Fantastic Beasts Stories

Newt, Tina, & Jacob: Emotions

I’m not really sure why it’s set in Hogwarts and not Newt’s house or something, but my brain does what it wants.

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Tina sat on the ledge of a closed window, head against the pane as she watched rain droplets slide down the outside. Her face mirrored it, a silent tear falling down her cheek, and she began to look like she was struggling not to break out in sobs. The cinch of her dark coat was untied revealing her blouse, which looked grey for lack of light, and her black pants.

The door to the room slowly opened, and Newt entered, coat hanging on his arm. He set it on a nearby chair as Teen quickly wiped the tears from her eyes and looked to him.

“Tina?” he said quietly, as if asking the room if she was there, if it was alright if he talked to her.

“Yes?” responded Tina, facing away from the light and hoping that she didn’t sound like she'd been crying.

“There’s — uh — food waiting downstairs if you're hungry.”

She wasn't.

“Thanks,” she replied tonelessly.

Newt awkwardly attempted to exit the room and shut the door, murmuring something unintelligible. He walked down the stairs and into a room with a few tables, chairs, rugs, a fireplace, and Jacob in it. Newt half expected his friend to give him some advice about Tina as he sat across from him, but Jacob was still rattled about Queenie’s sudden defection into Grindelwald's army. Newt, Tina, and Jacob all were, but Jacob preferred to talk his way through it with Newt while Tina had taken to becoming a woman of few words. This usually resulted in Jacob talking at Newt while he stared in Tina’s direction (who kept her distance from almost everybody at Hogwarts) if she was in the room or at an inanimate object, thinking of her. Really, Newt’s thoughts were almost always about Tina. Nearly an obessession, actually.

If Teen wasn’t helping with plans against Grindelwald and his forces, she could usually be found shut in the bedroom room during the day or perusing books in the library at night, when the students weren’t there.

“You know what I miss about Queenie?” asked Jacob mournfully for the nth time.

“What?” Newt repeated his line absently, still thinking — almost daydreaming — about Tina. He wrung his hands; a nervous tick.

“Everything,” he responded, repeating what he said in Paris and choking up. “Even the mind reading. I was lucky to have her even interested in what I thought.”

Jacob seemed to shake off his inability to think about anything other than Queenie for a moment, and he wiped the tears from his eyes.

“So, how’s it going with Tina?” he asked, sounding like he was just holding them back.

Newt was lost in thought, gazing intently at the leg of a chair, but when Jacob asked that he visibly jumped, unprepared for that question. Or, for that matter, any questions that weren't directly about Queenie.

“Uh, well...” He avoided eye contact, instead opting to stare at an empty table with an empty plate and glass waiting to be filled.

Every time the house elves brought the plates up, Newt and Jacob would eat, and then Newt would gently notify Tina. It was always a short lived conversation, and she never came down to eat while he and Jacob were there. Actually, if he thought about it, he’d never seen Tina eat anything during their stay at Hogwarts. She was always sleeping in her bed by the time Newt turned in and was always up before him.

The first night Newt had woken up to Tina's empty bed he thought she might have run off in search of Queenie without telling anybody, but when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he’d found her curled up in a chair, buried in a book. Maybe if he’d watched her longer, he would have noticed that she hadn't flipped a page the entire time he was there, and he’d walked past her to light the fire and then back upstairs and into bed.