The door to the cottage opened with a bang, and Newt jolted, scrambling for his wand. It really was odd being inside a wizarding home with broken wardings. Generally one had advance warning. Instead of some barely imagined threat, a dapper looking Jacob Kowalski stuck his head around the frame of the kitchen and removed a smart hat from his head. He took in their somber faces, and the slam of the door upstairs.

"Uh-oh," he said. "Tina not doing well today?"

Queenie's face lit up. "Oh honey! Newt's back! Come in, come in, I'll make you some supper. It won't take a minute."

"Don't go to any trouble Queenie, if you've got stuff to do," he said sincerely.

"To tell ya the truth I could use something to do. You come on in and say hi to Newt. He just arrived a little bit ago." She set about preparing a meal, and Newt suspected she'd been working on shielding herself from reading other people by the shuttered look in her eyes.

"Hey Newt," said Jacob. "How was your trip? Did you find what you were looking for?"

"I found something, I'm not so sure whether or not it'll live up to our hopes. But I shall have to take Tina to London, and she did not react well when I told her." Newt gestured overhead, where loud thuds seemed to signal Tina's displeasure as she banged around upstairs.

"She was a bit agitated, but she was listening. She became upset only after I gave her the travel papers from MACUSA."

"Why's that?" said Jacob with a swift glance at Queenie. She looked down at the oven as it flared to life around two beautifully assembled pies.

"Oh, because they have her current legal name on them," Newt said, trying for a light tone and miserably failing. "You know, her married name."

"She didn't take it well?"

"No. The news was not at all acceptable to her."

"Aww, buddy, I'm sorry. But she'll come around once she gets to know you again. I mean, she fell in love with you once, right?"

Jacob's supposedly rhetorical question did not make Newt feel better. What if it were blind luck or maybe the intensity of their original circumstances that caused her to feel kindly toward him? Heaven knew that he didn't, as a general rule, make a good impression on people.

"I don't know. She seemed not merely upset, but afraid," said Newt, trying to puzzle out Tina's reactions.

"She is afraid, but it's not really about you."

Queenie, still in the midst of setting the table and orchestrating the beverages pouring in midair, talked as she worked.

"It's a real mess inside her head right now. I don't know if you noticed, but Tina seemed to be stuck at about fourteen or fifteen years old. She's always been a little…uncomfortable around men, so it's not that surprising that she's reacting badly to finding out she's married. But she's not disgusted by you. That's not it at all."

Queenie levitated a delicious smelling pot pie over to Jacob, followed by an additional one for Newt. He was surprised to find he was hungry. He'd been sure he was too keyed up to eat a thing. Queenie sat down between them.

"Tina and I had our supper earlier this afternoon. I'm not sure whether she's gonna want to come down from there before bed…" Queenie trailed off and Newt hurried to change the subject.

"I'm so glad to see you've been able to come. I wasn't sure whether you'd have been able to since leave the bakery. Are your assistants proving reliable?"

Jacob smiled. "Well, here's some news. I thought I was all alone in the world, but whatdya know, as soon as I've got that mention in the Times, relatives have been coming out of the woodwork. My cousin Lenny came down from Rochester, looking for a job. He seemed pretty sure he'd get one, since he brought the wife and kids along when he came to see me."

Queenie made a face. "Margery thought you'd be less likely to refuse if they showed up with all the kids. I don't really like you leaving the place with those guys. People always have selfish thoughts, but some of those, they seem like they might mean em."

"Aw, don't worry about Lenny and Margie. Everybody thinks about what it would be like if they had some good luck."

"Good luck! You dying and leaving Lenny the bakery isn't what I'd call good luck!"

Newt was shocked and turned to Jacob. "You gave a job to someone who told you they hoped to inherit the bakery?"

"Nah. They'd never say something like that-they just, you know, thought it. With Queenie around."

Queenie nodded primly. "And before you say it Jacob, I know better than anybody that these things go through people's heads—but there's no way I can approve of leaving them alone to shut you out of your own place."

Newt realized that they were talking about something specific.

"That's right, Newt," Queenie said to Newt as he caught up, "I've gotta come with you. There's no way that I can leave Tina when she needs me the most. I'm the only one she remembers, so seeing me looking the age I am always proves to her that she did lose her memory and she's not really fourteen again."

"And I wanna come too." Jacob crossed his arms. "I know you had to travel to find a way to help Tina, Newt, but this has been real hard on Queenie, being up here all by herself with nobody to help while I'm at the bakery in the city. If she has to go, I wanna be there with her. And with you. If there's anything I can do to help, even if it's just feeding your moon calves, I wanna do it."

"Oh." Newt choked a little on the emotion welling up in his chest. Being back in Equatorial Guinea had given him a sense of returning to his solitary nomadic existence. His friendships had started to feel a little unreal. Finding he still had them filled him with warmth. He wasn't alone.

"I truly believe that taking Tina to our hospital in London is her best chance for recovery."

"So tell me about this thing you found in Africa," Jacob said, returning to his steaming pot pie. "Was it a creature or just some regular old plant?"

Newt filled him in over the rest of dinner, and by the time Queenie had pressed a second helping of upside down cake on them both and moved them into the slightly less uncomfortable parlor, Newt was feeling much calmer.

"So, you think this treatment might take a while?" Jacob asked.

"I would never call myself an expert," Newt said, "but my work with magical creatures has given me cause to study potions lore the world over, and certain processes take time. I would guess that even the most accomplished potions master in the world would also need to be cautious about the dosage—it might take some time to get up to an effective level if one isn't familiar with the herb. And I have seen no evidence that this plant has even been cataloged."

"Time as in weeks? Years? Decades?" Jacob had developed a tendency not to take anything about the wizarding world for granted, something which was undoubtedly serving him well as the beau of a witch.

"Months, probably, is my best guess," said Newt.

"You can't leave those people alone with the bakery for months!" said Queenie. "They'll run amok! That place is your dream, Jacob."

Jacob reached over and put his hand over Queenie's where it rested on the sofa.

"But I also can't leave you alone over there in England having to care for your sister."

Newt started to say that he would be there, but he couldn't be sure that Tina would allow him to help. He'd help as much as she'd let him. Even if she didn't want him near her, he'd try to find a way to help that didn't upset her.

"I haven't heard anything from Tina in a while," Queenie said, looking down at Jacob's hand on hers. "Why don't you go check on her, Newt?"

Although he was probably the last person in the world that Tina would want checking on her at the moment, Newt felt that he could hardly say no to Queenie. For one, she had spent the past five weeks on unpaid leave of absence from work as the exclusive caregiver to his severely incapacitated wife while he'd gone scrambling about the globe. Additionally, she'd been forced to live far away from her beau, whom Newt was realizing from Jacob's doe eyes was ready to be left alone with his sweetheart. If it weren't for MACUSA's ridiculous laws, it would have been a double wedding, and Jacob and Queenie would already be married.

So Newt rose from the rather hard horsehair loveseat he'd been occupying in the parlor and tentatively ascended the narrow stair, trying not to bang his case against the banister on the way up. The upstairs consisted of a short hallway where the stair let out with a door to a bedroom on either side. One door was partly closed, while the other was wide open. Newt peeked through the open doorway and found Queenie's typical mild disarray. He tried not to look too hard at exactly what type of garments were strewn over the bedposts of the heavy oak bed and quickly stepped back into the hall.

Newt tentatively rapped his knuckles against the other white painted door, and when there was no answer, Newt even more tentatively pushed it the rest of the way open. He carefully set his case down in the hall, double-checking the clasps, and then peered into the room. At first he couldn't see Tina at all. The bed was empty, the chair by the window vacant. Newt stepped inside the door, concerned, and realized that Tina was slumped on the wide wooden planks of the floor beside the door, fast asleep. From her posture curled up against the doorframe, it was evident that she'd been doing her best to listen in on the downstairs conversation until she had become too drowsy to continue.

Her wavy dark hair made a curtain over her face, and she'd gotten into her pyjamas, a familiar green set, silky and long. Before he could stop himself, Newt had fallen to his knees beside her, brushing her hair back from her face so that he could see the sweep of her cheek. She remained asleep, but nuzzled her face into his hand in a way not entirely unlike a graphorn pup. Newt took a short breath. The unconscious affection sent such a wave of longing through him that he had to look away, even as he reveled in the feeling of her soft skin on his hand. He reminded himself that this was a basic animal response to touch, and as such meant nothing.

It would be so much easier if he could think of her as a creature, and could gauge her responses thusly. Unfortunately human beings were infinitely more confusing, with self-awareness and all the attendant complications. Perhaps though, since she was asleep, it would be permissible to care for her a little as if she were simply another member of the magical animal kingdom. Also, Newt justified to himself, Tina was his wife, whether she remembered or not, and it was part of that agreement for him to honor her in sickness and health, and that included caring for her. She might prefer Queenie at the moment, but he'd already depended upon Queenie to do everything for him while he'd been absent, and Queenie needed a break.

Without allowing himself to prevaricate any further, Newt slid his arms underneath Tina's body. She'd lost weight, and it was upsettingly easy to lift her onto the neatly made double bed. Newt set her down, neatly untucked one corner of the bedclothes, and then slid her under them. Despite being rather a tall woman, Tina looked tiny in the sea of plain white covers. His hands lingered on her shoulders, tucking the covers securely around her. Despite his best intentions, he drifted into a morally ambiguous realm, no longer technically helping Tina, and instead foisting his unwanted presence on her while she slept. As if in response to his return to self-recrimination, Tina's slender hand slid from the covers and grasped his. Newt held it, half-expecting Tina's eyes to slide open and to hear her admonish him to get into bed already, they were going to have to get up early and didn't he think he ought to get a little sleep before the sun rose on him again?

He tried to gently extract his hand, reminding himself that with her memory compromised, Tina might become very agitated if she woke to find him there. Her grip on his hand only tightened, drawing him closer. If only she would wake, not to scream, but to smile at him sleepily as he had become accustomed to over the weeks after they'd begun their life together. With a soft exhale, Tina kept hold of his arm and turned over, so that Newt was pulled onto the bed on his side with his front against her back. His heart raced as she unconsciously settled them into this position, going so far as to tuck their joined hands under her cheek. This was how Tina had preferred to sleep, during those precious nights between their wedding and the attack. There had been twenty-three of them. While he was traveling, Newt had done his best to remember every single one.

Was Tina remembering them while asleep? Remembering him? Or was this simply animal-Tina's response to a warm body near hers while relaxed and asleep?

Newt lay stiffly at first, trying to work out whether or not it was ethical for him to be there. On the one hand, certainly not: Tina did not remember him and had expressed nothing but shock and dismay when presented with evidence that they were married. On the other hand though, she had pulled him down to the bed, draping his arm across her. And they were married. He still clung to the hope that that meant something. It certainly did to him, and had to Tina, he was sure of that. On the other hand, which was really the first one again, he had to honor Tina's current choices, which she could only be expected to make with the information available to her at the moment. Even when it led her to consider him a high-handed stranger, coming into her house and dictating her course of treatment to her.

As Newt tried to gear himself up to move, something shifted. Perhaps there was a change in Tina's scent, or maybe it was merely the vagaries of the human mind, but he was suddenly shot through with desire. His chest seized, and he could scarcely breathe. Every indrawn breath, rather than returning him to calm, filled him with the smell of Tina, lemongrass and lavender. His cheeks burned as he desperately fought the memories of being together with her. He extracted his hand from her grip and bounded across the room, shame racing through him. It was one thing, he thought, to provide body warmth and comfort to his sleeping wife, whether or not she could remember him. It was entirely another to become excited in the bed of a woman who had lost all memory of the intimate moments they had shared.

Newt left the room, not allowing himself a backward look over his shoulder, grabbing his case where he had left it out in the hall.

Newt had set his case down in the corner by the stair opposite the door to Tina's room. He swiftly opened the lid and descended into its depths. Now, much like any time that the world of human interaction became too much for him, he needed the solace of his space and his creatures. They must have sensed his upset, though, because as he stormed out of his shed only Dougal the demiguise came near. He paused at the door while Newt dramatically banged his head several times against the doorframe. Dougal wrapped his arms around Newt in what resembled a brief hug while he carefully removed Pickett from where he had been hiding underneath Newt's collar.

"Pickett? Were you there the whole time? You might have said something," Newt grumbled. "Especially during the part when I was being a complete idiot."

Pickett responded with an unsympathetic noise, what part would that be then?, and Dougal loped off to replace Pickett on the bowtruckle wiggentree. For the best in Newt's opinion. Indeed, he needed to move, and Pickett would likely be in the way.

The space hummed with the comforting sounds of the beasts, and Newt set to feeding them and looking after the space. It was significantly more extensive than it had been two years before. Thankfully the scarabeus mangrilana majora, or giant dung beetles, did the hard work of mucking stalls, but there was always excess to banish to some lucky farmer's compost pile. Newt had spotted some likely fields on the train on the way up from the city, so he got to work shifting the soiled straw out of the case and banishing it. If there was the slightest chance that he might have to keep Tina down here during the journey, he needed to get the place presentable. In fact, if she needed a place to sleep, it might be best to set it up now, before they left the cottage for the city in the morning. Newt had a hammock strung up high in the rafters of his shed, but truth be told he usually curled up with Dougal or one of the other beasts who were on the cozier end of the spectrum when he got too tired. That wouldn't do for Tina though. Not if she couldn't remember anything about them.

Newt cleared a little place between the wiggentree where the Bowtruckles lived and the Niffler's den, a little ways off across from the erumpant enclosure. The trees made it seem a little more picturesque, Newt thought. He stalked back over to the shed and began sorting through some of the bits of wood and siding that he had stored along the back side. When he thought he had enough to work with, he levitated the lot over to the space he had cleared. He carefully set out a framework of stones for a small foundation, and then used some fancy spellwork to assemble the nicest bits of wood into a fairly passable parquet floor. The walls went up next, enclosing just enough space for a bed and a chest of drawers. He didn't have these, so he'd have to ask Queenie for suggestions of where to summon some furnishings from.

Unfortunately with their current budget, buying them new was out of the question. Newt had long ago burned through the advance that he'd received for his book on a trip to bring a copy to Tina as well as paying for a spatial extension for his case, which had taken some pricey specialty charmwork that required four wizards to work in tandem. He'd been one of them, and he'd been able to call in favors to make up another two of the four, but the last had needed to be hired at an exorbitant rate. Royalties from his book were coming in, but it was mostly eaten up, quite literally, by his creatures. He'd gotten to the point where the quantities he needed to feed his creatures no longer fell in the grey area of living off the land that wizards were allowed to exploit. There was no way he could claim to have come across three wild boar a week while residing in London. Meat now had to be ordered from the butcher's just like for any were laws about this, since the one thing that could convince a muggle that magic existed like nothing else in the world could was the suspicion that someone was stealing from them. Lifting a few bales of hay from a barn was far more effective than setting a pack of piskies loose in a muggle home for getting a citation for breaking the statute of secrecy.

The first few days of his marriage to Tina were spent draining Newt's travel allowance from the Ministry by setting them up in a nice hotel and booking a steamer to South America, where Tina had agreed to help him with some field work. There had been lots of sleeping in tiny inns and camping under the stars during that 'd hardly got to the part of the Amazon that Newt had wanted to explore when a summons had arrived via the local magical administration ordering them back to New York immediately. While MACUSA had no real authority to force Newt to do anything, Tina was still a citizen and an Auror, so even though she had filed for a leave of absence, she had needed to return. When they returned to New York, MACUSA had put them up in a decent hotel. It was the least they could do since all they really needed was Newt's opinion on whether or not increasing reports of magical creature sightings were due to the waning effects of the Swooping Evil Venom or if there were some plot of Grindelwald's afoot in the city once again.

It had turned out to be both, which had not pleased President Picquery.

But now, with another journey to Africa mostly paid for and tickets to be bought on the ocean liner back to England, they were operating very close to the wire. He knew Tina had some savings of her own, but Newt absolutely couldn't ask Queenie for it. Not unless it became absolutely vital for Tina's care.

He sighed and returned to constructing the tiny cabin.. He gave it windows on three sides, all mis-matched since his stock of glass was low. But he had enough wooden shingles for a steeply pitched roof, one that would hopefully keep the fwoopers from attempting to roost there, and would provide a little shelter from all the activity outside. He finished the place off with a little porch with a bench. He thought again about furnishings, toying with the idea of transfiguring something that he already had, but discarding the idea for something as big as a bed. Despite doing well in transfiguration classes at school, he hadn't used transfigurative arts much as an adult. Besides, no one wanted to sleep in a bed that was trying to turn itself back into a hippogryph.

Feeling like he'd finally returned to a place of calm, Newt determined that he ought to tell Queenie and Jacob that they'd need to be up early the next morning.

Newt ascended the stair, and stepped out of the case. He stood still, listening for any sound from Tina's room. It was completely silent, too silent really. It was dark, so someone must have put out all of the lights. Newt was quickly realizing that he must have disappeared for hours and everyone else had to be asleep. He was about to set an alarm spell for a few hours on, when he heard whispers. They weren't coming from downstairs, but from Queenie's bedroom, and Newt couldn't help but overhear.

"I'm scared, honey," said Queenie.

Despite only having a moderate knowledge of occlumency Newt almost instinctively closed himself off so as not to alert Queenie to his presence. It would be embarrassing for all involved.

"She's still acting funny?" Jacob's voice also came from inside the bedroom, something that Newt was embarrassed to say shocked him a little bit. Though Tina had alsway been much firmer on these sorts of matters than Queenie.

"Well yes, there's that of course. But I give her that potion from the healers every morning, but it just seems to make her sick. One minute she's alert, then she goes a little blank, and then she starts getting sick. She's getting real skinny. She's eating, but it's all coming back up. How are we gonna deal with that on a boat?"

"Oh gosh. That's awful. When did this start?"

"I guess a couple weeks after Newt left. She was pretty unstable that whole time, and still in the hospital, so maybe it's been longer and the nurses just hadn't told me. But I asked the doctor when he came to do a checkup and he said it might be a reaction to the obliviate injury, or it might be something totally different. But he insisted I keep giving her the calming potion no matter what."

"Did you tell Newt?"

"I didn't want to tell him right away. He was so nervous about seeing Tina. That poor guy. He cares about her so much and she doesn't even know who he is. It's just so sad!"

Queenie started to quietly sob, and Newt retreated back into his case. He set the least intrusive alarm spell he could think of for two hours before dawn and settled in his hammock to try to sleep, worries about Tina pervading his every thought.

A/N: I'm so happy that people are reading, following and favorite-ing! But my most especial thanks is to my lone reviewer. You're the best! Those other things are great, but hearing from readers in a review is how I know there are real people out there engaging with my story.

If anyone else could leave a comment, I would really appreciate it!