up, nose wiggling. Newt’s not put him back in the case just yet, instead making a small nest with his jacket for the little fellow to burrow into. Pest though he may often be, the niffler’s penchant for pilfering shiny objects has done them all a major service and Newt is inclined to reward him for it. Tina notices, and offers the niffler a weak but genuine attempt at a smile.
“Are you alright?” Newt asks.
Tina does not respond; she stands in the doorway, expression calm but eyes wet and lips trembling every now and then. She is far more stoic than most would be in the same situation, but these little tells stab Newt as keenly as knives anyway. He cannot stand to see her sad. “Tina,” he says, holding out a hand, “Tina, Tina, come on, come here.”
And Tina comes, moving through the narrow space with easy precision. She sits down beside Newt on the makeshift bed and he curls an arm around her; her head comes to rest on his shoulder, and within seconds he feels tears. “How could she?” Tina whimpers, spectacularly broken voice a startling contrast to the stoicism she’d just been displaying. “How could she go with him? How could she?”
Newt squeezes her. He is grieving for Leta, but that does not make him ignorant to the heartbreak Tina is now suffering: Queenie is with Grindelwald now, and that means that the sisters are now enemies. If Queenie has a change of heart and tries to defect, Grindelwald will almost certainly kill her; if she stays where she is, she will almost certainly be killed in the war that’s coming for them. There is no winning for Tina: Her sister has survived, but death seems a horrible certainty for her now, and there is nothing worse than seeing the inevitable coming and being forced to live with the dread.
“She’s always been gullible,” Tina croaked. “Always been easy to lead. It happened all the time at school until the Legilimency started to clue her into what people were really thinking. But how could she have fallen for Grindelwald’s lines so quickly, knowing who he is? Jacob told me about- how could she have used that spell on Jacob? What was she thinking? What happened to her?”
Newt doesn’t have an answer for her. “I don’t know.”
“We’ve been together all our lives,” Tina whispers. “It’s been just the two of us since our parents died.” Her teeth clench. “How could she?”
Newt doesn’t respond. Rocky as their relationship has been in the past, he has kept his brother through this mess. And while Leta might be dead, she had taken the impeccable character Newt had always known her for to the grave. Instead he guides Tina to the bed, and they curl up together with her face pressed into his chest, clinging to one another. She draws in a shaky breath, but does not sob or weep openly. “I’m sorry, Tina.”
Tina’s salamander-eyes are bright in the dark. “So am I.” He knows she means that more than just rhetorically.
Newt mashes his face into her hair and tightens his arms around her. She is warm and soft against him, and not since Leta has Newt felt so good in the presence of another that was not a member of his family. Their mutual misery is the only thing that ruins it.
This is not how he’d hoped their reunion would go.
This is not how he hoped anything would go.
But there is nothing to be done for it now but to return to London and regroup.
They grieve together in the dark as the Scottish countryside rolls by outside.
-End