Chapter Text
Newt wasn’t sure when it happened. He wasn’t sure when it started to change. He just knew that it had.
He wasn’t even the first one to notice, Tina was, as she gently told him why they could only ever be friends. He and Tina were sitting off to the side of Jacob’s bakery as the newly married man twirled Queenie around the makeshift dance floor. Everyone was watching the happy couple in their first dance. As people started to join them Tina gently touched his hand to get his attention. There was a sad smile on her face as she told him, “Newt, I think we need to talk.”
Feeling tense from the fragile edge in her voice, there was little he could do but meekly nod to indicate he was listening. He tried to look her in the eye but mostly found himself looking down at his hands on the table, fidgeting with the stem of the glass of champagne he wasn’t really drinking. He didn’t know what she was going to say but he could tell she thought it would upset him.
There was a faint sigh from her before she started, “Newt, I know we were hoping to see if we might be able to be more to each other than just friends, that we’ve been trying to arrange for more time spent together, but we haven’t really been able to make it work. You always have a creature that needs you more in some other corner of the world, or I have a case that’s taking up all my time, and we keep having one excuse after another for why we can’t see each other, or even keep in regular enough contact.”
A pause in her speech made him glance up a little longer, try to read her expression, as she took in a long breath, releasing it slowly. She had closed her eyes before continuing, “I hate to say this Newt, but I think if we truly cared enough about each other in that way we would have made the time. We wouldn’t have let our work, or anything else, keep us apart for so long.”
It hurt to hear. He felt it like a grip on his heart, but he knew he felt it so much because she was right. He cared about Tina, he always would, but he wasn’t sure anymore he felt how he was supposed to. How Theseus had felt about Leta, or anything as intense as how Jacob and Queenie felt about one another. He cared about her more like he cared about any of his other friends, like Queenie and Jacob, Bunty or any of the other fantastically amazing people he had met over the last few years of his life. She felt like close family more than anything else. They would always be connected, had been through too much together not to be, but that didn’t mean they had to force something that wasn’t there, or misinterpret something that was. She would always be one of the people he trusted most, but that didn’t a romantic relationship make.
There was a silence that stretched between them, somehow comfortable as Tina gave him time to process, before he managed to softly admit, “I think you’re right.” He held her gaze with his own sad eyes before shifting them to the newlyweds and continuing, “We’ve seen what it looks like to fight for someone because you can’t stand to be apart from them. We’ve both seen what being truly in love can inspire someone to do, good and bad.” He felt the corner of his mouth quirk up in a shaky sort of way as he looked back at her and said, “We’ve seen people fight with all they had against the worst kinds of obstacles. We couldn’t manage something as simple as making time.”
Tina responded with a small, shaky smile of her own as she agreed, “I think we would have made it work if that’s what we both truly wanted.” She put her fingers gently on his wrist as she comforted him, “I’ll always care about you Newt, I’ll always love you, just not in that way, and I don’t think you could ever love me like that either.” She seemed to debate something with herself as she bit the corner of her bottom lip before quietly adding, “Especially while someone else has such a strong hold on your heart.”
He felt the confusion showing on his face as he stuttered out, “Wh..what do you m…mean?” He had no trouble holding eye contact as he asked, “Who do you think…?” He couldn’t get the whole question out but he also needed an answer.
There was pity, or maybe sympathy, on Tina’s face as she gently sighed, “Oh, Newt.” She fully pulled his hand into her own as she asked, “Who have you been able to make time for no matter what else you had going on? Who have you fought for without a moment’s hesitation? Who has your unwavering faith, even when you have every reason to waver?” She managed a real smile as she finished by asking, “Who has always inspired you most?”
If Newt had felt a squeeze on his heart before, it was in an iron vice now. He knew immediately to whom she was referring. Only one face popped into his mind, one pair of sparkling intelligent blue eyes and a small but always genuine smile, even if it sometimes had a hint of sadness. He could still see the man in his mind’s eye, sitting just outside the bakery in the snow as it danced around him, creating an almost ethereal and breathtaking beauty about the picture as a whole.
He all but whispered as he let out a stunned and breathless, “Albus”.
It was definitely something that hadn’t always been there. He knows it wasn’t there when he was at school, hopelessly lost over Leta. Following her around like a love sick fool. He knows it wasn’t there when he went off to war, to his beloved dragons, or while he fought next to the man that would be his first real love, who was lost far too soon, far too tragically. A loss that made Newt hesitant to open his heart again, lest he ever find that kind of anguish repeated. The love he had felt for Philip had still been new when he lost him, yet it had still filled him with a terrifying rage nonetheless. Newt had only ever used creatures for revenge once, and it was in a blind but calm rage, on the back of one of his beloved Ukrainian Iron Bellies as he rained literal fire down on the wizard soldiers that dared to take his love from him. That had been a first, untested by time, kind of love. What he now realized he felt for Albus was far more than that, and it terrified him.
He doesn’t know when it started but he can certainly look back and see its been there for some time. His actions in recent months alone should have alerted him to as much.
Newt Scamander was hopelessly in love with Albus Dumbledore.