Fantastic Feats and Who May Hide Them - Fantastic Beasts fanfiction

Separate Worlds

After Tina showed her how to get in and out of their Congress building, and gave her a pass to show the doorman, Celia was permitted at least to enter and wait in the main lobby until someone came to get her to escort her to the infirmary. Usually it was bright-eyed Queenie who came to tuck her arm in hers and lead her on, and Celia always enjoyed her company. Her daily visits to the Wizard infirmary added a strange excitement to her day, especially since no one in the infirmary treated her like anyone other than someone else with a problem that would soon be cured.

"At least you're up and walking around," said a man who was in the process of having his leg regrown. Celia brought him Muggle newspapers to try to alleviate his boredom. The second day she'd visited the infirmary the Healers (not doctors) had been busy, and she'd had to wait, so she'd taken a seat next to his chair to speak with him, since he'd been seated beneath a window looking out onto a landscape not New York's. He'd been interested in her life after she told him she wasn't a Wizard, and admitted that the Wizard newspapers didn't have as many pages as he'd like, so Celia had offered him day-old No-Maj papers. He found them absorbing.

And Celia was finally taking something for the pain. If she came home exhausted it was because of hunching over paperwork all day as opposed to her body simply being overrun.

"Hey, Burt," she greeted with a smile as Queenie left her at the door that day. "Can you see toenails yet?"

"Naw," he disparaged, "but I've now got a fully-formed kneecap to boast about."

"Well everyone needs something, don't they," she teased, and threw another paper on his lap. He toasted her with his mug of flickering purple fluid in thanks.

"Looks like you only need to come back one more day, Miss Green," the Healer told her with satisfaction as Celia sat on a tall stool with her blouse pulled up. "I'll give you one more heat treatment for today though, just to be sure."

The treatments involved keeping a cloth spelled for heat and a few other things wrapped against her side. The heat drew out the parasites—like tiny, dark red aphids—and the other spells kept them trapped among the folds once they were stuck. Sometimes the parasite got clever and fought back, the Healer had told her, and burrowed deeper. But Celia's appeared to be of the average variety, and behaved just as expected.

The Healer closed Celia's wound a little more every day, as the parasites' numbers diminished and the healed skin wouldn't just be eaten again. Now the wound was back down to a myriad of scratches, hardly anything worth commenting on. Her muscles in her waist still hurt, but not as demonically as they had before.

"Catch you tomorrow, Burt," she cheerily said once the Healer had patched her up for the day, with instructions to return the next day after work again.

As she always did, Queenie waited for Celia at the front doors, and the two Apparated to Celia's house, where Celia changed out of her neater work clothes into something she could visit Newt's enclosures in.

The first time Queenie had brought her over after her treatment, Celia had spotted Newt's case on the floor of the room with the spare bed—only one now, since Celia was staying in her own home—opened it and climbed inside without further ado.

"Ah, Celia!" Newt hadn't been surprised to suddenly turn around and see her. "Throw me that sack there, will you?"

And every day hereafter she'd let herself in and found a way to be useful, even if he didn't exactly tell her how. She came across a book in his workroom that told her all about his many plants—and Newt was always happy to pause and tell her more—and with a few questions she was able to water and fertilize most of them, as well as look them over for anomalies or illnesses each individual one was prone to.