His eyes are new, but his mouth is familiar.
They kiss across the length of the cabin, and Newt offers no resistance when she pushes him onto the bed. Tina climbs into his lap and soon, their hands and mouths and fingers are everywhere.
She reacquaints herself with his scars, tasting them to confirm their reality; he smooths his hands over her narrow curves, his gaze unbelieving and worshipful while she unfurls over him.
Her gown falls around them in gauzy waves when she mounts him, strong white thighs flexing against his narrow hips. Tina rocks over him until she trembles and stills, head falling back to gasp her adorations to the air.
Newt waits until the shudders release her before flipping them, one hand circling the strong column of her neck. He bares his teeth against her throat as he rolls his hips into her, slow and firm. He brings her to the edge a second time before following her over it.
They sleep in crossing beams of moonlight until she wakes him with tender kisses. They lie twined together and speak as lovers do—about their families, how much they've missed each other, and other mundane, daily things.
They do not speak of the war around them, and they do not speak of the time they had no contact. Tina doesn't need an answer or explanation; she need only know that it was something Newt felt he had to do, and she can accept that. Besides, there is no need for words when she can so easily read his heart.
When language fails, hands take their place in storytelling. They wrap around each other to communicate in cries and gasps and punctured moans, wordless entreaties shared in the space between them. Newt removes her nightgown to retrace every inch of her skin with his hands and mouth. Tina swallows his cries and holds him when he falters under the onslaught of memories of the last time they had done this.
They share intense eye contact at the end, and she notes distantly that his eyes are his own again, and not those of a war-battered stranger.
In the milky light of dawn, Tina stands by the window and realizes that their time together is coming to an end. Newt kisses her shoulder when he joins her before turning his gaze outward. She struggles through several false-starts before she manages to say what she needs to, unable to look him in the face.
"Jacob and Queenie are in Paris," and he turns to watch her carefully. "I'll be out there on the front, and if I get hurt, or if I die—tell them I died for a cause that I believe in, and that I died doing the right thing. Can you do that for me, Newt?" She hears him swallow and catches his miserable nod from the corner of her eye. Mollified, she is able to turn and face him.
He is pale but composed when he takes her left hand with his own. He trails over her third finger, where a ring would sit if things had been different in their world. "When you return to me," he begins in a hoarse voice, "will you allow me to rectify my mistakes? Will you grant me the honor of taking my name, until the day comes when we no longer walk this earth?"
Newt blows a slow breath out through his nose and closes his eyes, throat working before he continues. "If I don't come back, please tell my family that I died to protect those that I love." He opens his eyes and they are still his own. "Please make sure they know that includes you." Then he leans forward to capture her mouth, stealing her chance to answer and burning away the necessary goodbyes.
Overcome, Tina pulls him to bed and loves him. For the last and final time, she loves him.
Spells and hexes fly through the air, whizzing by in close proximity, but Newt is unphased. So is his mount, whom he's raised from a hatchling, and who has been involved in the war effort her entire short life.
They're in the final push of the campaign, and the air is thick with threat and the smell of burning. Despite this, Dorcas rests easy beneath him, and Newt loosens his harness so he can better reach her.
"That's a good girl," he soothes, rubbing the plates of her spine in a manner he knows she enjoys. She chirrups beneath him, and maneuvers to grant them a higher vantage point. Newt clucks approvingly.
He turns his attention to the men below, analyzing on the fly with a tactician's expertise. This isn't his first battle, and it isn't his first time leading the offense. Experience doesn't make it any easier to watch his beasts and men throw themselves into the direct line of fire though, and he keeps his wand clasped loosely in his dominant hand while he watches. He feels every apparent injury and loss and thinks painfully about the sheer amount of letters he'll be required to write once the fighting is done.
He never gets the chance to lift a quill.
His mount whirls beneath him, and suddenly there's a Hungarian Horntail and a rider in enemy uniform there, too smug and far too close. The enemy points his hand at Dorcas while intoning a curse, and Newt reacts purely on instinct: he pulls her to reign, intent on protecting Dorcas from harm—and the spell intended for her slams into his chest, knocking him from her back.
His wand is snapped from his fingers while he tumbles helplessly through the blue air. His good and faithful Dorcas senses the loss and reacts, but not quickly enough. She blasts the enemy rider from his mount, and Newt experiences a moment of vicious pleasure when the man falls, his body a smoldering ruin. Then his girl is diving for him, snout pointed and wings folded against her back for maximum speed, but he can tell that she's too far away, and his wand is too far away, and the ground rushes toward him, entirely too close—
Newt digs deep for the instinctive core of his magic, but his panic and fear get in the way. He tries to draw a deep breath but the air is snatched from his lungs with the velocity of his fall. He closes his eyes and reaches, and the magic is there but it's sluggish and unresponsive and there are leaves rushing by his head he can hear and smell them—
Dorcas roars, and he knows what that sound heralds. He feels her paw swipe desperately at the air where he was a split-second before, and Newt feels a sense of relief when he realizes he's about to die—because, in this moment, he can do nothing but accept his fate.
He opens his eyes mere feet from the scraggly remains of a garden. He can see the early spring beetles trundling over the leaves and the remains of frost in the shadowed corner. The ground rushes toward him, uncaring to his plight.
My Tina, he thinks and sees her radiant visage when he closes his eyes. He even manages a smile, here at the end of it all.
Tina Tina Tina, I'm sor—
Newt's dragon lands seconds after he does, hard enough to send the earth up in a tidal wave as she bellows her dismay. She lumbers to what's left of her rider, broken and bloody on the ground, and wraps protectively around him.
Tina is on the other end of camp when the news arrives.
She sees the flurry of activity around the Air Commodore's tent and is mildly intrigued, but she's heavily involved in smacking the mud out of her boots and she can't really spare the energy to wonder what's going on.
She is worn-down beyond measure, and her constant worries about Newt don't help. Her only reprieve is that she knows he is similarly burdened so she shoulders it with all the grace she can muster. That doesn't make dealing with the mud any easier, though.
She is almost finished when a soldier stumbles to a halt before her, puffing with exertion. He quickly straightens and snaps off a smart salute. "Goldstein," he says, and his broad Irish accent turns her name into something almost exotic. "The Air Commodore requires your immediate presence."
Tina smothers a sigh while donning her boots. She is exhausted, and crossing the encampment seems a truly daunting task. "Lead the way," she instructs tiredly and trudges after him.
Exhaustion is exchanged for adrenaline as she approaches the tent and sees the absolute bustle of activity around it. She's used to working on the front-lines, and she knows the typical ebb-and-flow between engagements. This is a time when things should be winding down, but the fevered pitch tells her that something is fundamentally wrong, and her hackles raise in warning.
Things don't improve when she throws the flap aside to find Theseus Scamander collapsed in a chair, bowed head held between badly trembling hands.
There is a parchment on the table in front of him, hastily scrawled words tumbling across the fine sheaf. The border of the parchment is black, and Tina swallows hard when the bottom drops out of her stomach. She grips the pole of the tent for support, hard enough to embed splinters in her palm. She doesn't notice.
She must have made a sound because Theseus lifts his ravaged face to make eye contact. "Leave us," he instructs those around him, and they obey with a haste born of deep respect. Tina hardly notices; she can't find it within her to feel anything but a vast and crippling emptiness as the realization of her worst fears comes to life in Theseus' eyes.
He lifts the parchment and waves it in her general direction. "You know what this is?" he asks hoarsely, and Tina doesn't respond because she cannot. The knowledge blocks her throat, and to attempt to talk would be to make it real; she isn't sure she can survive under the weight of that knowing.
He nods anyways. "My brother has fallen in battle," and his eyes are bright with tears. In this moment, they are Newt's eyes, and Tina has to close her own before her resolve crumbles.
"Apparently it happened yesterday, but they didn't realize because of his dragon—she wouldn't—" Theseus drops his head, inhaling through his nose. "They couldn't get to him because she went on-guard, and by the time they were able, there was nothing they could do."
Time seems to stop around them. Tina recalls the visage of her Newt, all freckles and golden eyes and gloriously kind smiles. She thinks of the man she arrested and the man she fell in love with and the man she made love to and imagines a dragon coiling around him protectively in death. She believes it a fitting tribute, as much as she allows herself to reflect on it—because she was so brittle before, and this could break her if she allows it.
"Can I see him?" she asks after a lifetime has passed in a blink. Theseus sniffles and wipes his eyes with the back of his hands, and the motion is so reminiscent of Newt that Tina has to lock her throat against sudden nausea. He nods once, sharply, and whistles for the messenger to rejoin them in the tent. Then he takes Tina's arm with another murmured apology and sweeps them away.