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He’s loath to admit it, but she drew his eye simply because she was beautiful.
He watches the dark-haired girl at the Slytherin table as she pushes her roast potatoes around on her plate. Around them, the rest of the school is laughing and feasting, seniors catching up with their Housemates, some first-years already beginning to make new friends. The fourth-year sitting next to him has given up her attempt to make conversation after receiving monosyllabic responses, and he’s grateful to be left alone. He slices his pork chops into neat squares and eats deliberately, gazing at the girl. Lestrange, her name was. Leta Lestrange. Amidst the revelry, an air of melancholy surrounds her. She is quiet, alone, and he feels a certain kinship with her.
That night, he thinks of her when he cannot sleep in the unfamiliar Hufflepuff dormitory.
*
As the days pass, he learns from the whispers in the corridors that she is French. That her family is ‘a bit, you know,’ whatever that means. That she’s moody, keeps to herself, that she’s weird . These do not put him off. People say the same things about him.
He works up the nerve to take the workbench next to hers in Herbology a month into the term. The lesson is spent in silence, but she smiles faintly as he takes the lid off the pot of dragon dung they’re sharing and recoils in disgust. He hopes he’s smiled back.
She saves the bench for him the next Herbology lesson, and the next, and the next.
He first hears her speak when she loses her grip on a Bouncing Bulb and it smacks him in the face. She gasps and apologises, coming to fuss over him when she has the plant under control, and for a long moment he doesn’t realise blood is pouring from his nose, engrossed in the timbre of her voice (is it lower when she’s not agitated?) and the way her eyebrows knit together as she frowns anxiously. She escorts him to the nurse, and on the way he has to assure her multiple times that it isn’t her fault and he’s fine. She finally takes a breath when he’s fixed up with a simple Episkey .
“I’m Leta Lestrange,” she says awkwardly as they walk back to the greenhouses.
“I know. I’m Newt Scamander.”
It’s nice to have a friend.
*
She stops addressing him as ‘Scamander’ when he stays over the Christmas holidays in third year.
He walks her to her common room after dinner the first day. Snow falls softly as they cross the courtyard, and in the faint lantern light he sees her rubbing her hands together from the cold.
“You don’t have your gloves?”
“I, um, lost them.”
“Here, have mine.” He wonders when Theseus’ gallantry has rubbed off on him.
“No, you must be cold-”
“Just one?”
They must be a comical sight; each with a bright yellow glove on one hand and nothing on the other, but in the quiet of Hogwarts at night there is no one to see them.
She returns it when they reach the dungeons.
“Thank you, Newt.”
Her smile warms his insides, and he walks off with a skip in his step.
The next day, he invites her to stay the night in his closet with a note pushed over to her shyly at breakfast. She says yes, of course, she’d love to.
They spend the morning on holiday homework; she tries to correct his abysmal History of Magic essay and gives up, but he doesn’t mind at all, laughing as she reads out the worst parts.
Later, in the closet, she watches as he tends to the little raven.
“That day - how did you know the raven was my family’s emblem?”
“I, uh… I was doing some reading.” He doesn’t tell her he scoured the school library for the name Lestrange in first year.
“Oh.”
That night, huddled beneath blankets and sheets sneaked from their common rooms, she tells him about her father. It is the first time he sees her shed a tear.
From then on, his closet becomes theirs.
It’s nice to have a friend.
*
In sixth year she says she doesn’t want to talk about it, so he doesn’t.
Instead he takes her to visit the Bowtruckles and coaxes one onto her hand and rambles on about their social lives until the corners of her mouth turn up.
In the week that follows she is pensive, aloof even, but he waits patiently and says nothing when he happens upon her with red eyes and tearstained cheeks one time too often, or when she doesn’t appear at dinner three days in a row.
He asks her to watch the sunset with him in the Astronomy Tower that Friday evening.
Their halting conversation turns to their classes, steadily avoiding Defense Against the Dark Arts. There’s a Potions test on Monday, an Astronomy paper due Wednesday, a graded Charms practical on Thursday…
“You’ve been stressed out lately,” she observes. “Me too.”
As the sun dips into the Black Lake, something gives him the nerve to reach out and touch her hand. He looks into her face for any sign of displeasure, but finds none. She watches interestedly as he covers her hand with his and interlaces their fingers, her chocolate brown eyes boring into him, but not in a bad way. It is the first time she’s looked at him like that.
They sit in silence as the moon rises and the stars fade into existence, their joined hands between them.
It’s nice to have a friend.
*
He places a single white rose at the foot of the headstone. It is not a grave; her ashes will lie forever in the tomb of her ancestors, mingled with that of the many others who perished in the fire.
“You loved her.” He turns to face her, not she who is gone but her , whose eyes are fire in dark water. It is not a question.
He exhales with a sad smile. “It was nice to have a friend.”