Unspoken // Theseus Scamander

Chapter Forty - Betrayal

Word Count: 1,553 words. 

Warnings: None. 

I seemed to revisit the memories as we fled the Manticore. The images that Gellert Grindelwald had returned were more potent now, more influencing. As I hit the forest ground harshly, I knew that they were mine... and mine alone.

"You can do it," Grindelwald told me, raising my hand slightly. It held his wand for I had no need of one yet. Before me was a small, quiet rabbit. It had not done me harm, and did not intend to, but that was not what I intended.

"I don't want to," I muttered, almost feeling as though that small voice was my own.

Breath on my skin, Grindelwald took a deep breath. "You have to know how to protect yourself... and Ariana."

I remember casting, but not how it felt, or what it had done. I also remembered the next time I cast the green spell. It was for protection, Gellert had told me, over and over again until I believed it.

There was a group of boys in the next town over who enjoyed picking on Ariana; if not because of her looks, then her hair or her eyes. She was beautiful, even in her youth.

I had cast it on them; a boy in the middle. Gellert gifted me his wand, when I do not remember, but I did remember that he had showed up with a shining new one for himself and discarded the unwanted one to me.

And it was because I casted, because I killed a man, that they came back. They came back and they hurt us, and they attacked Ariana. I was the reason that the Obscurus preyed on her.

I remembered eavesdropping on my sister's conversations, on her last conversation. Gellert Grindelwald told her to leave, and he gave her ticket, so then why was it that when I recalled that night now... was his face that of Albus Dumbledore?

I jolted upwards, taking in the forest clearing around me. It reminded me too much of the one in Godric's Hollow. I spotted the castle then.

"Hogwarts."

With a wince and a quick look around, I noted the brotherly pair that remained on their backs, a Manticore tail – hand, claw, what whatever it was – wrapped around their torsos. They stood, hand in hand.

"You can let go of each other now," I commented, reeling as I rose to my feet. The Plan.

"Hogwarts," Theseus breathed, smiling broadly as he turned to face me. I ensured that my expression remained flat. "What's wrong?"

"Did you know?" I was planning out the argument in my head at every second, and I only hoped that he could catch on.

"Know what?"

"What I did," I explained, eyes meeting his. "The memories. Grindelwald gave them back to me and I didn't really... take them in, but now... now I can feel them."

"Nat," he began, taking a step closer.

"Just answer the question!" I shot, the aggression entirely unlike me.

He barely hesitated. "Yes."

I didn't need to fake the betrayal in my heart. "And you didn't tell me?"

"Albus made me promise...."

"Albus," I scoffed, throwing my hands in the air. "Albus, Albus, Albus. It's always Albus. He's the one in control, he's the godly power, and yet where was he when we were facing death?"

"Nat, what are you talking about?" Newt questioned.

Despite the tears in my eyes, I straightened my spine. I never was a good actor, but the pain was real and that was what mattered.