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I know / You want the sin, without the sinner / I know / The past will catch you up, as you run faster
— I Know, Placebo
The distant peaks of the Caparthians held silent witness over the camps. At night, Newt envied them more than ever, their ability to hold more secrets than even Newt himself could contain. Never had he told anyone much. But now, he was drowning in them.
Just minutes before, he’d slipped out of the Commander’s bed, her arm warm and familiar. And if there had been anywhere to turn to relieve this devastating, oily feeling—a slow slide into something inescapable, the way a trapped animal clawed at the confines of its box—then it should have been with her.
By all rights, it should have been her.
Guiltily, Newt glanced back at the commander’s tent. Larger than the others, warded around the edges. He rubbed one thumb over his metal identification bracelet as he forced his eyes away from it, gaze drifting over the larger camp. Tents sprung up from the cold ground like barnacles, dotted here and there.
Somewhere beyond the protected perimeter was a single, lonely tent.
For years, Newt had followed Margot’s research from afar. Commander Margot Vilkatiė. While working in the higher echelons of the Beasts Division, she’d cultivated a long career based on being the first known European to successfully ride a dragon based on bonding with the beast alone. But abandoned by his brother, with the burns from the fireplace’s embers still peppering his hands, he’d needed more. And so, when Newt had approached the tall, blonde, older woman to ask about her research, and she’d mistaken his shyness for desiring a date, he hadn’t challenged it. Even with the near-twenty year age gap.
And she’d given it. Love. Attention. Everything he’d been starved of as a child. Everything Theseus had tried and failed to give him in the right way. That, and she’d made sure he got onto the Dragon Programme when it’d been announced in 1917, seeming to listen to what he’d said about them being more than weapons.
After all his conversations with her about Theseus, about his resentment—most dominantly, because that was how she twisted—Theseus’s arrival had felt like worlds colliding. Newt hadn’t forgiven Theseus for the argument after the expulsion, yet, but rescuing his brother had brought up complicated feelings about it all.
He crested a small dirt-carved lip and sank down onto the rickety wooden viewpoint overlooking where the dragons slept, twenty feet down in the valley. Each was shackled at seven points. Concealment charms were cast daily on them, dulling their bright hides, in case planes cut across this area. But even through the thin cloud of grey smoke, Newt could see the underside starting to shine through, their glinting scales catching the moonlight.
He hated it—all of it.
With a heavy sigh, Newt sat. He reached into his pocket and found a cigarette. It was dry, at this altitude; all he needed was a spark. Shielding it with his hand, he breathed it into a bright flame, and took the first drag.
Rumour had it that the Muggles in the trenches couldn’t smoke for fear of the snipers. But none could touch them here.
The nicotine felt good. Better than good. But while it numbed his unease, he still felt twisted and wrong inside. It was catching up. They were catching up: the years since March 1915, years spent not writing to Theseus, not receiving letters, searching the casualty list of every paper he passed. Never had he expected getting his brother back to make him feel worse.
His breathing had become shallower, catching a little, devouring the cigarette in harsh puffs. It was already burning low, nearly singeing his fingers. He'd have to light another soon. Everything felt both distant and too close tonight, like looking through the wrong end of a spyglass. They had more than enough in the Corps. Enough of everything, really, alongside heaviness of the Ministry’s covert hopes riding on their soldiers. No one else had dragons. If the German wixen made a stand of their own, if the Muggles stayed intent on destroying one another, they had dragons.
Not subtle creatures, nor tameable ones. All Newt had wanted to do was save them from this fate.
Trying to clear his head yet again, on a careless night flight, he’d seen a glowing dog sprinting through the cratered, muddy ruin of old land.
He’d only recognised Theseus from his Patronus. He’d only known the Russian wolfhound was Theseus’s Patronus from the rare notes they’d exchanged under one another’s doors, the only way to cross the distance between their assigned family roles and wire-tight atmospheric pressure.
Merlin, Theseus hadn’t been able to talk nor hear for that first day.
Newt couldn’t bear to think about it.
It jangled with such inherent wrongness that he was almost glad Theseus was hiding on the outer edges of the camp, away from less-sympathetic members of the Corps who might report him back to the Ministry and get him sent to Azkaban. They knew, by now, that many had followed Theseus’s example. But the warrant remained.
Under the heavy sky, in the churned dirt, one of the Ironbellies was stirring. Katya, the second-largest. The elegant spines on the back of her head twitched, raised. On the nights where they could almost hear the distant shelling, she writhed in the earth, scratching with her claws. The sounds she’d made through the muzzle sounded like human screams.
Newt leaned forwards, squinting. Something wasn't right. She jerked her head, rearing up, her chains rattling—and a brilliant burst of orange light illuminated the deep brown scales at her throat.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, stumbling to his feet. The cigarette fell, forgotten.
She worked her jaw against her muzzle. The reinforced leather straps were fraying where she'd been gradually wearing them down—he watched her massive head thrash once, twice—and the muzzle split.
“No, no, no.”
Newt swung himself back over, tottering down the thin slope. The viewpoint practically hung over a cliff, the path down to the dragons winding and scattered with broken rock from the boulders they’d cleared. This had once been a quarry, before the Aurors MACUSA had led the evacuation, and there were Muggles around thirty kilometres away in scattered villages still being sent out. In the day, the journey was treacherous enough, but at night, one wrong move could lead to his death. Her agitation was beginning to warm the air, sending simmering heat rolling over him in waves.
Boom. The first fireball sank into the entrenchment around the rough pens. Katya was wild, desperate—spluttering out great globs of burning that crashed into the ground like molten metal, leaving scorched craters in their wake. It was nothing like the controlled, focused stream of flame they'd been training the dragons to produce.
Worse, she wasn't trying to escape, not really. Bleeding afterimages haunted him even when he screwed his eyes shut.
Another fireball erupted, this one larger than the last, scorching a black crater into the ground. The other dragons were beginning to stir, disturbed by their companion's distress. If they all started getting agitated…
Newt's hand went to the pouch at his belt where he kept his calming draughts. He'd developed his own mixture, gentler than the standard Ministry formula. The dragons responded better to it, didn't develop the same resistance. But he'd need to get close enough to administer it properly. In the dark, he only had the intermittent bursts of dragonfire to light his way.
“Easy now,” he murmured, though he was still too far away for the dragon to hear him. It was instinct more than anything else, the same soothing tone he'd used since he was a boy dealing with injured creatures in the woods. “I know it hurts. I know they've got you all wrong…”
Newt was fifty metres away, but Katya sensed him. He was the only one, he knew, that they really trusted. Doomed—doomed, they all were, but what could he say? Raising too many concerns would just force the Ministry to axe the project entirely.
Another gout of flame shot through the damaged muzzle, emerging closer to liquid than anything else. But her head swung toward him, eyes gleaming. Katya was watching him, assessing. That was good. That meant she was thinking rather than just reacting.
Rocks tumbled off the side, rushing, river-like. Newt nearly twisted his ankle. His arms flew out to steady himself on the winding path down to the dragons as he came to a hesitant stop. There was something in front of him. A figure, standing motionless on the slope, wearing a khaki uniform stained in mud and blood.
Theseus.
It had to be Theseus, though these days Newt found himself doubting his own certainty when it came to his brother. The man who'd come back from the trenches wore Theseus's face like an ill-fitting mask: all the familiar expressions slightly askew, slightly wrong.
Another burst of fire illuminated the scene properly. Theseus hadn't moved a muscle, staring transfixed at the flames as they arced through the night air. His face was cast in sharp relief. The hollows of his cheeks, the darkness pooling under his eyes, the way his jaw worked silently as if chewing on words he couldn't quite form.
Newt's steps faltered. Katya's distress seemed to recede, becoming background noise to the sight of his brother standing there like a man carved from stone. Even the dragon's attention seemed caught by this new presence. She lowered her head slightly, smoke curling from her nostrils as she watched.
The distance between them felt impossible to cross. Newt found himself counting his own breaths, trying to steady himself.
Five steps. Four. Three.
Theseus didn't react. His hands were shaking too badly to curl into fists. Up close, Newt could see the minute tremors running through his brother's body. The back of Theseus’s neck was stained with dirt and gunpowder residue. It had only been days since they’d found him. He’d still not washed.
Two.
He hesitated.
Katya was still watching with narrowed eyes, the flared scales by her ears pinned back. Wary and waiting. For the first time, Newt wondered if she sensed the wrongness, too. The fire on the ground, the wreck of the lower path, was smoldering and burning out; every breath she took seemed to choke around the hanging muzzle.
Help her, screamed his instincts. You have to help her.
But there was only one path, the width of a lying man, before the long drop.
One.
Slowly, carefully, Newt reached out. His fingers brushed Theseus's shoulder, skimming the coarse weave of the uniform and the awful tension beneath.
Theseus made a sound. Barely more than a breath, a tiny broken thing that might have been “no”. And then he was turning, moving—
—attacking.
It was so fast Newt could barely process it. Their surroundings were so dark that he could barely catch himself as he fell, the air flying from his lungs with a harsh whump. Dull pain flared through his back; days of attempting to ride and sleepless nights in bed leaving him brittle already, the warning twinge making him grit his teeth.
Theseus grabbed at his shoulders, at his arms. When Newt tried to crawl backwards, barely even thinking about the path’s narrowness, Theseus followed, pressing the heels of his hands into Newt’s shoulder joints.
“Don’t,” whispered Theseus. “Don’t, don’t.”
Whether Theseus was attacking or defending, Newt had no idea. Above him, his brother's drawn face was swimming, distorted by shadows and dragonfire. Those weren't Theseus's eyes. Couldn't be. They were too wide, too empty, like windows into an abandoned house.
“Thes—“
Newt brought his arms up, trying to create space between them, but Theseus was stronger, had always been stronger, even if the months of war had worn him down to sinew and bone. His movements were desperate but uncoordinated, leaving openings that the old Theseus never would have allowed.
Newt managed to get his hands around Theseus’s waist, as if wrangling a Zouwu, desperate for breath. His brother’s sharp elbows were pushing every ounce of air from his lungs. Freezing at the contact, Theseus hit out at Newt, striking his chest, his bicep, his face, breathing like a rabid dog.
"It's me," Newt gasped out. "Theseus, it's just me—“
But Theseus surged to his feet. Newt’s hands slipped; he fell back, hard. His wand was in his belt; Theseus’s was in the holster at his wrist, untouched, like he’d forgotten it was there. With a sharp gasp, Theseus gathered himself, clambering back up the few feet he’d staggered. He checked every direction with sightless eyes, made a low noise, and lunged at Newt just as he got to his feet.
Smack. The collision sent a shockwave of pain through Newt’s body. Instead of falling backwards, he went limp, tottering forwards. Theseus’s sudden stillness, like a pointer dog having just smelt prey, was the only thing that stopped Newt stumbling.
For the first time, he realised Theseus could have been trying to protect him from the flames, could have been trying to get him down. But the straps and buckles of Theseus’s uniform were clinking, his brother taking shallow sawing breaths as he fumbled for weapons which were no longer there. No knife, no rifle. No knife, no rifle.
“No,” Theseus said again, his voice taking on a hazy quality.
Eyes wide, Newt could only open and close his mouth.
The brief combat classes were replaced by a white blank space. Slowly, Newt sagged forwards into Theseus’s clumsy restraint, hands useless at his sides. Because what was he meant to do with them? Hit his own brother?
Had Theseus’s hearing even returned? How long ago had it been with the two of them in the medical tent, silent, utter strangers to one another? Whether it had it or not, Newt was running out of time. Again. He’d been running out of time before Theseus had left and never realised. Each day, a countdown to this.
“Ah!” Theseus looked at Newt as if he were dead and pushed him back.
Stomach lurching, still blinded by the familiarity of his brother’s face—and while he hadn’t processed it yet, the hint of terrible, terrible relief, so strong he could die from it, that Theseus was alive—Newt again made the mistake of grabbing.
He fell to his knees as he managed to hook his fingers around Theseus’s wrist, the contact softening the fall. Hand trembling, for the first time, Newt reached for the wand at his waist. It wasn’t that he wanted to attack Theseus. But disoriented and lost in space-time, with a fire-breathing dragon watching and the perilous slopes of the old mine, Newt was terrified Theseus would get hurt.
So when Theseus dropped down and began to shiver, blue-grey eyes just as intense and just as empty, Newt didn’t make a sound as his older brother wrapped his hands around his throat.
It wasn’t that he thought he might die from the attack. No, that was the worst part. It was clumsy and weak, disjointed, Theseus’s hands slipping each time he tried to press on Newt’s neck. Two days ago, Theseus had been chased by Percival, tracking doggedly to the perimeter where Newt and Margot had been on patrol.
Two days ago, Theseus had begun with I’m sorry, before Margot had arrived.
The potential of dying here, no, that wasn’t the worst part. Newt had always been flippant, nonchalant about death. Something that happened to other people, something he might do to himself, something that was a random eventuality of the adventures he wanted to have.
The worst part was enduring this. Newt had spent years accepting that his relationship with his brother was close to unfixable. After his expulsion, the final tie binding them had snapped, and Newt had tenderly kept it severed, drowning in the hurt. He’d not thought they could sink further. He’d not thought Theseus could be broken like this.
His instinctive plan—to survive this, so unfamiliar—was been to lie there and take it. For years, Newt had been a quietly defiant teenager struggling with his propensity towards passive and pained retreat. The war had accelerated his development into a lost boy walking around in an adult body. Only since landing in Ukraine in spring 1917 had the dragons helped him come back to himself.
But the impulses were at war with one another: You’re seven again and people are shouting. You’re twelve and Theseus couldn’t stop himself saying what he truly believes. You’re sixteen and they all hate you, you’re sixteen and the family failure, you’re sixteen and thinking that you could die, but instead, you’ll choose to be free; you’re seventeen and alone and still at the Ministry and you didn’t know dying would be possible in fractions.
Odd distortions. Strange priorities. His deepest fear, an office job. With thicker skin than many assumed, Newt let it all snap into place. When his differences, his so-called schizophrenia, had the ability to make living a daily hell—then a daily hell could become manageable.
With a deep breath, Newt found somewhere deep and calm inside him, as smooth and cool as a lazy ocean current. His thoughts clarified, even as his heart rate remained rabbit-fast.
Wrenching his hips up, Newt managed to knock Theseus to the side. His elbow dug into the gravel. The Corps training flashed through his head, the basics of how to engage, instructions that had all felt incomprehensible at the time now leaping electric-hot to the fore of his mind. At his belt, the pouch clinked. To deliver the potion to the dragons, they had to use needles, enchanted for sharpness and durability
Katya tried to step back, pawing at the ground, and the ruined muzzle’s chain caught on a boulder. It wrenched at the scales on her face, skinning a thin line, and she shrieked out another fiery cry of pain.
Theseus froze. Trembling, as taut as a bowstring in his half-crouch, he turned back towards the fire. Stared at it as it licked his hair auburn. For a moment, Newt thought Theseus was going to throw himself into those flames, his brother taking a tiny, tiny step forwards, stretching out one hand—
Newt lunged for Theseus’s collar. Too late, he realised that Theseus might have been thinking the same as him: there’s someone I need to save, and they’re being devoured. Too late. Theseus cried out this time, a noise young enough that Newt had never heard it from him before, and tried to throw a punch. When Newt caught Theseus’s arm at the elbow, the blow glanced off his temple hard enough to rock his vision. He reached his free hand to his belt and pulled out a cold needle.
His eyes went to Theseus’s thigh. He let go of the elbow. Theseus didn’t move. The needle was enchanted, could tear and wound if Newt did this wrong, so Newt splayed his hand against the bony side of his brother’s thigh. He thought about aiming. Thought about using it.
And then, Newt looked at Katya, her glowing eyes and flame-engorged throat, the beautiful russet scales on her throat all twisted and hurt. She didn’t want chemical mollification, either.
With a single decisive movement, Newt dropped the needle. It took a full second to shatter on the quarry boulders below.
“Theseus,” he said softly. He’d never spoken this gently to Theseus before, never like this, as if Theseus were a spooked animal. He extended one hand, keeping his motions slow. Theseus’s pupils were blown wide.
His brother dropped his head, only fractionally, but that was good. He was tracking the hand. Almost.
“Please,” Newt implored. “I—I don’t know what this is, or how to treat it. And I know that you were sorry and that I don’t forgive you for what you said, and I know it must hurt. We travelled so far and we still can’t talk. I don’t know what you’ve seen—or what you’re seeing now.”
With a slow blink, Theseus looked around. His hands crept up to claw in his hair, tugging hard. He gave a slow shake of his head, eyebrows crumpling. The smoke from the fireballs batted lazily around their ankles—cruelly, even. Because the painful irony was that Newt had not seen much of the war, not from the mountains, not from the ground. The closest he’d got had been the night he’d found Theseus, the first time he’d heard the terrifying whistle of shells, seen the blown and torn and still corpses patterning the earth as it unspooled beneath him with each great flap of his dragon’s wings.
“I don’t understand,” Newt admitted.
He tried to touch Theseus’s face. “No,” breathed Theseus again, like it was the only word he had left. His brother screwed his eyes shut and startled forwards and backwards at once—and Newt’s metal identification bracelet tore open his cheek.
“No,” repeated Theseus. “No.”
The emptiness was draining from his eyes, replaced by something far worse.
Recognition.
Despite himself, Newt stepped back, unable to look. He hated, hated, hated watching Theseus realise he’d hurt him, so much so that it was often easier to pretend he hadn’t. The mountains looked strange through half-closed, anticipating eyes, their great cast shadows taking on odd shapes.
Theseus very deliberately, very slowly began to raise his hands. Both at once. The universal gesture for surrender.
“You—you don’t need to do that,” whispered Newt.
Theseus's hands were still raised, but they'd started shaking more violently now. Blood from his cheek had soaked into his collar, staining the khaki dull red.
“Thes?”
No response. Theseus bent his knees, as if suddenly aware of his own intimidating lanky height. Bowing his head, he stretched his hands out further, showing they were empty. Once, twice, he almost threw them up to the sky, the motion carefully controlled as everything normally was with Theseus, but carrying a veneer of desperation that made Newt’s heart twist.
“Thes, I,” and he stumbled over the words, because truth be told, he couldn’t escape his own unfamiliar anger. “I don’t mind.”
Helplessly, Newt stared at Theseus for several more heartbeats. The noise of his own pulse in his ears was like a drumbeat. Katya. He couldn’t forget her, either. But when he twisted to check, her proud head was still, crooked to one side as she stared further up the slope.
His hand drifted to his wandloop. Slowly, the dread clawing up his throat, Newt turned.
Tall and blonde and older. Marked Newt’s commander, but without her greatcoat, looking far more like whatever else they’d become. Because wasn’t that half the point of war? Becoming something else? Newt only counted himself lucky that most of his transformations had taken place only on his own terms, perpetually out of step with society, always forging his own path.
Hadn’t they?
Margot’s wand arm was raised, her aim deadly and precise. From this distance, she wouldn’t miss. When she looked at Newt, her gaze was steady.
“He was,” said Commander Vilkatiė, “never meant to be here.”
She had always been firm about rules and order, about the scope of their project. They were to train the dragons and endure no interference. At the highest level of classification, civilians—magical or not—would need total memory erasure, should they stumble onto the camp. And Margot, like many other wix, had limited tolerance for those who’d broken the Decree. Either we end it quickly and stop the suffering, she’d said, or we accept that the stragglers will get what they deserve. Back then, Newt had been too high on his own pain to push back. He became someone else when he was with her.
His eyes darted back to Theseus.
His brother.
He was frozen in place. Whatever he did, he wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to stop the spell finding its mark. Through their entire scuffle, Theseus hadn’t drawn his wand. He was surrendering to Margot. He was never meant to be here. What else could that mean but no one will know if he disappears here?
“Margot—“ Newt began.
“He attacked you,” she said coolly, a hint of that possessive lilt entering her tone. She looked just like the woman he loved in the moonlight. “He can’t be around the others. Someone will report him, sooner or later—and do you think he’ll survive in Azkaban?”
Before he could form the next words, something confused and desperate, the brief calm splintered again. Again and again and again in waves—was this how Theseus felt with his nerves shot to pieces?—he tried to muster last-minute defenses of his mad brother that died in his throat.
Oh, Merlin. It felt like keeping a secret, the way his body was locking everything inside. Margot’s eyes narrowed as the thought crystallised in Newt’s head. He couldn’t, but he had wanted to tell Theseus, tell him everything that was wrong and hurting, because even if this didn’t look like Theseus at all, it was still his brother.
With limbs half-frozen, he took a step forwards, putting himself between the two of them side-on. Theseus’s hair was too long, matted curls hanging over his face. His expression held pure shame, laced with bitter resignation, because even if Newt wasn’t good at reading people, he’d known for Theseus for as long as Newt himself had been alive.
There were bruises forming on Newt’s neck. He had never quite tasted them like this. They were strangely heavy, pulsing as the damaged vessels clotted and stilled. A soreness too close to emergence.
You might not be able to stop her, a little voice at the back of his head whispered, and he couldn’t help the subconscious response. But it’s not him, it can’t be him, he wouldn’t hurt me like that. Not like that even if he does. He wouldn’t attack me like that, I wouldn’t attack him like that; I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, would I?
Margot’s fingers tightened on the handle of her wand, but she lowered it, just a fraction. Like a bird of prey waiting for its target, she had gone entirely still. Katya let out a small huff, smoke gushing from her nostrils; and Margot fixed the muzzle with an intricate twist of her wand. Her round eyes were almost eerie as she kept her attention fixed on Theseus and Newt.
Deliberately, Newt turned to face Theseus entirely.
Theseus stared at him with that shattered expression, still bleeding, as if he could divine and then spit the secrets of this meaningless universe in which they allowed a war like this to happen.
“The Germans,” Theseus said, so softly that Newt could barely make out the words. “They had flamethrowers. You can hear them coming. This...this click-hiss sound. And then the fire just...doesn't stop. Doesn't die. Clings to everything it touches.” His breathing hitched. “Sometimes I think I can still smell it. The way it—the way they—burned.”
A pause. When the wind ran through the mountains around them, quick and nimble, it barely drowned the faint burning of the last dregs of Katya’s pain. Fire did make a sound. Theseus was right.
“Three seconds,” he whispered. “That's all it takes. Three seconds and you can't tell who anyone was anymore.”
Flamethrowers?
The nausea rose swift and violent in his throat, not just from the imagery but from the horrible intimacy of it—how Theseus's voice had gone flat and clinical.
“Step aside, Newt,” Margot said, her voice carrying that familiar note of command. Newt watched her over his shoulder, aching. “I waited. I didn’t want to do this. But it’s proven—sometimes we have to become what circumstances require.” Her eyes flicked to Theseus. “Some of us just break instead.”
“He's my brother,” Newt interrupted. The words came out weaker than he'd intended, more plea than statement.
Behind him, Newt heard Theseus's sharp intake of breath. Margot fell silent as Newt turned back to Theseus; she loved Newt enough to know, to understand, didn’t she? He wanted to reach out, to grab Theseus's arm, to anchor them both in the present moment—but the memory of those same hands around his throat was too fresh.
Instead, he found himself watching Katya out of the corner of his eye. For the first time since joining the Corps, he saw her as Theseus must see her: not a magnificent creature to be studied and protected, but a living weapon.
“I saw her from my tent,” Theseus said, swallowing. “I knew—the dragons. I saw the night flight, yesterday, the test on that copse, the smoke.”
A brief pause.
“Just what are you going to do here, Newton? What's she going to do?"
In 1908, when time had started to pull them apart, Theseus had stood up to their father in one of those few times to take Newt into the woods, stargazing, in the aftermath of an asteroid exploding over the Yeniseysk Governorate.
Standing between his brother and his lover, he felt that plummet, that fall. His beliefs and hopes and fears cracking open in the sky like a detonation, their fragments crashing irrecoverably to earth. And this earth was wounded, hungry. In its screaming indifference, it gave Newt no chance to gather the pieces about what he’d thought he knew—about war, about dragons.
To gentle wild creatures, he'd learned to make himself small and unthreatening, offering safety without demands. But this—this was different.
This was Theseus transformed by fire and fear into something feral, something that might never trust again. This was Margot, who'd shown him how to bond with dragons, now ready to strike like one.
This was himself, caught between them.
He looked at his identification bracelet, at the blood on it.