Newt came awake with a start as something slapped him across the face and then stepped sharply on his throat.

"Shit!"

He blinked his eyes open, moaning faintly and shifting. He was sore from the previous day's activities and there was something weighing down his chest, what was it...?

"Son of a snidget…"

"Do you always swear when you first wake up?" Newt found himself asking, throwing his hand over his eyes.

"Hm, a lot of the time, yeah," she replied dully, and the corner of Newt's mouth quirked up.

He groaned once more as a small paw came down on his thigh and drew his hand back. Sometime in the night, they had shifted. His legs were tucked up along the couch and Elvira was crammed between his body and the back of the couch, lying half on top of him. One of her legs was thrown over his and an arm was around his waist, her face pressed into his chest. Her braid was a mess, the end of it tickling his hand. Gus was leaping all over them, wagging his tail and whining.

"Gus, off!" Elvira ordered, and the axhandle hound obediently slid off the couch. She waved her hand irritably and a cabinet in the kitchen popped open, a twig drifting out of it and floating towards the living room. Gus jumped up into a chair and leaped off the arm, hitting the floor with a thump as he landed, stick clenched tightly in his teeth. He slunk off underneath the kitchen table to eat his breakfast.

Newt shifted, trying to pull his numb arm out from under Elvira's shoulder. She obligingly braced one arm on the back of the couch and lifted herself. Newt started to withdraw his arm, only to freeze when Elvira let out a pained gasp. She tried to stifle the noise, that was clear by the way she was biting her bottom lip, but her eyes were awash in pain.

"Overdid it yesterday," she wheezed and, slowly, the leg that was thrown over his straightened out. She was stiff as a board as she carefully shifted her weight and Newt realized what the problem was with a sinking in his gut. She was so sore that she could barely move, and the night spent sleeping on the couch hadn't helped her situation any.

"I should have levitated you to bed," Newt said apologetically, words spilling out of him. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to fall asleep as well, I just didn't think..."

"My own fault," Elvira disagreed. "I need my potion."

Newt recalled what she had said about the potential dangers of the stuff, but he also could read the agony in every line of her face as, bit by bit, she tested her limbs. His wand was sitting on the side table and he arched back for it, fighting the surge of guilt when he jostled Elvira with his movements. A quick flick of his wand summoned the flask containing her pain potion. Elvira reached out and caught it, flipping open the lid and bringing it to her lips. She took three long, deep drinks as Newt watched her carefully and, slowly, her body began to relax as the potion worked its way into her system.

"Are you alright?" Newt asked her warily, and got a weary laugh in reply.

"Not hardly, English, but I've got things to do. What time is it?"

Newt glanced at the clock, squinting first at it, and then at the light trickling through the curtains. "I believe it's nine in the morning."

"Sweet Sayre," Elvira muttered bitterly, slapping a hand to her face. "They never got fed last night, damn it."

"Fed?"

Elvira twisted to look up at him, a faint smile on her face, and the usual mischief in her eyes was muted by pain and tiredness but it was still there. Newt was suddenly very aware of the fact that she was still mostly on top of him and he still had an arm around her shoulders. In theory, she should have been crushing him, and she sort of was, but he found he rather liked the weight of her against his chest. There was something nice about feeling her arm around his waist and knowing that she'd been holding him like a pillow through the night, like he gave her some kind of comfort. He didn't imagine he was terribly comfortable to sleep on, gangly as he was, but she didn't seem to mind.

"Wanna see my version of your suitcase?"

Newt's eyes popped wide at the invitation. He recalled her story of Spike and his family, how she had taken them in, and he hadn't seen any signs of a cactus cat living in the apartment, let alone a whole family of them. She had done something similar to what he had, it seemed, using Undetectable Extension Charms liberally on some kind of container and making whole pocket dimension to care for her creatures. And now that he thought about it, he remembered Gnarlak saying something about a re'em.

"Very much," he breathed, eyes darting across her face, wondering how he had managed to stumble across such an amazing woman.

Getting the pair of them off the couch was an exercise in awkwardness. Elvira couldn't move very fast and Newt was stiff as well. Hands ended up places they shouldn't have been as they tried to disentangle themselves and they traded elbows in unpleasant locations more than once, but they finally managed it, standing red-faced before the couch.

The blanket Newt had thrown over them was resting on a steamer trunk when he found it, and it was that trunk that Elvira approached, leaning heavily on her cane. She reached out, her extended finger glowing purple, and traced a series of runes across the lid. The runes flashed once before vanishing and there was a loud click from within. Newt admired her spellwork as she looked at him knowingly.

"I've got a bit more than a bum lock on mine."

The lid rose and Newt found himself peering down into something that was much lighter than the interior of his own case. Elvira went first, and he took her hand, helping to support her as she threw her leg over the side of the trunk and descended inside. Newt followed eagerly, wondering what other things might be down there aside from cactus cats. Perhaps some creatures he hadn't even heard of, given the variety that could be found in the United States and the lack of ready information on the topic.

The place they descended into was much like his own workroom, but with a distinctly feminine touch. It was a ramshackle structure made of a light-colored wood, but there were white eyelet curtains in the window and lanterns in every corner that lit the place. A multicolored rag rug covered part of the floor and there were a few pictures up on the wall. They were all wizarding pictures and Elvira was in most of them. She stood with soldiers in various uniforms, sitting on a fence next to Iliana. A much younger Elvira stood next to a horse in one, and in another she was pulling faces at the camera, hanging upside down from a tree branch, her hair brushing the top of her father's head as he stood beneath her and laughed.

Newt paused before the pictures, eyes combing over all of them with interest. He smiled as a young Elvira waved at him from her tree branch and watched fondly as her father reached up and tugged at her trailing hair. His eyes slid on and focused on a picture of her that must have been taken right after she was hurt in Europe. She looked like hell, pale and drawn and probably fifteen pounds lighter, sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket across her lap and a bandage around her head. Soldiers surrounded her, all looking battered, weary smiles on their faces as they leaned in almost protectively. They must have been some of the men she'd saved during the war.

The sound of rattling drew his attention and he looked around to see Elvira pouring a measure of some grain mixture into a tin bowl that looked like it was originally meant for a dog. She set it aside and pulled down another identical bowl from a pile on a shelf above her head. Newt immediately moved to her side and asked eagerly,

"How can I help?"

"That cabinet is chilled, do you care to fetch me out about two or three mice?" she asked, and Newt guessed that whatever this was for was probably some kind of reptile. He opened the door and was greeted with a wash of cold air and a faint scent of dead things. The cabinet was lined with metal, likely to make it easier to clean, and it was nearly sparkling as he reached inside and dragged out with his bare hand three small frozen mice and dropped them into the bowl.

"Should these be warmed?" he asked, and at her nod, he drew his wand and cast a warming spell so that the mice were closer to a living temperature.

"Can you do the same and make a bowl with a pigeon in it?" she requested and Newt nodded, fetching a dead pigeon from within the refrigerated cabinet and repeating the warming procedure.

While he was doing that, she had started stacking the different bowls one on top of the other inside of a bucket and he watched in surprise as she bent down, grunting slightly, and pulled from beneath the counter top a wine bottle that looked like it was definitely not filled with wine. She pulled the cork out of it and downed a shot for herself before offering the bottle with a teasing smile and wag of her eyebrows.

"What is it?" Newt asked, as there were no helpful labels on the bottle. She merely pouted and looked up at him from under her lashes.

"Don't you trust me, English?"

He did, and Newt took the bottle from her, bringing it to his lips and taking a small sip. He choked and sputtered as the sweet burn of cactus cat juice hit the back of his throat. She chuckled as he passed the bottle back and admitted wryly, "I suppose I should have expected that."

"Probably," she agreed, and made to lift the bucket. Newt was quick to take it for her, recalling how much pain she had been in when they woke. No matter how much of that potion she took, she was probably still aching and he was completely fine with taking a bit of her morning load off her back. She gave him an appreciative look and moved to the door, pushing it open and stepping out.

Newt followed her down three small wooden steps and his mouth dropped open. If he hadn't known they were inside of a trunk he would have thought they'd just stepped out of a house into the middle of the plains. Gently rolling grass spread in all directions, and for a moment he thought that was all it was. But off to the side he could see smaller areas, one done up to look like the desert and another fixed to resemble a coniferous forest. There was an area that looked like an aviary as well, going by the faint gleam of wards stretching high into the air to keep whatever was in there inside.

"Oh," Newt said faintly.

Elvira looked at him, and she felt a surge of pride at the awed look on his face. There was something extremely gratifying about having the approval not just of Newt as a friend, but as a man who had dedicated his life to the study and protection of creatures that most people would have tossed aside as monsters. For once, she felt like she was the one who held the cards when it came to magizoology and it made her swell with confidence as Newt looked at her, that delightfully thunderstruck expression on his face, and she tried to play her blush off as nothing.

"Come on, there's some people I think you need to meet," she said with a grin, gesturing for him to follow her. He went willingly, and as she approached the nearest enclosure, the aviary, Elvira leaned her head back and let out a long, shrill trill of a whistle that was apparently some sort of signal. All around them he saw creatures starting to emerge from shelters and come out from dips in the landscape.

In the aviary, along a branch hopped a creature unlike any he'd ever seen. It was a bird with a turkey-like head and a long green neck. Its body was covered in silver scales and it had different colored wings, black on the right and pink on the left. When it saw them it let out a caw and jumped in the air, and against probably all known laws of aviation, when it flapped its wings it glided down from the tree backwards, settling on the ground and turning to face them, flaring its wings eagerly.

"He's a goofus bird," Elvira explained at the sight of Newt's entranced expression, reaching into the bucket and plucking out the bowl of grains. "They get called filla-ma-loo birds and flu-flu birds too, but most people call them goofus birds. People like to catch them for pets because they're so odd looking, but because they tend to fly off at the first chance, people clip their wings. That what happened to this poor fellow," she said, crouching down to set the bowl in front of him and reaching out, smoothing a hand down the pink wing as the bird dipped its head and began to snap up mouthfuls. "The people who clipped him abandoned him and he couldn't fly away from predators very well, so I took him in and got him better. You should have seen him, he'd plucked half his feathers out when I first got hold of him," she said sympathetically.

"I've never heard of such a thing," Newt admitted somewhat reluctantly, setting the bucket aside and crouching down, cocking his head as he observed the animal and wishing he had his field journal on him, or even a piece of paper and a pencil so that he could sketch him. The bird's musculature was surely interesting, given that its wings were oriented forward yet it flew backwards, and he wished he could take a closer look but he knew better to bother an animal while it was eating.

"You can pet him, he's actually very well socialized despite everything," Elvira urged, and Newt reached out, letting his hand run over the smooth silver scales, touching with interest where they faded into feathers on the wings.

There was a low, deep growl from the next area in the trunk and something smashed against the side of the goofus bird's enclosure and exploded into splinters. Newt drew back instinctively as the goofus bird flared its wings and cawed in protest at the interruption and another growl came from the forested area.

Elvira rolled her eyes. "Should have known he'd be pissy this morning, he gets that way when his meals are late. Come on, we'd better get moving before he gets really mad and starts tearing his trees apart."

Newt picked up the bucket once more and followed her over to the thicket of pines and fir trees. Elvira hesitated and thrust her cane in front of him, saying warily, "You... might want to hang back?"

"Is it dangerous?" Newt guessed, and Elvira scowled.

"Not so much anymore, mostly he's just an asshole. He doesn't like anyone, but I'm the one that's least likely to get nailed."

There was a loud, irritated roar from inside the enclosure, and this one sounded much closer than the first noises had. Newt squinted around the base of the trees, but Elvira tapped his shoulder and pointed upwards.

Sitting on a branch halfway up a particularly sturdy pine and peering through a gap in the branches, only just visible through the gap in the needles, was another interesting-looking creature. It was as if someone had crossed a gorilla with a bear, starved it, and then stretched out its arms. It was completely black save for its face, which had an ash-grey skull pattern contrasting with the black of the rest of the animal. Most striking, it had only one arm. There was a stump not far below the right shoulder that was a mess of ropy scar tissue and what looked like claw marks.

There was a pile of rotted wood stacked neatly just outside of the enclosure in a little lean to and Elvira stretched out her hand, lifting a piece as long as the animal was off the top. With a flick of her wrist it went sailing through the wards and landed neatly at the base of the tree the animal was resting in. It let out a series of irritated grunts as it made its way down from the tree, swinging on its remaining arm and landing lightly before dropping down to another branch, finally settling on the ground. It picked up the log and bit into it before making a sound of distaste and drawing it back. Elvira's eyes widened.

"Shield!" she barked, and Newt had a Protego up fast as a blink. Good thing too, because a moment later the animal flung the log with enough force to bury it nearly two feet into the dirt outside of its enclosure, roaring and growling in annoyance at the meal it had been given.

"Hey!" Elvira yelled right back, hands on her hips. "That's what there is, you picky bastard, and if you don't like it then someone's not getting their pigeon, got it?"

To Newt's great surprise, the word 'pigeon' seemed to get the animal's attention. It was immediately docile, making chittering noises that sounded almost wheedling. Elvira straightened up and huffed.

"Yeah, yeah, uh huh, I'm sure you didn't mean it." She sent the log back into the enclosure followed by the bowl containing the reheated pigeon and Newt watched as the animal dove onto the meat and devoured it in a few bites before turning to the log, now complacent, and nibbling chunks off with contented huffs.

"Agropelter," Elvira explained at his confused expression. "They stay in the forests up north, they used to be a huge problem for loggers, but now they've mostly been relocated to a couple reserves. They can launch branches like they're firing shells, which as you can imagine, is pretty much always fatal for anything they actually manage to hit. He lost his arm in a territorial dispute is all I've been able to figure. Agropelters mostly eat rotten wood and nesting birds, but they will go after weaker agropelters if they come across them. He'd have been lunch if I hadn't found him."

"I see," Newt said, nodding in understanding as he realized why the animal was so dangerous. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to be a logger, minding his own business, and suddenly a branch was coming at him like a mortar thrown by some strange gorilla-bear. It would be traumatizing for an instant until the branch connected.

Elvira leaned in and murmured conspiratorially, "That's why I mostly just call him bastard. But he's a teddy bear when you dangle a pigeon in front of him, he's mad for them."

"Does your goofus bird have a name?" Newt asked wryly.

"Heinrich," she said. "He was tagged with it when I found him and he responds to it, surprisingly enough. Goofus birds, on the whole..." She winced, "Well, they're about as bright as a box of rocks but Heinrich is actually pretty clever, relatively speaking."

Newt tried not to look too deeply into it, but he was definitely seeing a theme to the animals that Elvira had taken in, and it wasn't entirely hard to guess the reason why. All of the creatures she had taken in would either have been killed by bigger predators or would have been unable to provide for themselves in the wild due to an injury, and there was a pretty straight parallel between their various states and the cane clenched in Elvira's hand as she guided him over to the desert biome. She took in creatures that were just as damaged as she was.

Something in Newt softened at the realization. She had seemingly gone from an adventurer to a nurse in one of the most dangerous parts of the world and then started some sort of rescue for injured or disabled animals. Her compassion seemed to run in surprising directions, to the creatures and people no one would think to look to help, and unfortunately she seemed to have been mostly met with trouble and censure wherever she went for it. He knew she wouldn't want him to pity her, but it didn't stop him from feeling a prick of it. He knew well what it was like to be isolated and called a freak, and he wouldn't wish it on anyone, least of all her.

"I think I know who this is," Newt said with a smile as they approached the desert and Elvira chuckled as she crouched down and clucked her tongue.

Near the front of the space was a rocky outcropping with a small, dark cave carved into it. It looked natural, but it clearly was there to provide a place for the cactus cats to live when they weren't out slashing at the fairly bedraggled cacti that grew thickly in their space. As he watched, a pair of small cactus cats crept out, their fur white and their eyes pink. They were bobcat-like creatures, covered in hair-like thorns, with particularly long spines extending from the legs and an armored, branching tail.

"You'll be surprised to hear that they're not really up for petting most of the time," Elvira said drily as she bent over a shallow divot carved into a rock and brought out the bottle. From the cave stepped a significantly larger cactus cat, this one colored in varying shades of light brown and greyish tan, with glittering dark eyes. A large, albino cactus cat followed him out and two more of their children.

"Spike," Newt said fondly, and Elvira nodded as she poured generous measures of the cactus cat juice into the makeshift water bowl. The two seemingly more social of the kittens immediately bounded forward and began lapping the stuff up eagerly.

"Do you need to... replenish your stores?" Newt asked delicately, gesturing to the gouges in the cacti around the enclosures, and Elvira shook her head.

"No, I usually only do that once a week or so, when I take them out to given them baths."

"Baths?" Newt repeated incredulously, and he had to ask, "And how does one accomplish that?"

He really should have expected it as she looked up at him and replied cheekily, "Very carefully." She stretched out a hand and Newt took it, helping her to straighten up, pulling her up with a little more force than he intended and ending with her leaning into him nearly chest to chest. His mouth opened ever so slightly and if he were braver he might have seized the opportunity and leaned down to kiss her. But Elvira's eyelashes were fluttering, her lips parted, and the look on her face made his heart race and his throat tighten and he froze nervously, unintentionally squeezing her hand in his.

There was a yowl behind them and Elvira instinctively turned, smiling fondly and shaking her head as Spike disciplined one of his children that was nipping at the end of his tail with a sharp swat over the head. Newt was still holding her hand, his owner settled on her hip, as she half-turned to watch. She drew back, his hand sliding off her waist, but their hands stayed linked as she pointed, "The mom is Selene, and the kids are Thorn, Luna, Blade, and Diane."

Newt found himself itching desperately for his field journal to take sketches and make notes as Elvira continued to walk him around the strangely open plains area that seemed to fill the interior of the trunk. After summoning Selene, the gentlest of her cactus cats, close enough for Newt to daringly lay a hand on her back and smoothly stroke down the thorns to feel their texture, she had guided him away from their enclosure and off towards a long, low-walled area with a mesh cover thrown across it. Newt was curious as to why the roof, when he noticed the nearly six-foot long snake resting inside, body partially submerged in water. There was a foggy blue eye cap over the creature's eye, indicating that it was close to shedding. It had a peculiar pattern to the scales, almost like wood grain, and its body seemed segmented-

Was segmented, Newt realized, as Elvira laid a hand on the metallic mesh and it let out a soft whoom sound as it shifted. The snake sprang apart, crumpling into six-inch segments that began to crawl away independently of each other in the direction of a rotted-out log, obviously seeking shelter. One segment wasn't moving, however, and at the glint of metal Newt realized why - it was not, in fact, a section of the snake, but a folded pocketknife.

Elvira sighed and flicked her wrist, and the knife launched itself off into the depths of the log. There was just enough light that, if Newt shifted around the edge of the enclosure, he could watch the snake reassemble itself in a coiled ball, the knife sliding into place somewhere about three-quarters of the way down its length.

"Joint snake," she explained wearily. "They stay together until they get scared enough to break apart, like a lizard throwing a tail, or someone sees them and hacks them up but after that they can have real problems. Sometimes the pieces get stuck or destroyed. For whatever reason, the only thing that can replace a missing piece is the knife that cut them up in the first place. Little kids, boys especially, think it's a gas to hack one up and toss one piece in the fire to be replaced. Problem is that obviously the knife can't run away so they have to crawl back to wherever the danger was in the first place to pick it up, and sometimes whatever scared them is still around."

"An interesting phenomenon," Newt murmured, tilting his head to try and get a better glimpse of the knife blended into the body of the snake. "And it's only the knife used to cut the snake up? Not just any knife?"

Elvira nodded, reaching into the bucket. She lifted a small panel in the mesh of the covering and deposited inside the rats they'd prepared earlier. "The working theory is that it's something about joint snake blood impregnating the blade, but I've never had the heart to do my own studying." She squinted into the log and frowned, muttering, "I don't know if he'll eat this close to shed, but no harm in giving him the option."

"Where did you find him?" Newt asked curiously, crouching down to peer closer into the mesh, watching as the snake's tongue flicked out and scented the air.

"He was a gift, sort of," Elvira recalled, leaning against the edge of the enclosure. "An acquaintance down in Georgia caught some neighborhood boys scattering the pieces of him around to watch them crawl back together. He was tiny then, they were keeping the poor thing in a coffee can when they weren't playing with him. He couldn't get little Sunflower to eat so he passed him along to me."

Newt looked up at her, a faint smile pulling up the corner of his lips, as he repeated, "Sunflower?"

Elvira couldn't fight the pinking of her cheeks as she recalled Harvey Taylors passing her along the small joint snake, then under a foot in length, as well as showing her the coffee can that the boys had been keeping him in. The quarters had been terribly cramped as it was, not even considering that the snake needed room to grow, and as horrible as the situation was, when she looked for something to call the snake, the only thing that had come to mind was that rusted Sunflower coffee can.

"Hush up, English," she grumbled in response, pointedly turning away to hide her flush. Newt couldn't help but feel charmed by the somewhat childish gesture as he straightened up, her now empty bucket sent whizzing back towards her workhouse with a murmured spell and a wave of her cane. She gestured for him to follow her towards a fencerow done up in rough-hewn stripped branches that seemed to encircle the workhouse and all the other enclosures, turning the aread on the other side into a massive, fenced pasture. There was a decent-sized section of it segregated from the rest, and inside was a single occupant, golden hide gleaming in the sunlight overhead - the re'em that Gnarlak had mentioned.

"This is Santa Anna," Elvira said, unable to suppress her smile as Newt took in the re'em's missing leg and threw her a long-suffering look.

"Truly? Santa Anna?"

"I couldn't resist," she admitted, and slowly approached the animal. Newt followed a few paces behind her, knowing well that the re'em might be fine with having Elvira approach, but the animal could be far less comfortable with him. The re'em, with its massive horns and rippling muscle, resembling for all the world an overgrown gilded ox, could do serious damage if provoked, even if it was missing a leg. He trusted her to tell him when he needed to stop as they approached if he needed to give the animal a respectful distance.

"Re'em blood is valuable," Elvira said, though she knew Newt would already be aware of that much. "Because of that, some wizards will stalk them for days before they make their move. Santa Anna started wandering closer and closer to a populated area, so this wizard - couldn't have been older than twenty, bastard," she spat spitefully, "panicked and decided to just hack off a leg and get as much as he could as fast as he could. He really messed up."

"In what way?" Newt asked, before hastily adding, with a nod to the missing leg, "aside from the obvious."

Elvira gave him a wicked look. "It was our property Santa Anna wandered onto. The minute he Apparated inside our wards, pa and I were on him. He barely had time to sever the leg before we were there. I was much younger and not quite as good as I am now with healing spells, so I hexed his ass nine ways from Sunday while Pa went to work on stopping the bleeding."

Newt could not think of a more unfortunate situation for the poacher to have wandered into. He was, at heart, a pacifist, but even he was a bit pleased to hear that the poacher had found himself at the end of Elvira's wand. He'd had a very vivid, very recent lesson on how grim a fate that could be and after such a brutal act committed on such a peaceful animal, he had to admit there was some sense of justice to it.

"I use numbing spells every now and then and draw blood from him once a month of so to supplement my income, and Iliana's done some work on it with regard to potions," Elvira admitted. "But it's never even a drop compared to his size. You've got it pretty good here, don't you buddy?" she murmured, going up on her toes and pressing her face squarely to the swirl of gleaming golden hair in the middle of the re'em's forehead. The re'em blew out a breath, ruffling the front of her shirt, and she chuckled as he lightly shook her off and leaned some of his not-inconsiderable weight into her shoulder. Elvira obligingly braced with her good leg and leaned into him, smiling as she ran a hand up at down the side of his throat.

"You can pet him," she invited, when a glance up showed Newt watching the scene intently.

He couldn't deny that he was eager to be able to lay his hands on a re'em - it was an opportunity he'd dreamed of in the past - but that wasn't why he'd been staring. He'd been oddly entranced by the image of Elvira leaning her face against the animal's, the way her eyelids fluttered shut for a moment and the way every trace of pain seemed to drain from her body between one blink and the next. Watching as both of them, their legs irreparably damaged, leaned on each other for support, was an unexpectedly stirring image and once more he was struck by her as he approached and laid his hand on the re'em's cheek.

"I'll get you a bit of his blood I have under stasis before you leave," Elvira offered casually, like what she was offering wasn't worth several handfuls of galleons on the open market. "He likes you," she added as the re'em huffed again and shifted so that Newt could more fully scratch under his chin, drawing a laugh from both of them. There was a beat and then she continued, "After what happened, we weren't sure that he would ever be alright around people, but he's always been incredibly friendly. Even Iliana was able to be around him within six months, and she was still just a kid."

"That's amazing," Newt murmured, leaning in closer to examine the details of Santa Anna's eye. "You're quite the marvel, aren't you?" he asked the animal absently as he ran a hand along his side, purposefully avoiding the damaged hindquarter.

"He is," Elvira agreed affectionately, her hands coming up to frame the re'em's face gently and she proceeded to coo, "Who's my big buddy? Who's my big, shiny boy?"

Newt bit his bottom lip to keep from laughing. He had yet to see her baby talk any of her animals - hadn't thought her the type - but it seemed she had a particularly special bond with Santa Anna, something he could entirely understand as the re'em lifted its head and began to chew absently at the loose baby hairs around her face. Elvira jerked herself back, a string of drool sliding down her temple, and made a face.

"Thanks, general, that was great," she said sarcastically, and Santa Anna lowed in reply.

In a valiant attempt to keep himself from laughing in her face, Newt turned to the fenced in area that stretched over the horizon into the distance outside of Santa Anna's pen. "Is that his as well, when you turn him out?"

"Hm?" Elvira turned away from the re'em, looking in the direction Newt was pointing, and blinked. "Oh. No. That's something else. I, uh..." She winced a bit and gave Santa Anna a swift, parting peck to one of his horns before she moved towards the gate. Newt followed, noting as he did a large brass bell hanging above the gatepost, a knotted rope dangling down. He made to unlatch the gate, but Elvira ignored it. She let out a not-entirely-muffled grunt as she simply ducked between two of the cross bars and hoisted her leg over, somehow managing to make the ungainly movement look easy in the way only someone who had done it a thousand times could. Newt followed her through, feeling significantly less graceful about it, as she reached back and rang the bell sharply three times.

For a moment all was quiet, and Newt recalled the time when he'd hopped up onto the rock in his suitcase to call the graphorns. Much like then there was a charged feeling in the air, and then he saw a cloud of dust start to rise in the distance. For a long stretch it was impossible to tell what it was, but then he was able to pick out dark shapes within the cloud, becoming more and more distinct as they drew closer.

"Horses," he breathed as he realized that what was coming across the plain towards them was a herd of horses, probably fifty to sixty strong, all coming running at Elvira's signal.

"The war was wrapping up when I was hit," Elvira recalled, and Newt turned to her, her voice becoming a bit louder as the herd came closer. "The men in the cavalry were finding out that only officer's horses were being shipped back. The rest would be sold off to butchers or glue factories, farmers if they were lucky. Some were banding together to buy favorite horses so they wouldn't be killed, but they didn't have the money to save many. So, I asked them, if I could manage to get as many back as I possibly could, would they be willing to keep their mouths shut about my involvement. To their credit, not a one of them outed me," she said with a pleased smile.

Again, Newt stared. He knew the fate of many of the Muggle cavalry horses during the war after it was all over, and it had always turned his stomach. But he couldn't imagine doing what Elvira had done, smuggling probably tens of thousands of dollars worth of trained warhorses home in a steamer trunk as if it was nothing. And even now, years later, she was still taking care of them.

"Some of the boys had land back home, I got their horses back to those who could take care of them," Elvira admitted as the herd drew closer and began to slow, many breaking off into small huddles to munch on grass or nudge at each other playfully. They were surrounded, the smell of horse strong in the air, and Newt watched as a truly massive black warhorse strutted up to Elvira and nudged her hand demandingly, like a dog begging its owner for pats. Elvira obliged, carding her finger's through the horse's forelock.

"You are absolutely, wonderfully, ridiculously mad," Newt breathed, because he could think of nothing else to say in response to everything he'd seen here, and Elvira couldn't fight the blush that rose in response to his tone and the intensity of his stare.

"Aw, English, you say the sweetest things."

3-legged re'em

Joint snake missing pieces

Horses