.:: At This Moment ::.
Tina spends the first few days after Newt's departure telling herself that she doesn't miss him. Not Newt, and not Jacob, but especially not Newt. After all, that was the logical course of action when someone has swept through your life like a whirlwind, disappeared again as quickly as they appeared, and managed to take part of you with them, in spite of all the haste.
To a certain extent, her work helps her.
Her colleagues, and especially her superiors at MACUSA, make every effort to get on well with her after her glorious return to the Auror Department; in the first few weeks she is almost exclusively assigned to the most exciting cases. It is exactly the kind of work that first sparked her passion for this job, but still she can only enjoy it to a limited extent. And sometimes, in telltale moments of idleness, she would almost prefer to continue working at the wand admissions office, if she could only be rewarded the chance of maybe seeing that shy smile from Newt. When he'd come back for her, of course.
It's mostly the little things that remind Tina of him, and when she's not busy trying to forget him, she gets annoyed with herself. She only knew Newt for a few days—not nearly enough to logically justify why her mind wandered too often in the direction of Britain. She shouldn't be distracted by daydreams; she should continue to play the unapproachable, down-to-earth Miss Goldstein; she shouldn't expect miracles from life and, above all, she shouldn't get emotionally involved in anything whose end, good or bad, cannot possibly be foreseen.
And yet... yet she can only prevent so much from reminding her of Newt. It was those darn little things that she'd never paid attention to before. A tourist with an English accent, embarrassed downcast eyes during a conversation, a slightly bent posture... Nothing was hardly worth mentioning, and yet everything was so significant, each in a very special way. There are other changes, too: suddenly Tina gets angry when street boys throw stones at pigeons. Strangely, her heart contracts when she passes an animal shelter. Against all habit, she stops on the way home to pet stray cats.
Such behavior does not suit Porpentina Goldstein, and she cannot explain it. And sometimes she thinks that she doesn't want to.
Queenie probably has it just as difficult in her own way, but unlike Tina, she has never been prone to superfluous brooding. Queenie belongs to the incomparable kind of people who have no problem listening to the voice of their hearts and taking action when others have long been standing still, undecided. There are days when Tina envies her little sister for it. On other days, she wishes she had the ability to read minds as easily as other people tie their shoelaces. Maybe that would help her find out what exactly Newt meant when he assured her she'd hear from him soon.
"Soon," it turns out, is a very flexible term—and one evening, Tina takes so long to come home from her walk from work that Queenie arrives before her sister and surprises her with a bag full of tempting smelling biscuits.
"Don't tell me you actually went there again," Tina begs her sister against better knowledge. In view of Queenie's radiant expression, however, it is difficult for her to maintain her already superficial mixture of resignation and anger.
"Jacob's bakery is fantastic," enthuses Queenie. "You should stop by there, too. His place is like a piece of home in a world that is getting ever stranger, I tell you... And his pastries are really amazing. Here, try one."
With no further ado, Queenie reaches into the bag she brought with her and holds a Niffler made of puff pastry under Tina's nose. Tina is so surprised that she almost drops her cheese sandwich—her usual meager dinner that she was about to bring to her mouth before Queenie attacked her. A Niffler. A damn Niffler. Had she wanted to lose her reputation as the sensible one in the family, she would have laughed hysterically.
Jacob Kowalski bakes magical beasts—who would have thought that was possible?
Queenie, it seems, thought that from the start and naturally so.
"He remembers me. I am quite sure of it. He remembers deep in his heart. I just have to help him bring those memories back to light... I think I'll go see him again tomorrow. Besides, you can never have enough pastries."
Tina does not have the strength to dissuade her—as usual—overly enthusiastic sister of her plan. Discussions and logical arguments, in particular quoting the confidentiality agreement, have never been fruitful with Queenie; and anyway Tina is too distracted by the way her heart contracts painfully at the sight of the Niffler to even think of a confrontation.
Ultimately, Queenie eats the entire bag of pastries on her own. Tina places her Niffler on her plate, but doesn't touch it. Instead, as the evening draws to a close, she takes it as inconspicuously as possible into her bedroom and places it on her bedside table. She cannot explain exactly why she does this. Her hands and feet moved by themselves. All she knows is that if she ate it, it would seem like killing the poor creature. The thought makes her nauseous.
In a way, she muses, she and Jacob Kowalski are not that dissimilar. Jacob bakes Nifflers and Mooncalves and Murtlaps, and she suspects she's lost her heart to a man who carries Bowtruckles in his pockets—both chasing an intangible dream.
Tina was never good at waiting. If she saw Newt again, she would no doubt have to thank him for teaching her a valuable lesson in patience with his persistent silence. All in the same breath, she would curse him for making her wait so long.
Four months is a long time, at least for Tina, especially when you fear a little more each day that you'll forget the face of the person you're waiting for. At some point, however, even the most stubborn Auror would learn that time doesn't pass any faster if you leaf through the references in the newspaper every day, hoping to get a clue about the goings-ons of a budding writer.
Tina's only distraction, aside from her work, is her sister, as is so often the case. Since her first visit to Jacob's bakery, Queenie has made it a tradition to bring Tina a piece of pastry every time she goes shopping. Although she was sure it was almost an insult to what Jacob's baking skills represented, Tina does not eat any of the imaginatively designed animals. Instead, she puts a particularly strong durability spell on each specimen to keep them in their original state, and after a while she becomes so good at these spells that she sometimes comforts herself with a touch of cynicism—at least something useful came out of this whole affair.
After six months, her collection has grown to the size of a small zoo, and due to a lack of space, is moved from the bedside table to the window sill—except for the Niffler. The Niffler retains its place. Every now and then, when Tina wakes up in the middle of the night, stroking his hardened head calms her down, and she prefers not to think too carefully about what petting a pastry puff says about her state of mind.
When Queenie accidentally stumbles upon that exact thought in her sister's head one day, all she lets out is a patient sigh.
"Why aren't you writing to him, Tinie?"
Tina shrugs her shoulders uncomfortably. "It's not proper for a woman to run after a man," she replies lamely; not because she really believes in it, but because that's the response anyone would expect from her. Right?
Queenie, however, wore a weary smile. "Dear, don't be so retrograde," she warns. "You're not just chasing after some guy—you're writing to a friend." It's hard to argue with that, and while Tina is still looking in vain for an argument, Queenie adds, "I don't think Newt is the letter-writing guy. Better not get your hopes up, Teen."
Tina grits her teeth and nods. Why should she fool her sister? Queenie has long known how hopeful she looks at every unexpectedly arriving owl and how, with little success, she hides her disappointment when she realizes that every time it's just bills or postcards from old school friends.
It's long been clear to the both of them: if Tina waits for Newt to take the first step, it could soon become a never. (Tina knows her way around being abandoned. She doesn't attach great importance to repeating the experience, although she sometimes wonders if it's not already too late for that.)
Armed with a bundle of good intentions, she jerks herself together, pulls out parchment and a quill pen, and spends an hour staring into space. After failing to address the recipient ("Dear Newt?" "Hello, Newt?" "Hey?"), she gives up, carelessly stuffs her writing tool into the desk drawer, and curses herself for her ineptitude.
A week later, contrary to all expectations, she receives a letter from Newt. Even before she opens it, she recognizes by the ornate seal that the letter is from England, and her hands begin to tremble so much that she's glad of Queenie's current absence. (If she had to guess, she would have wagered her pastry collection on finding her sister at a certain bakery—not that it meant anything to her at the moment.)
Newt's letter is far too short for all the waiting time and relatively meaningless. In awkward sentences he asks how she is, sends greetings to Queenie, and assures Tina that he hasn't forgotten his promise to her but unfortunately cannot say when he will finally be able to keep it. He hardly writes anything about himself, and the wave of disappointment billowing up inside her makes Tina almost wish, for a telltale blink of an eye, that she had never received the letter at all.
The only two bright spots about the business are the certainty that at least Newt has not forgotten them, and the Augurey feather pen that came enclosed with the letter. Tina slowly strokes the shimmering, green-black fibers and then places the quill on her bedside table, where it is in good company with the Niffler.
It's autumn, and she still hasn't heard from Newt. More than ever, she burrows herself in her work because honestly, what else can she do? She repeats that question daily. After all, it's not as if there isn't enough to do at MACUSA. On the contrary, times are becoming noticeably more restless, both in the world of wizards and that of the No-Majs, and incidents in which both groups clash are increasing. Most of the culpability rests on the shoulders of the wizarding world, which worries not only Tina.
There are a staggering number of rebellious wizards who had become inspired in exactly the wrong way by Newt Scamander's involuntary adventures in New York. Tina surmised they are seizing their chances to look for ways to show their audacious attitudes to the public. The fact that these people share a harmful portion of Gellert Grindelwald's ideas does not exactly defuse the situation. In fact, there are so many gruesome incidents with No-Majs that MACUSA had a perpetual commission set up to erase the memories of those affected—and sometimes, when Tina feels a particular need for distraction, she helps supervise.
At first, for some inexplicable, never-before-experienced reason, she had found it difficult to steal the memories from these people ("Muggles," she recalls. In Britain they are called "Muggles"). She still sees Jacob's face in front of her every time she Oblivates a No-Maj. But doing so gets easier with time. And with every unpleasant incident.
At MACUSA, Tina had always been considered the aloof ice princess from the start, and that's why she is understandably baffled when Quentin, one of her colleagues from the special commission, approaches her after work.
"I would like to invite you to dinner," he tells her in the typically straightforward way that she has come to appreciate over the past few weeks of particularly busy work; only today she has absolutely nothing to do with it. "Provided, of course, that you have the time." From a rational point of view, there is no reason to decline the invitation. Quentin is charming and sure he's handsome... but he couldn't have picked a worse time.
Before Tina's eyes, all rationality dissolves into regret. Quentin, the poor man, couldn't have known that on that day of all days, during the lunch break, she'd met a young wizard boy who was walking his pet Puffskein; that she did not admonish him about the public display of magical beasts, as she would have done a year ago, but only went on with a melancholy smile; and that since then, she has involuntarily imagined what Newt would have looked like as a child. Perhaps a narrow, shy boy with messy hair who drove his parents to the brink of madness with his love for those animals...
"So?" Quentin asks, and she realizes that she has once again strayed onto the dangerous route of distraction.
"I'm sorry," she says quickly. She's actually sorry, but that doesn't change the fact that she has to refuse. "I would like to go out to eat with you, but..."
She is glad that Quentin finished her sentence and thus saves her the embarrassing search for a not-too transparent excuse.
"Is there someone else?"
"No," replies Tina, proud of the fact that the answer is neither too hasty nor too unconvincing. "No, of course not. You see, I just already had different plans."
Before the conversation can take an even more awkward direction, she decides to end it with a skillful escape. Quentin's "If you change your mind—you know where to find me" sailed over her shoulder.
("He wouldn't suit you anyway," Queenie later claims. "His thoughts are so... colorless.")
Quentin doesn't ask her a second time about dinner together or about other off-duty events. After a while, they manage to find their way back to the impartial basis of two friendly colleagues.
Tina continues to conscientiously collect her pastry animals, and continues to leaf through the literature reviews, albeit out of habit rather than genuine interest.
At some point, she reasons, her patience will be rewarded. Hang on. Just there. An entry about a work to be published with the poetic title "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" literally jumps towards her from the moving advertisement text.
It's just an ordinary advance notice, just five meager lines without any scoring, but it's more than Tina has heard from Newt in nine months. Reverently, she cuts out the ad and keeps it safe in her bedside drawer. She's briefly tempted to pre-order the book via international interlibrary loan, but stops just in time. Newt promised to deliver a copy to her in person, and he would keep his promise. She refuses to believe anything else.
Exactly a year after the day she said goodbye to Newt, she sees him again.
If she's honest—and she doesn't like being honest because that would mean having to admit that she almost wronged Newt—she'd no longer expected him to keep his promise. Her reaction is all the more incredulous when she takes refuge in her apartment, after a particularly strenuous day at work from persistent rain, and does not find it empty as expected. Queenie is still on one of her obligatory shopping trips through town, but instead of her sister, an instantly recognizable young man is sitting at the kitchen table, his fingers nervously tapping open the buckles of an ominous suitcase on the floor next to him.
At first, Tina thinks it must all be a joke, that a cruel whim of fate would lead her to believe merely what she wants to see, only to disappoint her when the illusion ends. Only Newt's greeting, an embarrassed smile and an uncertain "Hello" awaken in her the assurance that this... this is actually real.
"H-hey," she replies, too shocked to think of anything more elegant.
Tons of thoughts race through her mind, bumping into each other, wedging together, and then disintegrating. All she can do is stand frozen in the doorway and listen as Newt pours out a torrent of incoherent explanations.
"I hope I'm not bothering... In this weather I didn't want to wait outside, so I thought maybe... I haven't touched anything either. I really would have liked to have come earlier, but the Ministry was progressing more slowly than I'd hoped, and then I had to make a stopover in Brazil on the way here..."
Innocently, he looks up at her from beneath the fringe of his forehead. His hair is longer than when they last met, Tina observes casually, and finally she manages to break her stiffness and slowly walk toward the table. Only now does Newt seem to remember his manners because he jumps up as if stung by Billywig.
"Newt ..." Tina begins, not sure what to say to him at all. That she missed him? That until after Queenie comes back, she won't have anything in the house to offer him for dinner? That his shirt is badly buttoned?
Newt relieves her of the task of finding an intelligent reaction. "Of course, I have my book with me for you," he says with an apologetic shrug. "But I thought, maybe you want to first..." He interrupts himself one more time, but when he continues, he suddenly seems as confident as when he's in the company of his animal creatures. "Do you want to see my new Porlock? His name is Pan. I bought him from a choleric Granian breeder who was not at all interested in animal welfare."
Tina has to grin—a grin so wide that she fears that she will find traces of it on her face weeks later. It's a prospect she can be quite comfortable with, especially when Newt returns her grin that way.
"Sure," she says, throwing her travel cloak carelessly over the arm of the first chair that comes up and stepping close enough to Newt to take his outstretched hand and let him lead her into the depths of his mysterious suitcase.
Tina doesn't need anything more, at least not at this moment.
A/N: As always, reviews are appreciated and are replied to. Or, if you'd prefer to leave a comment more privately, feel free to shoot me a PM.
Cheers,
+ KVP