Fantastic Feats and Who May Hide Them - Fantastic Beasts fanfiction

Into the Suitcase

As soon as the girls had disappeared, Newt threw off his covers and laid his suitcase flat on the floor between their beds. After fiddling with the lock compartment, he threw it open and proceeded to step inside....and down, as though descending a narrow staircase.

Celia watched with one eyebrow raised, the chicken sitting in her lap, the mug of cocoa still raised.

One of his hands reemerged from the rim of the depths of the suitcase. It gestured at her and vanished. Celia watched the suitcase a moment longer, and the hand reappeared, once again beckoning her forth. "Come on," he prompted.

Celia set her mug aside, put her shoes back on, and nestled the chick into her stomach. She stood at the edge of the suitcase looking down, as though into a well-lit cellar. It had a wooden floor and several crowded shelves.

Newt's head popped around from the other side and he peered up at her. "Did you want that Murtlap bite treated or not?"

She jumped at his sudden reappearance. "The what?"

"Murtlap bite. The hairless creature with the tail that bit your neck, there." He vanished again.

Celia sighed, considered her options, and began stepping down into the workspace. She slipped the last step but managed not to too tightly squeeze the chick.

"You can sit down," he said, and Celia found a chair wedged between the ladder and the nearest shelves. She took a seat, stroking the chicken's bobbing, wobbling head.

Newt approached and tugged down the side of Celia's collar despite the look she gave him. He grimaced. "That's definitely the Murtlap. You must be particularly susceptible." Newt had his back to her as he dunked a pewter cup into a small barrel of water, stripped a few leaves from a plant that looked like overgrown rosemary, and rattled a few pills in a jar on a shelf. "See you're a Muggle, so our physiologies are subtly different."

Newt set the cup of water on a stair and mashed the leaves between his palms, wet his fingers with his tongue, and returned to the marks in her neck, dabbing the mashed and dampened leaves against the sore cuts there. Celia winced as he plucked something out of the cuts. She eyed him, and he held out a hand. She lifted one of hers, and he dropped the pill into it. "That should stop the sweating, and one of those should stop the twitch. The whole cup of water," he added, returning to his workbench. "May I see your chicken?"

Celia sat with the chicken in one hand and the pills in the other, eyeing him warily still. Already her heartrate was beginning to slow, and she could feel some of her burning skin washing with coolness. She tucked a hand under the chicken and offered him over. Newt took him carefully in both hands then transferred him gently into the fold of one arm, prying open his beak, and tipping him to look in both of his eyes, then lifting him to press his ear to his back.

Mr. Scamander then began throwing things together into a shallow dish one-handed. "It won't help unless you swallow it," he said.

Celia looked down into the white pill in her hand, considered, and tossed it into her mouth, chasing it with a third of the water. She saw him nursing a smile in one cheek as he mashed his many strange contents together in the dish, then added a scoop of water. He then swirled the contents in, and deposited the chicken in the dish so he stood in the lavender water.

"You stay there," he said to the chicken.

"I haven't taught him 'stay' yet."

Mr. Scamander glanced over his shoulder at her.

She took another slow sip of the water, regarding him solemnly.

He grinned and went back to work. Now he was hacking a massive piece of what looked like an oversized turkey into hand-sized pieces. He threw them into a bucket, cleaned the workbench and replaced the knife on its rack, then started squeezing some faintly glowing fluid out of something he held firmly in his other hand, catching it in a clear vial.