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Air in his lungs felt...odd now. He wondered if it would hurt when, or if, he breathed again.
Credence pulled apart the loaf of bread he'd pilfered from the street cart dozens of stories below. The butter from a store down the street had long melted on his tongue, and the imbalance in the amount of butter to bread disappointed him, but this far up above the city skyline not many negative thoughts could stick.
The city below him was changing. Signs on shop fronts warned of rations, and one day a line of tanks rolled through the city in a show of force that made him stop his wandering and pay attention. The last time this much unrest plagued the city, he'd caused it. Not that any of the no-majs around him would remember, thanks to Tina and her friend Newt. While their eyes wandered and their throats cheered for the soldiers going off to a war Credence didn't understand, he'd taken his chance with the bread and butter. Stealing felt wrong, but he was in no shape to take a job and make money. Most days he didn't have a shape at all.
He wasn't sure if he'd recovered three or four years in Central Park, healing before moving to another spot saturated with magic that his partially formed body could sense intrinsically. It could have been one year, for all he could recall. What he did know was he'd only managed to take his first true breath since the subway incident exactly fourteen days, three hours, and ten minutes ago.
A siren passed beneath him, signaling a fire truck rushing to a spot he knew well, where Ma's church used to stand. Credence walked by it every day since he'd gotten his feet back, though he didn't rightfully know why he felt the pull to return.
Before he'd realized it, his feet moved to carry him down the sidewalks he'd known better in a former life. He doubted anyone could see him since he didn't even feel the chill of the winter air everyone else turned their coats up to but he was still cautious when he moved through the crowds down the avenue the burned-out church stood on. There were signs and caution barriers scattered over the property, left derelict for...really, how many years had it been? It didn't matter. He could still remember the way the air tasted first thing in the morning when Ma pulled their covers away, the smell of the soup wafting from the windows to drawn in other orphans, and how the bite of the belt felt on his palm when...
Credence shook his head to dislodge the memory, imagining his long hair brushing his ears. He could only barely feel it, and hadn't seen his own reflection since before the incident in the subway, but he was aware of his own change in appearance the way an animal knows where it can most easily blend in in the forest.
Another short whistle call, soft and sweet, floated through his mind. Was that what he'd heard that removed the memory of that belt from his mind? And again. This time it was closer and he felt his feet move of their own accord towards it.
Watching his ghostly hand pass through the stone corner of a wall, he bit his lip and pushed, willing himself to move through to the building behind where the church used to stand. The alleyway reminded him too much of Graves...of Grindelwald...but he didn't want to leave until he answered the call of something pulling him forward. Several feet of stone, brick, and dusty mortar passed through him on his way down, moving however the bidding requested, and he reminded himself he didn't have to breathe. The whistling grew longer and louder the further he moved towards the lowest floor of the building.
As easily as he'd slipped into the wall, Credence all but fell out of it, not realizing there was a room coming closer and closer to him. He slipped through the bricks like a yolk from an eggshell and collapsed to the floor in a heap. Instead of packed dirt or cobblestones, though, his mostly-returned body met a soft blanket. He lifted his eyes, vision following the dark stripes of amber and grey to see a pair of shoes he was sure he remembered from his past life, connected to dark trousers, a blue coat, and finally up to the face of a man he'd forgotten once, but was the first face to return to his memory fourteen days, three hours, and forty two minutes ago.
Newt smiled and cocked his head at him, the first living human to notice Credence's presence in years. His teeth almost glowed in the darkness, but from the light at the end of his wand, somehow even the dullest threads of his jacket sparkled and shone. A long chain connected to a tiny brass whistle floated in the air next to the magizoologist's curly head, innocently glimmering with an almost inquisitive spin before shooting into some pocket of the man's jacket, no longer required.
"Hello, Credence," Newt said softly. "My name is Newt Scamander. Do you remember me?"
Taking his first real breath as a human, Credence nearly choked on the fullness of it, drowning in sensation of the rush of oxygen like a scalpel had cut into him and opened his body to the entire spectrum of emotion. Gasping, Credence nodded, then grinned through his tears, before throwing himself into Newt's waiting arms.