Could - Crewt

Chapter 2

I return, I return!! It's been wild... I've been thinking of joining AUgust again... stay tuned!!

December 16, 1926

It's not the first dress.

It's not the first blouse.

It's not the first anything. It's not anything new or unusual or anything years and years haven't worn away most of the edge from.

And yet.

And still.

The glass shatters, the blonde woman screams, the bed flips, the gentle man with too many words pulls out his magic wand to protect himself.

From this. From this rushing, coiling, bursting anguish.

This wild.

Control over the wild slips away, going, gone. It rushes and screams, uncontained.

It's not the dress or the houses, or the bright pearly buttons and the effeminate colors, no. No, it is not always something that makes so much sense as all that.

Instead, it is the feeling of forever.

It is the feeling of a glass cage.

It is the feeling of trapped.

It is that everything has changed: Mary Lou is dead, Chastity gone and Modesty run off, lost in New York, Percival Graves a bad man and the world of Wizards as afraid and hateful as the rest of the whole broken world and the Goldstein sisters and this man taking care of someone no one has taken care of before, not really, and everything has changed.

And still.

Still.

The hairbrush, the clothes, the pretty mirror now shattered on the floor.

Even the knowledge that the wizards will only have to wave their wands to put everything right back together again hurts, aches, breaks, breaks, breaks. The window, the bed, the necklace on the dresser.

They'll all be fixed anyway.

They'll all go right back to how it was, as if frozen in time, unchanging, unchangeable.

No matter what changes, this stays.

The dress, the blouse.

Hairbrush.

Mirror.

A drawer—three drawers—full of a woman's things. Anything you like.

But none of it is liked.

In no words at all, the reminder exists.

In the simplicity of the world and the complication of it, in the dozens of scattered clothes on the floor and the determined, fearful look in Queenie Goldstein's eyes, in the mirror, the reminder exists. Because it does not need to be said. Whoever forgets it in the first place is a fool.

And perhaps there is something else, too, that stays the same. Men are dangerous. Women can be wicked, too, but Tina has afforded care that no one else has without, it seems, asking for anything afterward.

But Mr. Scamander... Mr. Scamander has to want something. Men always want something, always expect something in return. Demand something in return.

What does Mr. Scamander want? Not knowing is the most frightening part. Mr. Scamander is so good at it—at caring, at giving, at seeming real and genuine—so good at pretending.