Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me
A/N confession time! I messed up on the timeline! I thought Armando Dippet was headmaster when Newt was at school. I even mentioned him last chapter. But I've since realised it would have been Phineas Nigellus Black. So I've gone back and fixed that, just in case anyone is confused.
Those summer holidays between the sixth and seventh years were the longest six weeks of Newt's life. His days seemed to follow an interminable rhythm of waking up, trying not to think about Leta and killing time before he could go to bed again. He considered crossing off the days on his calendar but decided against it on the basis of it being a little too melodramatic even for a teenager.
He made no attempt to contact Leta. He wasn't even sure how long she was going to be in Bulgaria for – he assumed the whole holiday – and who with. He tried to tell himself that his fear of getting her in trouble was greater than his fear of his owl being returned with the parchment unopened, and sometimes he even believed it himself. He did not hear anything from her and did not expect to. He had walked away from her in anger, after she had ordered him not to, and what was more, he had made no attempt to apologise before they had gone home. They hadn't even ridden in the same carriage on the Express – she had gone in a carriage with his fellow Slytherins and Newt had to suffer the shame of sitting in an empty seat in a carriage with a bunch of first years and listen to their incessant squabbling and gossiping. It mainly revolved about one of them having a ridiculous name – Fleabon, or something similar – and exceptionally messy hair. He'd seen Leta on the platform at King's Cross and had done a funny sort of half wave, half salute that he had cringed about the entire journey back home to Devon. She had merely frowned at him. Merlin only knew how long she was going to bear a grudge for. Bearing a grudge was something that Leta was exceptionally proficient at, after all. Possibly forever. The thought of forever without Leta Lestrange made Newt's chest ache and a lump appear in his throat that he couldn't swallow down no matter how hard he tried.
His parents had tried to ask him what was wrong but he hadn't got his nervy awkwardness from nowhere and after a few stilted efforts they had left him alone. He helped out on the Hippogriff breeding colony that his mother ran, and went to the local pub sometimes in the evening with his father for a pint or two of ale but his heart wasn't in it. More often than not he would spend long hours lying on his narrow, iron framed bed, with his hands tucked behind his head, staring at the crack on the ceiling that looked like a quintaped.
One unseasonably gloomy day, he was awakened from his melancholic introspection by a tapping at the window. His heart rose up into his mouth as he realised it was an owl, demanding entry. It couldn't be the owl who brought him the Prophet – he had cancelled that. He couldn't bring himself to scour the paper even one more time, for news of any occurrences or deaths on the continent. Maybe Leta had relented, maybe she had returned from Bulgaria early, maybe she was writing to tell him that their brief period of absence had made her realise that she couldn't be without him! In the two seconds it took to cross the room from his bed to the window, he had managed to spin such fantastic castles of possibility in his mind that when he saw Albert nibbling at the window catch, his mouth dropped open in surprise that it wasn't the Lestrange family's darkly feathered tawny owl.
Swallowing down bitter disappointment, he opened the window and let the little owl climb onto his hand where he held out the small package tied to his leg for Newt to take, chirruping excitedly.
Utterly confused as to why he would be getting an owl from Hogwarts, and worried that the surprisingly acceptable exam results that had arrived the previous week may have been a horrible mix up, he tore open the attached parchment. Enclosed was a brief note in a messy, hurried script that he recognised as Professor Kettleburn's
They are both pining for you. Please keep them for the rest of the holidays and return them when you come back
Newt looked up from the parchment utterly bemused to see Albert quirking his head at him hopefully.
Newt stroked the feathers on the top of his head, "I do hope you haven't been causing trouble at Hogwarts," he teased, causing the owl to hoot an indignant denial, "But what does he mean by both?"
Newt carefully lifted the lid to see Pickett the baby bowtruckle, fast asleep on a bed of leaves. He shook his head fondly at the little creature, barely more than a sprout. He had spent a lot of time with it in the last few days of term and it seemed to have accepted Newt as some kind of mother figure.
Having the pair of them with him made the last few weeks of the holiday a little easier. He was rarely seen without Albert perched on his shoulder and the telltale bump in the pocket of his robes where the tiny bowtruckle seemed to like to reside. Looking after the pair of them gave him a feeling of purpose and responsibility. It also made him wonder about what other animals he could look after, wove ideas about dragons through his thoughts. Perhaps that was why Professor Kettleburn had sent them to him. After all, he only had one year of school to go and he needed to make plans. Ever since Leta had mockingly suggested opening a sanctuary for magical creatures together he had fantasised about the idea from time to time but he needed to live in the real world and put these silly ideas of Leta and him, alone in some wild terrain, surrounded by beasts, out of his head. As a way of making this resolution more concrete he sent off for several thick tomes about dragons and endeavoured to learn all he could about them.
He got a few odd looks on the train back to school, seeing as he carried his owl on his shoulder rather than in a cage, like all of the other students, but the only person whose opinion mattered to him was absent from the platform when he arrived. He longed to search the length of the train for her, just to hold her by the shoulders and look into her dark eyes to make sure she really and truly was back safely but instead he settled into the same carriage he had travelled in at the beginning of the summer. Fleamore, or whatever his name was, seemed to have applied some treatment to his hair so his dark locks clung in oily clumps to his head, which the others teased him about even more than they had when his hair had been a mess.
It wasn't until they were sitting down to dinner that he managed to catch a glimpse of her, over at the Slytherin table. The Hufflepuff quidditch captain had pulled him aside just before dinner and offered him the place of chaser on the team that year and his first thought had been, before he even opened his mouth to accept, was 'wait till I tell Leta'. He was half out of his seat to go and just spill out his apology to her and hope against hope that she would smile that sharp smile at him and they could just pretend it never happened, when he noticed something. She wasn't sitting at the end of the table, as far away as she could get from her housemates, she was sitting in their midst. They seemed to be hanging onto the words of a tale she was telling. He sank back onto the bench, defeated.
Just at that point, when he had been trying to work out if he could sneak out of the feast early, the noise in the hall dimmed, and Professor Black, the headmaster, rose from his seat.
"Welcome back students, to another year at Hogwarts," he barely disguised the disdain from his peevish, reedy voice, and Newt wondered, not for the first time, why he continued his role as headmaster when he clearly hated the job, "I wish I could stand before you and wish you a wonderful year, wallowing contentedly in your ignorance, however, that is not, I fear, to be. For so long we have lived in a peaceful time. But I worry that this soon may be threatened. There is dissonance amongst wizards and muggles alike. Both the Ministry and the Muggle government tell us that these stirrings are contained to Europe and that we should close our eyes and our borders to it. But it may already be too late. That war is coming. I look at you young students, and I feel afraid. Afraid that the mistakes made by previous generations will be meted out on you. Muggles have technology now that can match the power of wizards. Flying machines – without brooms. Bombs that can rip a city apart faster than a reductor curse. And we must trust them to wield the power wisely -"
"Or take it away from them," a voice from towards the back of the hall muttered, just a shade too loudly. Every head in the room swiveled in unison to the source of the disruption. Interrupting the headmaster's address was almost unheard of, even by accident. Professor Black frowned along the length of the Slytherin table as Abraxas Malfoy slowly stood up.
"Mr Malfoy?"
"Muggles are going to tear the world apart and we're going to let them because of some stupid secrecy laws. If a bomb falls on Hogwarts, or the Ministry, or my parents' house; all the magic in the world isn't going to put the bits back together again,"
Gasps and excited whispers rippled around the room but Black just raised both hands in a call for calm.
"We must not interfere in the business of muggles." Black looked weary of the subject and spoke with a finality that Malfoy ignored.
"They aren't capable of making the right decisions – we need to help them. Come on now Professor, you've never made a secret on your views on muggles and muggleborns, why start defending them now?"
"I am doing my duty as headmaster, which is to defend the school. That kind of change comes at a great cost, Mr Malfoy, whatever we may hear about the Greater Good. And I will not let that cost be paid by my students. Any of them," Newt could see Headmaster Black's shaking at his sides.
"Hypocrite," Malfoy smirked, looking down to his cronies sitting around him who nudged each other in amusement, "You've spent years acting like you know best, saying how if you had your way, muggle borns would be banned from the school. And now someone comes along with the power to make that happen, you run scared, dropping your principles behind you."
"Mr Malfoy," Headmaster Black's voice rose an octave, sounding slightly shrill and panicked. Newt could see Professor Dumbledore, sat next to the headmaster, pinching the bridge of his crooked nose with his fingertips, "You are of age. If you find that you have outgrown this school, then I cannot prevent you from leaving Hogwarts. I'm sure Durmstrang would be proud to have you as a student."
Abraxas Malfoy just nodded once, slowly, before stepping over the wooden bench and leaving the hall. Professor Black sat back down at the staff table, shaking his head, headmaster's speech seemingly over, as the hall exploded into rapid, scandalised chatter about what had just happened.