A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back.
The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?"
The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too."
The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog.
The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp: "Why? Now we will be both perish."
Replies the scorpion: "Because it is my nature..."
- Aesop
"Who?"
But of course, he knows who she is.
His lies began the minute he stepped off the boat in America. Good natured, well-meaning untruths designed to appropriately uphold the International Statute of Secrecy, conceal and protect his beloved creatures and at times quell the interference, concern and occasional nosiness of two kind-hearted sisters.
His interaction with Tina Goldstein was particularly dotted with dishonesties and deceptions during his whirlwind adventure in New York but he had never told as many consecutive lies to the pretty, inquisitive woman as he did during their final minutes together.
Having Tina Goldstein of all people unexpectedly, and somewhat shakily, say the few syllables that can cruelly pull at the ache in his chest he's learned to carry is somewhat unexpected. The guilt he had acquired after his abrupt rudeness towards Queenie dissolved instantaneously into even more magnified annoyance at the golden-haired Goldstein for her further interference. Not even being entirely aware of what specifics Queenie had pulled from his head, he had tried to dispel anything particularly personal or intimate about them when his initial pain slipped at the mention of her photograph, but he was still slightly panicked at what Queenie could have discussed with her sister.
"Does Leta Lestrange like to read?"
It's an odd question but he's never understood people well. He can't place her tone. It's not accusatory or angry. But there's something sad about it. It appears she worked up a lot of courage to ask such an inexplicable question and now her eyes are full of regret and fear at the answer.
He feels like he just took a bludger to the chest and he needs a few more seconds to compose himself and construct an answer so he delays by asking who in an innocently confused murmur as if he didn't hear properly. A large part of him hopes that he's given her an opportunity to lose her nerve and hastily brush off her strange question, but she presses again though this time with her shoulders squared and a touch more confidence.
"The girl whose picture you carry."
He detects a little accusation now. Rightfully so, he feels. So effortlessly forgetting a girl whose picture you carry, who your feelings for were only brought up yesterday probably would paint you in a no better light than lying about it anyway. Never being great at this sort of thing, he thought their conversation was going remarkably well until he was blindsided with this and he was so unprepared he was already convinced she would, as usual, be his undoing. It seemed Tina wasn't overly impressed at the best of times at his behaviour during his chaotic visit so perhaps his best route of out this prickly subject was the truth. She was owed a few of those at the least.
Having many disorganised thoughts, Newt thought about the strange request at hand. Oh. L…(it's just her name, Merlin's beard) Leta's reading habits? His brother's annoying and unwanted advice about women never meaning what they say exactly popped into his head (he started to wish he'd listened a little more now), but he thought he'd take the chance that for some inexplicable reason Tina wanted to know about a stranger's reading habits.
It wasn't a particularly loaded question on the surface, seemingly easy enough to quickly dive into the carefully contained and suppressed part of his mind. But Newt knew that pulling on a single thread of anything Leta Lestrange proved as risky as inching open his suitcase with a far greater chance of being left in eviscerating pain for days. But he could bear it for Tina, he decided.
Yes.
Leta Lestrange did like to read. Maybe it started at her family's gloomy and opulent castle where she was always in trouble and locked away, unable to escape into the surrounding woodland hinterland (at least while her stepmother's house elves were watching), and with little to do except wander the many libraries and flip through dusty, untouched books for hours on end. Knowledge was power to Leta. And the Lestranges were relentless when it came to the pursuit of power. He often thought she was the pure embodiment of Ravenclaw and wondered on many occasions why she was not sorted there.
He remembers watching her face, carefully and protectively from across the crowded common room, lovely as always and free from any evidence of the tears he had wiped away with his thumbs minutes before. Trying not to wince and chuckle at how her eyebrows were knitted together and how she bit into her lower lip between sentences as she initiated the conversation they had practised. She was in an amusing battle between nervous and determined and concentrating far too hard that she probably looked confused and angry to everyone who was not him. When she turned away she looked over at him with the muggle book she had just borrowed off a previously Lestrange-phobic (and now quite befuddled and slightly entranced) muggleborn student. She didn't stop chewing her lip in uncertainty until she could see his encouraging smile.
He remembered breaking into the restricted section for books they needed, as many as they could carry, to piece together what they could about the creatures they had discovered.
He remembered her watching his Quidditch Match from a tower window while serving her usual detention. This time she'd been caught breaking into Ravenclaw tower (by continuously outsmarting the entry riddles or simply scaling the tower – another skill acquired through years of breaking in and out of her family's fortress) because she didn't think it fair they had a library of their own. He scored the first point and looked up before the commentator even had time to announce it to see if she had seen. She had smiled and pressed a kiss to the glass rendering him completely paralysed before a bludger crashed into his head ending his portion of the game before it had barely begun.
He remembers her perched in a tree with their small and still growing menagerie reading to him as he listened or took notes.
How she would use books as a prop or a disguise sometimes to avoid people and on occasion, himself. Staring at the same page for an hour at a time so he knew that she didn't want to talk about it. It being many disturbing and horrifying things that varied in severity and frequency and all of which made him want to sprint to wherever she was in the castle, grab her hand and run as far and for as long as they possibly could.
Just a little longer, my love.
So instead he would sit beside her, pretend to read too and not ask until she closed her own book. Not ask about her bloodied hands where her fingernails had cut into her palms, or the latest, chilling rumour he'd heard about her family or the cruelty of other students, or why she winced slightly every time she moved a few weeks after she returned from the holidays.
Other times, she didn't read properly for a very opposite reason.
A Spring's day by the lake studying, or at least one of them, since Newt had long given up on concentrating on anything other than the beautiful girl beside him that he kept glancing over at every few minutes (not nearly as inconspicuously as he thought as her slightly amused smile playing at her lips would tell) as she read contently in the sun before she sighed boredly, tossed her novel aside and threw herself into him with such sweet, reckless abandon that the memory alone could steal the breath from his body.
He was not at all well versed in impressing a woman but wasn't quite sure that was the best thing to tell Tina. But he could still tell her the truth he believed most.
"I don't really know what Leta likes these days…"
Did she still forgo sleep to soak up every drop of knowledge she could absorb at all hours of the night? No longer needing the secret candlelight to illuminate her pages and to not to alert her relentless household or her tired and grumpy dormitory. Had the utilitarian clutches of adulthood finally captured her and left no time for reading by lakes or perched in trees reading to the Bowtruckles? Did she eventually throw away the muggle stories that she had suffered so viciously for being found with? Did she still read the books he kept finding in her possession, full of dark and experimental magic and history that surely weren't even from the shelves of the Restricted Section?
"…because…people change."
He wondered sometimes, tried to recall in his darkest hours if she had been holding any of those books – the questionable dark ones or the light-hearted muggles ones - on the last night he'd seen her. He could recall the moment in painstaking detail but was so focused on searching her face, searching for the girl by the lake who climbed towers, ran away into forests teeming with creatures without a moment's hesitation, could read to him in more languages he knew existed and could immerse herself so deeply into different worlds sometimes he was worried she'd float away entirely, that he didn't take notice of anything around them such as the various titles of the books that slipped through her fingers and tumbled to the floor. He searched. Desperately. He can't find her. He can't pull her out.
"I've changed."
"What are we going to do once we've read all of them?"
"I think. Maybe a little."
"Write our own, of course."
Hiraeth – a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.
