He's not okay.
He knows he isn't, even without looking in the mirror. He can see it in his hands (fingers too long and thin) and in his arms (former muscular glory eroded to slack vicissitude). He can feel it in his body, the joints and pulleys of which no longer operate smoothly but creak and groan with every movement.
It's in every cup of tea, which contains less and less tea in favor of more and more whiskey. It's there when his mouth tastes like dragon dung every morning and his head thumps like a drum (like her heart had pounded against his palm, once) until he makes another pot of tea (his tea, his way) and suddenly, it's all better.
Newt's hands tremble badly while he works, but he ignores it. His writing skitters over the page when he puts ink to parchment, but he justifies it by fixing the errors with his wand. The creatures suffer for his sudden inability to see beyond his own vast pain, and he notices that—but feels powerless to help it. He relies more and more on Dougal to help him remember to feed, water and clean his menagerie.
Pickett stops sleeping next to his bed eventually, choosing instead to spend his nights in the case. Newt notices, but only very peripherally, and the observance inspires no emotion.
Dougal stops trying to be there when he wakes from dreams. This, he notices, but it is one change he's grateful for: Tina visits him in slumber, and he'd rather wake from those encounters alone. It allows him to savor the full bitterness of his grief.
He's selfish: he wants the memories of her (skin eyes hair lips taste feel) all for himself.
Theseus comes to visit a few times during the long, twilight expanse immediately following her death.
"You can't keep doing this," Theseus says over tea (real tea, not his tea) during his first visit, and Newt throws him out of the house with a snarl.
"She wouldn't want you to be like this," Theseus says over tea (his tea, this time, and his brother had grimaced before spitting it back into the cup) during his second visit. Newt simply looks at him through flat, disinterested eyes until he changes the subject.
"What about your book?" Theseus asks the third time, and that, at least, gets through. Newt rubs his chin thoughtfully (when was the last time he shaved?) before remembering where he'd stashed the revised manuscript.
Without a word of warning, he tosses the entire thing into the fire.
(He updated it, shortly after she had left. Scamander and his wife Porpentina...
He doesn't want the reminder.)
Theseus shows himself out. Newt is just fine with that.
The teapot hits the wall, and the eye-watering stink of whiskey fills the room.
It's snowing when he wakes one morning.
Snow drifts against a shallow hill, and the shape of the curve reminds him poignantly of the gentle flare of Tina's hip. He braces against the dirty glass, hands curling into fists as he stares, and stares, and stares. Dougal comes to tug on his pant leg but he ignores him; Pickett climbs onto his shoulder and Newt absently brushes him away.
They leave him, and it's only when he can no longer make out the shape of the snowdrift that he touches his cheek curiously and his fingers come away wet. It's the first time in (hours days weeks months years) that he's wept. It's also the first time that he's really noticed the state of his fingernails—ragged and dirty—and the talon-like shape of his hand.
He looks down at himself and is appalled by what he finds. She wouldn't want this, some long-ignored part of him whispers, and that voice is so vital and alive that his heart begins to pound. You aren't going to bring her back this way, he reminds himself, and his eyes blur all over again—but these tears are different.
His cheeks burn when he stumbles across the room to the mirror, at last looking and seeing: overlong, tangled, filthy hair; hollow cheeks and cracked lips and the scraggly beginnings of a beard; the hard line between his brow, and the oily sheen of his neglected skin.
Most telling of all is the stark bruise-flesh beneath his eyes, a result of too much alcohol and too little sleep.
You look like Father did at the end, he realizes and shivers so violently that his stomach begins to churn.
Then he reaches for his straight razor.
Tina had loved his hair. She'd told him so, running her fingers through it one night after loving, when her skin was still warm with sweat. Now, hanks of it lay scattered around him as he hacks away, heedless to his fingers as he cuts, and cuts, and cuts.
He finally casts his razor aside to examine the results critically. His head legitimately looks as though a family of Pixies had mown through it, straggly ends uneven and jagged—but it no longer hangs in his eyes, and it no longer looks like something she would love, and so he's happy.
He scrubs his face with soap, wincing when it gets into his eyes before lathering up his badger brush. It's been a while but some things are never forgotten, and he tries his best not to remember the way she'd watched him at this task, last time she was here, as he shaves.
He follows the razor with his fingers and tells himself that the urge to slash his jugular (pulsing with vitality just beneath the skin) is entirely normal.
He doesn't act on the urge, and the water in the basin is cloudy and thick with coppery strands of hair when he's finished.
Newt doesn't recognize himself when he looks in the mirror. He's not sure if that's a good thing.
Something hoots questioning from the doorway and he turns to face it.
"Dougal," he murmurs in his creaky voice, and the Demiguise hoots again before loping across the room. He climbs up his leg and Newt accepts his weight readily, allowing the creature to sling its arms around his shoulders before resting his head on his chest.
Dougal accompanies him down to the case, where Newt uses the facilities behind the shed to shower, and is very, very careful to keep the specter of Tina at bay.
He reflects, later, that the time immediately after Tina's death was spent in a long, narrow hole. There was some light there, but it was too far away to be of any use. Too distant. The light, which signaled recovery, health, healing, was too far out of reach for him to even considering stretching his arms toward it.
Yet slowly, slowly, he digs and climbs his way out.
It gets easier to sink into his bed at night and climb out of it every morning. The balance of his tea shifts back until it's only tea in his pot. He learned to eat again, and eventually, he no longer needs to lean on Dougal for help with daily tasks.
Pickett returns to sleep next to his bed, though the last letter from Tina never gets put away (he reads it every night before sleep; the edges of the parchment are tattered from repeated handling and the salt of his tears.)
Theseus comes back to visit after a time, and the cottage is neat as a pin once more. His clothes are clean, his nails groomed and no longer ragged. They talk about meaningless things until his brother asks with forced casualness when he intends to return to work with the Beast Division.
"Soon," Newt answers and knows it to be the truth. "Soon."
Winter has given way to spring when he returns to the Ministry.
His boss welcomes him cordially, almost warmly, and that helps make the transition somewhat easier. He doesn't ask about the manuscript Newt had so foolishly thrown into the fire, and Newt's glad for it—he still hasn't caught up with all that work, mostly because he's doesn't know what to put in the About The Author section (he is still not sure who or what he is, and that burden remains heavy, heavy, heavy.)
He relocated the ring he gave Tina from his pinky finger to a small, well-hidden leather thong. He wears it around his neck always, and it proves a comforting weight. He reaches for it whenever he's feeling sad or scared, or when the burdens of the day prove to be too much (he reaches for it often.)
Pickett eventually forgives him; Dougal does too. He helps his erumpent with her calf—which is soon to be a yearling—and assists the graphorns with their complicated mating rituals. He feeds and cares for his creatures with the same paternal pride he felt before, and soon the memory of Tina in his case (on his bench in his camp bed) loses much of its painful edge until he can smile, almost, when her ghost comes to visit.
The nightmares never really go away, but they do change. He now wakes at night with her taste on his lips, but he comes to love it. He has no inclination toward other women; he'd never really been interested before, and now he's committed to remaining a bachelor for life.
To do anything else would be to profane her memory.
(He thinks of her when the pressure gets to be too much and he takes himself in hand. He vanishes the mess and tries not to feel guilty, afterward.)
It never gets any easier, but it does become more manageable.
There comes a day when she isn't his first thought in the morning and his last thought at night. Eventually, he can eat fish n' chips again, and not feel as though he's going to vomit the meal all over the sidewalk. There's even a lovely, warm Sunday when he goes to the coast of Devon and walks the beach, to stand where he'd asked for her hand and she'd accepted—and these tears are not a sign of weakness, but of strength. They cleanse him from the inside out.
Slowly, much like a man climbing out of the long, narrow tunnel of his grief, he begins to heal.
Hundreds of miles away, a woman whose name is not Tina Goldstein pushes back a lock of hair and remembers.
She recalls blue eyes (which she now wears,) ruddy cheeks and freckles. She tastes his phantom self in her mouth and uses the strength of that memory to pull herself to her feet. Blood streams from a wound in her temple but she flicks it away without really noticing, turning to survey the damage she has caused with a grim yet satisfied smile.
Behind her, a feminine pair of eyes—nearly as dark as her own—stare fixedly into the sky. They're already clouding over in death, and she restrains the great and powerful urge to spit into the other woman's face.
"You lose," she croaks and tightens her grip on her pitted and battered wand. "You lose," she repeats more strongly, injecting all her despair and scorn into the words as tears cut clean paths through the dust on her filthy cheeks.
"Newt," she breathes in a cracked voice, and turns toward the west, to where he waits for her if he only knew it. To a future that's hers to claim, now that this final task is done.
She says his name again—a prayer and a promise, a quiet plea for forgiveness, and sets her face towards home.