A/N To both guests who commented, thank you so much, you made my week, you're both awesome! Normally updates are on Fridays, and will return to that schedule next week, but since this chapter is finished and I'm at a literary festival tomorrow, I thought I'd post it today for the guest who wanted comfort after their orthodontist appointment. Hope this is a good distraction!

Chapter Ten: Coming Home

Maglor stared, dumbfounded, at the little furry black creature holding out a sparkling ruby pendant, allowing her to deposit it in his palm. "You're giving me a jewel," he murmured, holding back hysterical laughter at the sheer irony of that gesture. "You're changing your ways," he realised, "is this your way of telling me that I can too?"

This is ridiculous, he scolded himself, you're reading far too much into this.

Nevertheless, he couldn't take Helga's determined scramble into his lap and contented snuggling there as anything other than a decisive yes.

Newt's expression as he looked on would have been comic had the situation not been so serious. He was gaping open-mouthed, staring at the niffler as though she had just sprouted a second head. Clearly this was not normal behaviour then, and Helga had broken the habits of a lifetime in offering him the trinket. The other day, Maglor had been embarrassed from the moment he started lecturing her, knowing the futility of what he was doing but needing to express the uncomfortable parallel between his behaviour and hers. Perhaps, though, Helga was wiser than he'd first believed.

Newt pulled himself together. He pointed out Maglor's trio of beastly hangers-on, and the fact that he was not harming them. The logic of it was undeniable. The very idea of harming Newt or any of his menagerie was abhorrent to Maglor, and that was why he had been so intent on leaving. But prompted to think differently by the niffler's sudden behavioural adjustment, he suddenly realised that for the first time since he'd sworn the Oath, there was nothing that might compel him to hurt another being. Whether made void by his crimes, fulfilled when he retrieved the Silmaril, or broken when he rejected it, Maglor wasn't sure, but he was certain that his wretched vow no longer held any power over him, now that the Silmarils had been scattered to their final resting places. Once the chains of the Oath had broken, he had exchanged them immediately for the chains of guilt.

Therefore, it felt like the entire world was turning on its head when he realised that for the first time in what felt like forever, perhaps he was at liberty to choose how he acted. Helga had ignored her hoarding instincts to give one of her treasures to a person wavering at an impossible crossroads; maybe he could ignore his now-instinctive impulse to hide himself and accept that as he really didn't want to hurt any of the friends – yes, they were friends now – around him, perhaps that meant that he wouldn't. Nothing now could make him; his conscience, so long silenced and smothered, was finally free.

Newt was pleading with him, all open sincerity and earnest passion and so-like-Elrond,confirming the impossible notion that he really did desire Maglor to stay. He had, after all, been a rather high-maintenance guest, he was fully aware of that, but Newt's emphatic yes left no doubt as to his sincerity. He could stay, perhaps even help Newt care for his creatures, and attempt to make amends for all the suffering he'd caused. He could stop running away. At last confronting the prospect of ending his solitude, perhaps permanently, he allowed himself to believe that it might be…good.

"I…stay," he declared, feeling like he'd made the right choice for once, and quietly revelling in Newt's elated reaction.

He passed the next few minutes in a daze, stunned by complete revolution that Newt and his creatures had made of his worldview. He was vaguely aware of allowing Newt to fasten Helga's necklace for him, and then walking together to the hollow in the cliff where he'd based himself for the last few years and picking up the few meagre tools he'd used to eke out his existence. He wouldn't be needing them anymore, and he wasn't particularly attached, but emptying out his hideout did give the whole thing an air of finality which gave him the sudden urge to bolt. He breathed deeply, trying to stem the instinctive desire to hide, and remember that the decision he was making now made sense. He just had to be brave enough to follow through with it. Newt opened the suitcase, watching him nervously, as through expecting him to run away again. Maglor was half-expecting the same. But Newt had kept his word in giving him the opportunity to choose to go; Maglor had, after painful deliberation, decided to stay. He would not disappoint Newt as he had Elrond and Elros. He would not be the cause of that horrible expression of broken desperation again. He mustered a smile for Newt, feeling the muscles protest at the unusual motion, and stepped into the enchanted trunk and a new life.

"I'm so proud of you. All of you."

Newt hugged his suitcase to himself where he sat on a boulder, taking a moment to gather himself enough to safely apparate after the emotional upheaval of the past few minutes. Once again, he found himself indebted to his creatures, who had intervened in a team effort to prevent both he and Maglor going through with something they would have both regretted. On the surface, he was their rescuer, but more often than not, Newt felt that it was his creatures who were saving him. So he murmured his praises to them while his whirling thoughts calmed down, and a slow grin spread across his face as it sunk in that, against all the odds, Maglor had chosen to stay.

There was so much he needed to do now, so much to work out. He'd have to find out what Eldar dwellings looked like and attempt to create one in the trunk, plan out some more systematic language teaching than the ad hoc miming he'd been using so far, and somehow work on getting past Maglor's acute mistrust of himself – a task for which Newt felt himself woefully underqualified. But he grinned all the wider at the prospect, because now he'd have a chance to do all that, and Maglor would finally get at least some of the care he deserved. But before any of that, there was one thing to do which was an absolute must in this situation.

So Newt apparated back to his guest house, slid down into his case, and put the kettle on.

The other day, he'd used some of Maglor's hair recovered from the comb to run a Toxicity Tester potion and had happily confirmed that along with most common herbs and potion ingredients, he was safe to indulge in a cup of tea. And Newt reckoned that they were both in dire need of a nice cuppa after what had just happened. Maglor watched him curiously from where he was perching on a crate, dutifully eating an apple, supervised by Dougal, with Helga snuffling happily around his ankles. Charmed by the scene, Newt wrapped a blanket around the Elda's shoulders, even though it wasn't particularly cold in his hut. Maglor raised an amused eyebrow, as if to say really?, but he accepted it anyway. Newt chuckled. Sometimes he just couldn't help himself. He sank down onto his own perch and offered Maglor some tea, who sniffed it carefully before sipping. His eyes widened in surprise at the new taste and his brows creased as if he wasn't sure what to make of it. He took another taste though, and Newt's inner Brit cheered as Maglor smiled in surprise and pronounced it "good."

"Very good," Newt agreed, taking a long slurp of his own, for the next few minutes that was all that needed saying.

"Well," Newt said, standing up once they'd both finished, breaking the companionable silence. "You're going to need somewhere to live. Come on. Oh, and bring Helga."

She settled herself in the crook of Maglor's elbow with minimal grouching; Newt grabbed his trusty atlas from the bookshelf and off they went. As they headed towards the empty enclosure he'd cleared out in the hope of exactly this, he made a point of stopping at each enclosure and testing Maglor on the words for each kind of habitat, which he remembered flawlessly as usual, then illustrating the use of the word 'lives' in the hope that Maglor would understand what Newt was getting at. They delivered Helga back to her bling-covered den as part of the tour. He was slightly concerned about that, given Maglor's previous reaction to her tendencies, but after the moment on the beach he seemed to have reached an understanding with the little thief, and simply shook his head in something like Newt's own fond exasperation with the creature.

"Helga lives in a den," Maglor suggested, anticipating Newt, now he'd spotted the pattern.

"Yes, exactly," Newt confirmed as he led the way through to the large area curtained by blank canvas. "Now, where do you want to live?"

Maglor frowned.

"Here," he said, gesturing around vaguely to make it clear that he meant the whole case rather than just this area. "I stay?"

"Yes. Yes. Absolutely yes," Newt hurried to confirm. They definitely did not want to go through all of that again. But how was he to communicate that he wanted to create a space within the suitcase that could be entirely Maglor's own, and he needed his input on what sort of thing he would like?

"This is yours," he explained, marking out the boundaries of the curtained areas. "You choose something and I'll make it for you." A little illustration was always useful in these circumstances, so he brought out the atlas, a birthday present from Tina from several years back. It used similar magic to a pensieve and allowed its owner to embed their own mental images of the places they'd travelled into its pages. Newt had thoroughly enjoyed reminiscing as he filled it with his extensive memories, and occasionally imagined how nice it would be to tell the stories of his adventures with a little one on his knee, staring entranced at the floating images conjured by the book. He and Tina hadn't had any luck on that front so far, though.

Now, he had a different purpose in mind for the book. He flicked to the page where he'd concentrated on recording the various habitations of magical creatures and peoples, aiming to inspire Maglor with some options of dwellings he could feasibly make with some creative transfiguration, hoping that he'd hit on something at least similar to how the Eldar lived. He had no idea how far Maglor had been displaced from his people's original home to end up on that beach, so he opted to show him a wide range of places around the world. There must be so much that someone lost, being the sole survivor of their species, so much culture and tradition that fell away. Newt was determined to give Maglor something that could at the very least feel like home.

To begin, he double tapped the glowing point somewhere in the middle of the Sahara, and the expansive and homely tents of the Behrawi appeared, a nomadic tribe of mainly magical people who had once sheltered Newt whilst he was tracking a nundu. Naming everything as he went, he went on to show Maglor the elaborate Veela nests in the German Black Forest; the sturdy mountain chalets of the dragon handlers in the Peruvian Andes; the cluster of simple but attractive thatched huts which housed a small Japanese werewolf colony; the elegant bowers used by centaurs in southern France; and an English cottage, which he'd included for his fond memories of its amateur magizoologist inhabitant, who had given Newt several useful tip-offs over the years. His selection was limited to structures he was confident enough to build using his magic; anyway, he reasoned that it would have been harder for an entire species to just disappear from memory if they'd left more permanent buildings behind.

"What do you want?" he asked when he'd shown Maglor a range. "What do you like?"

Seeing that Maglor seemed a bit floored by this concept, Newt decided to approach the subject in a different manner.

"The Eldar, where did you live?"

Did. Past tense. Remember that. a weirdly detached part of Maglor's brain observed. He thought he knew what Newt had been getting at, but still struggled to wrap his head around the idea that Newt could really transform this blank cube of white canvas into a house or a forest. He was also a little flummoxed by the idea of choosing an abode; he had stayed on the beach as a form of self-punishment, ensuring that he would be ever confronted with symbol of the lost Silmaril and his inaccessible home. The few places he'd stopped were chosen for secrecy and practicality purposes only, never comfort or luxury. Hence he found himself floundering a little when presented with the staggering range of options Newt had suggested, all of them far more indulgent than he truly needed. But then Newt changed the question.

He couldn't see anything that resembled the fortified dwellings he'd resided in for most of the First Age among the available choices, except perhaps a glimpse of something behind the image of the bowers which sheltered some strange but majestic horse-human hybrids. He indicated that general area and Newt called up the image again.

"You lived in bowers?" he asked, and Maglor shook his head. Instead he pointed to the looming grey structure just visible through the trees atop a distant hill.

"You lived in castles?"

Newt sounded amazed this time. He licked his lips nervously. "Do you want a castle?"

Maglor shook his head again. He'd only been trying to answer his question accurately; he would never dream of demanding something so excessive from his already generous host. Newt looked enormously relieved.

"I can show you more if you want?" Newt offered. Something told him that Newt wasn't going to accept it if he tried to insist that he'd wandered the shoreline for years, he would be perfectly happy to just drift through the locations already in the suitcase. Before he could be overwhelmed by yet more options, Maglor went with his instincts and picked one of the wooden houses from the Eastern side of the map. Something about its clean lines and gentle curves was pleasantly reminiscent of Valinorean architecture.

"Good choice," Newt enthused, his hands fluttering in excitement. "Now, where do you want it?" He flipped open a different page in the atlas and his wand danced across different locations, calling up meadows, forest, stream, savannah, beach, mountains.

"You make mountains?" Maglor couldn't help asking, incredulously, and despite himself, a little hopefully.

Newt grinned proudly. "I make mountains. Well, illusions really…stay here."

He dashed off, caught up in the thrill of his new project, and quickly returned holding a jar of paint and with a trail of rocks bobbing along as they floated behind him. He arranged them along one side of the curtained area and set down the paint, glanced over his shoulder to check Maglor was watching, and began.

First, with a flick of his wand he levitated the paint out of the jar and onto the canvas walls, then with a couple of murmured incantations and complicated wand movements he caused it to twist and shimmer. It was originally a pale gold colour but as Newt worked, contrasts became apparent in it. Gold shifted to silver which faded into grey in some parts, whilst others cleared to a delicate eggshell blue. Maglor watched in awe, trying to remember that he was looking at an image and but unable to ignore the signals from his sharp eyes, which insisted that there was suddenly an entire mountain range where before there was only cloth. After tweaking the colours of the snow a little, Newt moved on to the rocks he'd brought with him, commanding them to grow until they became foothills blending into the image so seamlessly that he couldn't tell where the real stone stopped and the canvas began. He crouched over the boulders, reaching into his pocket for something, but it looked no different when he stepped back.

"Floresco," he incanted with a curving motion of his wand, and tiny little alpine plants sprung up from the seeds he'd scattered in every fissure and hollow, bursting into verdant leaves and showers of white blooms.

If Curufin had ever produced something like that, Maglor was certain they wouldn't have heard the end of it for years. He would have turned round with a casual, appraising attitude to his creation, one eyebrow half-raised in a silent well?, trying to hide his satisfaction and fooling exactly nobody. The display he'd just witnessed was spectacular enough that he half-expected Newt to do something similar. But when he turned round, not pride but nervousness written all over his face, his hands twisting together in anxiety, he reminded Maglor instead of Elrond, lifting his head after performing his first composition on the harp for his foster father and hoping for his approval.

"Do you like it?" Newt asked, his words once again made more resonant by the echo of Elrond's, so many millennia ago.

I need an intensifier in this language, Maglor decided, quickly sorting through the words he'd learnt so far to find one.

"I very like it," he said sincerely, and the corners of Newt's eyes crinkled up as he smiled delightedly.

"You like it a lot, do you?" he confirmed, offering a subtle correction, and blushing a little.

"Yes," Maglor confirmed, mentally noting that 'very' was not used with verbs, "I like it a lot."

He wanted to explain exactly why the backdrop Newt had created gave him so much joy. It was a little nonsensical, really, that his time defending Maglor's Gap should be one of his happiest memories, given that he was holding a vulnerable territory in the middle of a brutal war which ended up being lost, but nevertheless, it was so. That was one of the few times in his life when he could both pursue the Silmarils and protect his kin without those goals conflicting, Maedhros had been returned to them and was recovering with his usual ferocious determination, the Noldor were as united as they were ever realistically going to be, and for a brief point in time it felt like together, they might stand against Morgoth and not yield. By the standards of Maglor's life post-Valinor, that was practically bliss. As a commander, he was very hands-on, he felt that he could make better decisions that way, so he often rode out on patrols with his scouts. There was nothing quite like the feeling of satisfaction and safety as the western arm of Ered Lindon grew larger in their view, embracing the lands of the Noldor as if Arda herself were protecting them from Morgoth's cruelties. Seeing those mountains meant that a long patrol was coming to an end, and that Morgoth had not won today. But an explanation at that level was beyond his current linguistic capabilities, so he settled with saying:

"I like mountains. They protect, keep safe."

Newt nodded, leaning in with interest as he did every time Maglor offered information about himself or his opinions.

"Good," he said once it was clear that Maglor wasn't going to elaborate, clapping his hands as he straightened and turned towards the remaining blank canvas on the other side.

"Let's make some more."

Newt was rather relieved. For a moment there he'd thought he was being asked to recreate a medieval French château; his transfiguration was good, but that was certainly beyond his skill set.

If the Eldar had lived in stone fortresses though, that did raise the question of what had happened to them all and why had nobody noticed them? Perhaps they were taken over by humans, their original designers forgotten- it wouldn't be the first time that humans had appropriated the work of other magical races. Or perhaps the cataclysmic event that had killed the rest of them had destroyed their dwellings too. Newt shivered and decided not to continue that train of thought.

Castles might not be a part of his repertoire, but mountains; mountains he could do. Covering the rest of the canvas with more of the enchanted paint, he completed the vista with more craggy peaks extending in the other direction. He decided to leave the house to the next day and explained this to Maglor; he wanted to devote the entire morning to it, as that would take a lot more concentration. Habitats were one thing, but he wasn't too fond of more technical construction magic. He'd built his own cabin inside his suitcase when he first set it up, with all the fervour of youth on a mission, and probably less attention to detail than he should have had. So it was twisted and a slightly odd shape and irredeemably cluttered; it was his, and he loved it. But with Maglor's new home, he felt that he should at least attempt to follow a few principles of symmetry.

That evening they ate together on the terrace – having another person around was doing wonders for the regularity of Newt's own meals – and then Maglor accompanied Newt on the evening feed. Maglor refused to let Newt carry everything himself, Newt refused to let Maglor even think of holding anything on his palms, so eventually they compromised and Maglor ended up with a few buckets of feed slung over his arms. Perhaps Newt was reading too much into it, but the creatures seemed to be more than usually affectionate to Maglor, as if they were aware of the earlier near miss and wanted to make it clear that they were grateful for his continued presence. He ended up wearing Laila the occamy coiled around his neck like a scarf for most of the evening; Maglor seemed bewildered by this, but not distressed, so Newt just let it pass, and it seemed that the Elda grew used to the comforting weight of his slightly bizarre new accessory.

Later, Newt drew a makeshift timeline in order to illustrate tenses, knowledge which Maglor hungrily absorbed. Using the newly elaborated future tense, he explained the plan for the next day: he would build Maglor's house in the morning and Portkey back to England in the afternoon. Maglor had certainly kept him busy and distracted, but there was no denying the growing ache in Newt's chest to see his wife again: she'd be home in a few days, and he wanted to make sure he was there when she got back. Given their respective jobs, they were used to spending time apart, but that didn't mean he had to like it. It was even worse when she was undercover for long periods of time, since that meant that they couldn't have any contact at all so as not blow her cover, and it was one of the most dangerous parts of an auror's job. Logically, he knew that if anyone should be worried, it would be the criminals who dared to cross his wife, but he yearned to see her safe nevertheless.

Newt wasn't quite sure how much Maglor took away from his 'portkey' mime (consisting of grabbing a random book and jumping between parts of the room he'd designated 'Norway' and 'England'), but he'd at least made an attempt to explain their travel plans. It wouldn't make much difference to Maglor, since he'd be in the suitcase the whole time, but Newt felt it was only fair to inform him that he was being taken to a different country. Maglor stubbornly resisted all Newt's efforts to convince him to sleep, so eventually Newt had to be content leaving him to gaze at the artificial stars of the case as they rose over his newly created mountains, feeling once again that he was intruding on something beyond his ken.

In the guesthouse bed that night though, his mind buzzing with construction charms he hadn't used for years as he planned out Maglor's new home, Newt drifted off, warmed by the incredible privilege of Maglor's hard-won trust, and growing steadily more convinced that together, they might just make this work.

On his first day as an official member of Newt's suitcase family, Maglor was gifted with a house. Newt had banned him from watching the building of it, managing with some difficulty to convey that he was nervous about having an audience for this part, and teaching him the word 'nervous' in the process. He didn't understand why Newt would be afraid of his judgement when Maglor had spent thousands of years in seaside caves, and would be grateful for any shelter at all, but nonetheless he spent the morning with Katarina, enjoying the profound quality of their shared silence. Newt was buzzing with energy when he came back, clothes rumpled and covered in wood shavings, his enthusiasm infectious as he led Maglor back to his new 'habitat.'

It was utterly idyllic. Newt had done something to make the ground slope upwards, making it impossible to tell that the sheltering mountains were created by enchanted paint. He'd also added a stream meandering its way through the foothills and splashing melodiously over the boulders into a clear pool. The house itself had all the features that had appealed to Maglor in the image in the atlas, the clean lines of wooden beams contrasting attractively with the painted white of the walls, and the gently curving slopes of the overhanging thatch roof looking perfectly at home against the backdrop. True, the symmetry wasn't completely perfect, and the roof was slightly wonky, but that didn't annoy Maglor's inner perfectionist nearly as much as it would have earlier in his life. Now, he believed that it added to the character of the place. Doesn't quite fit the perfect mould, just like its inhabitant, he thought, it's fitting. Its quirks also made it similar to Newt's own cabin, and that pleased Maglor, although he wouldn't have been able to say exactly why. Newt saw him pondering the roof and rushed into apologies and an explanation of that he wasn't that good at this type of magic, but Maglor cut him off.

"It's very good," he said, relieved to be finally gaining some confidence with this grammar, "I like it a lot. I want to live here. Thank you."

Newt beamed and led the way inside. The space was light and airy, with rugs and cushions covering the wooden floor, the bed and table moved there from the side room in Newt's cabin, and a screen at the back concealing a basin and a water pump. Newt was rambling again, indicating empty spaces and outlining invisible furniture with his hands, promising to supply it as soon as possible. Intuitively sensing how to reassure him, Maglor sank down onto a cushion and made himself comfortable. It would be a perfect peaceful spot for singing or meditating.

"You look at home," Newt said with a gentle smile when he noticed, finally ceasing his anxious chatter.

Maglor smiled back at him, inferring his meaning.

"Yes, I am."