Okay, a couple last bits of Newt and his creatures before we turn to the US and get back into the meat of the prompt. (I meant for the traveling to be so much shorter, but I am incapable of succinct writing. I'm sorry! OTL)
------
Newt flees all the way to Cairo because Cairo is the only place he can force out of his lips between lingering fever, dull but constant pain in his shoulder, and panic. He makes the trip in a record two and half days, traveling through the night on the road from Harar to Addis Ababa, a Muggle boat up the Blue Nile to Khartoum in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and a Muggle train from Khartoum to Cairo- all to keep anybody from picking up on his magic.
It is only once he reaches Cairo that Newt concedes he may not have needed to flee at all.
“I fear I may have been a bit hasty,” he muses aloud, working on the habitat for Martha (the nundu shows no interest in leaving and Newt can’t just throw her out), “The Healer would have mentioned my name if she’d been through my things and found my ID, or if there was some sort of search order for me.”
Pickett chirps an agreement. The bowtruckle is sitting on his shoulder, where he has been almost constantly since Newt woke up in the hospice in Harar. Newt has tried getting Pickett to return to his tree and his tree-mates, but Pickett has refused each time.
“I suppose I should have considered that those Aurors were not looking for me as the wayward finance of some wizard called Graves. They would have been there to ascertain the specifics of what happened at that poacher's camp.”
Pickett nods and chirps again. He seems to be taking pleasure in watching Newt shape the Undetectable Expansion Charm and coax grass and trees to grow and plateaus to form, which Newt makes a mental note of for his book.
“I’m glad you think so,” Newt says dryly. He runs the hand attached to his good shoulder through his hair. “Now. Do you think Martha would prefer a more mountainous form? Or more of a rock outcropping?”
+
“He was in Abyssinia less than five days ago,” Percival’s voice says into his ear. “In Harar.”
“Source?”
“Healer Ibsituu of the East African Alliance.”
Theseus immediately spells a pin into the city on the map, much like he has pins in every city any of his informants have mentioned. Shanghai, Constantinople, Calcutta, a possible sighting in Yekaterinburg that was long ago enough that his contact couldn’t be sure, Budapest, Sofia, now Harar. Not counting all the places Newt had undoubtedly been without detection. No logical path of where he’d been; no way to tell where he might be going to.
“I’ve heard of her. Not one of my personal contacts. How does she know?”
“She’s one of mine,” Percival says. He goes silent. Theseus knows that sort of silence.
“Perce. How does she know it was Newt?”
“She... He was in her care for 9 days.”
“What happened?” Theseus barks.
“The poachers snagged a nundu,” Percival says in a long breath, “Very young- not toxic yet. She says Newt wrote into the Alliance when he realized what the poachers had. They acted as soon as they got the letter but found a smoldering pile of wood and Newt in the mountain scrub nearby. He’s brought down a Muggle poaching ring which had been gaining power like the Muggle mafia around Abyssinia and Somaliland.”
“And what happened to him?”
“He rescued the nundu, and the nundu bit him. He’s not dead because it was so young. And if she’s to be believed, the nundu has... ah. It has adopted him.”
“By Hecate,” Theseus says slowly, but with deep passion, “I’m going to kill him when he comes home.”
+
Newt stays in Cairo nearly two weeks in order to allow his shoulder to heal and get to know Martha better. (He actually books himself into the Shepheard Hotel on the Nile- given the abuse his shoulder took, Newt decides it’s worth the expense.) He’s quite pleased with the progress she’s making; she’s taken to her new habitat quite well and she’s been very careful with her teeth. It’s been very exciting watching her growing out of her emaciated state (getting the right kind of raw meat is costing him a little more, but it shouldn’t be a problem for a while yet) and gaining confidence in herself.
Now that he can lift his arm over his head without wincing, it’s time to move on.
Newt hums idly as he looks at his maps and his calendar. He finds it hard to believe, but in just a month and a half he’ll have been in the field working on this book for a year and he’s not yet gotten over to the Americas. All of his personal notes cover creatures from Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Africa, working from his old sources. He found about a smidge more than nothing on creatures from the “New World”, so it’s time to look to South America.
Before he leaves he’ll send Augustus Worme the notes he’s taken on all the creatures he’s come across for proof that he’s working on his commission. He supposes he should send a note to Theseus. It has been a year since they’ve spoken.
The railways that exist are less reliable than a steamship between Egypt and the west of Africa, but there are enough of those railways plus roads to get him to Rio Muni* if he walks and hitches rides between them. On the outside he’ll probably need a week to make the trip, but considering he hasn’t been through the west of Africa that it’ll be a good opportunity. He can then books passage for himself on a steamship to Brazil. If he does that, he can send his note from Cairo and still keep Theseus in the dark as to his whereabouts.
Dougal grabs Newt’s hand.
Newt leaves his finger on a rail timetable and looks down at the Demiguise. “What is it?”
The demiguise chirps and climbs into Newt’s lap. He reaches for one of Newt’s research notebooks.
“Have you seen a creature nearby, is that it?” Newt asks. He opens a desk drawer to put his maps and timetables away and give Dougal easier access to his notebook. As he puts the maps away, his eyes land on the photograph of Percival Graves as he does. He bites his lip and reaches into the drawer slowly, taking the photo gingerly between his fingers. “I forgot about this.”
Dougal makes a grasping motion. Newt places the photograph in Dougal’s hand as he puts everything away and closes the drawer again. The demiguise is studying the photo thoughtfully and looks somewhat sad.
“What?” Newt asks again, rubbing his fingers across Dougal’s head.
The demiguise sets the photograph on the desktop and shakes his head.
Newt hoists Dougal into his arms so he can stand, smiling softly. “Come on, then. The hatched occamies need to be fed and I’m worried about those last two eggs. I need to think of some sort of new way to incubate them. Then you’ll have to show me what and where the creature you’ve seen is.”
+
Dearest Percival,
You missed our call. I tried ringing you the other day, but it didn’t seem like it went through- I’ve never heard that sound before. Are you upgrading your equipment without telling me? Hardly seems fair.
Assuming you’ve been kidnapped to an enforced vacation, I’ll try again in a week or so.
I remain yours, Theseus
+
Dougal takes Newt to a place in the vicinity of the Citadel at the edge of Cairo. He’s surrounded by sprawling Muggle cemeteries on one side- and neglected hovels on the other. Newt thinks the neighborhood must have once been a fairly prosperous area, but the few elderly Egyptian men Newt sees in the streets glare side eyed at him and walk to the other side of the street when he passes.
Newt almost misses the building Dougal wants him to stop at, it’s so crammed in among other dilapidated buildings and hovels. It’s lucky that he has Dougal, invisible and clinging to his back, to insist on stopping; otherwise, he’d have simply walked by.
On a hunch, Newt checks for a Disillusionment charm. Sure enough, the whole building is under one.
He checks the streets on either side to be sure that nobody is paying him much attention- he finds them all but deserted- and then moves into the alley alongside the building to check for alarms or the presence of other wizards inside. Either the wizards who operate out of this place are confident in their Disillusionment skills, since the alarms are only on the backdoor and upper windows, or nobody is home.
Newt casts a Disillusionment on himself before going back around to the front of the building. He casts Alohamora on the front door and creeps in just far enough to close it behind him. It seems quiet, which is not necessarily an indication of nobody being home, but there’s a stillness to the air that Newt has come to associate with emptiness. He hopes he's right, as he doesn't fancy another altercation. There are various Anti-Apparition wards set in the attic and upper floors.
“Dougal, stay with the others, please,” Newt murmurs.
Dougal obligingly hops into the suitcase. Newt closes and latches it before continuing into the building. The wards are strongest leading to the basement, so that is where Newt decides to check first. it takes him about 60 very intense minutes of hoping nobody comes in and surprises him before he's able to co-opt the spell work and release the wards to go downstairs.
There are massive storage containers of all sorts in the basement. Some are stacked in piles to the ceiling. Newt spells one open and immediately recognizes all kinds of feed- much like he keeps for his creatures. Checking through several cabinet and cadenzas turns up caches of creature parts: Ashwinder eggs, erumpent horns, piles of fwooper feathers, vials labeled Phoenix Tears, and other horns and tails and hairs that most apothecaries wouldn't dare carry without very special licenses and in very limited quantities.
He's standing in a major source of black market materials.
Newt frowns to himself, sifting through the stores of materials more thoroughly, making mental notes of everything he comes across. Proper authorities should be alerted, but will this place even be here by the time he does? Though, now that he’s looking closer, there is a fine layer of dust on everything that isn’t enclosed in some way. Perhaps this place has been abandoned. Newt vaguely knows that there’s trouble between the British Muggle government and Egyptian Muggles, but how much trouble it causes the Egyptian Ministry is hard to say.
In the back of one of the cadenzas, Newt comes across a clear jar of red-gold feathers; feathers like Newt’s never seen before. He pulls one out and runs it through his fingers. It's the softest thing he's felt in months.
He slips it into his pocket, considering his options. An operation like this, so well stocked, usually starts up because someone has their hands on the creatures they get the most money from. Newt wavers just a second, then sends all the cached material into his suitcase so nobody else gets their hands on it and turns back to the rest of the basement.
The storage is all spelled to keep food fresh, and the spells haven’t worn off, so if this place has been abandoned, it’s fairly recent. There could still be creatures trapped down here. It’s that thought that has Newt searching for more alarms and wards. He finds a closet door which all but lights up.
“Mmmhm,” Newt murmurs, “What have we here?”
He gets started picking at the warding.
+
Dear Percival,
Antigone returned without a reply to my last letter. I have decided this was not due to rudeness on your part but because she waited three days and you were not there to reply. I thus send this by regular international post.
Your telephone still appears to be off the hook (is that the phrase?). Have you been discovered and made to get rid of the thing? I don’t hold it against you- you’ve had much less of a chance to make the office your own since your country lost so few wizards, I know.
News has reached of an upset in your politics. Anything I should know about? You could do me the courtesy of sparing a few words this time. We are colleagues and counterparts, after all.
FILL [7/?]: Newt/other, eventual Gramander; arranged marriage, past abuse, h/c, learning to trust
------
Newt flees all the way to Cairo because Cairo is the only place he can force out of his lips between lingering fever, dull but constant pain in his shoulder, and panic. He makes the trip in a record two and half days, traveling through the night on the road from Harar to Addis Ababa, a Muggle boat up the Blue Nile to Khartoum in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and a Muggle train from Khartoum to Cairo- all to keep anybody from picking up on his magic.
It is only once he reaches Cairo that Newt concedes he may not have needed to flee at all.
“I fear I may have been a bit hasty,” he muses aloud, working on the habitat for Martha (the nundu shows no interest in leaving and Newt can’t just throw her out), “The Healer would have mentioned my name if she’d been through my things and found my ID, or if there was some sort of search order for me.”
Pickett chirps an agreement. The bowtruckle is sitting on his shoulder, where he has been almost constantly since Newt woke up in the hospice in Harar. Newt has tried getting Pickett to return to his tree and his tree-mates, but Pickett has refused each time.
“I suppose I should have considered that those Aurors were not looking for me as the wayward finance of some wizard called Graves. They would have been there to ascertain the specifics of what happened at that poacher's camp.”
Pickett nods and chirps again. He seems to be taking pleasure in watching Newt shape the Undetectable Expansion Charm and coax grass and trees to grow and plateaus to form, which Newt makes a mental note of for his book.
“I’m glad you think so,” Newt says dryly. He runs the hand attached to his good shoulder through his hair. “Now. Do you think Martha would prefer a more mountainous form? Or more of a rock outcropping?”
+
“He was in Abyssinia less than five days ago,” Percival’s voice says into his ear. “In Harar.”
“Source?”
“Healer Ibsituu of the East African Alliance.”
Theseus immediately spells a pin into the city on the map, much like he has pins in every city any of his informants have mentioned. Shanghai, Constantinople, Calcutta, a possible sighting in Yekaterinburg that was long ago enough that his contact couldn’t be sure, Budapest, Sofia, now Harar. Not counting all the places Newt had undoubtedly been without detection. No logical path of where he’d been; no way to tell where he might be going to.
“I’ve heard of her. Not one of my personal contacts. How does she know?”
“She’s one of mine,” Percival says. He goes silent. Theseus knows that sort of silence.
“Perce. How does she know it was Newt?”
“She... He was in her care for 9 days.”
“What happened?” Theseus barks.
“The poachers snagged a nundu,” Percival says in a long breath, “Very young- not toxic yet. She says Newt wrote into the Alliance when he realized what the poachers had. They acted as soon as they got the letter but found a smoldering pile of wood and Newt in the mountain scrub nearby. He’s brought down a Muggle poaching ring which had been gaining power like the Muggle mafia around Abyssinia and Somaliland.”
“And what happened to him?”
“He rescued the nundu, and the nundu bit him. He’s not dead because it was so young. And if she’s to be believed, the nundu has... ah. It has adopted him.”
“By Hecate,” Theseus says slowly, but with deep passion, “I’m going to kill him when he comes home.”
+
Newt stays in Cairo nearly two weeks in order to allow his shoulder to heal and get to know Martha better. (He actually books himself into the Shepheard Hotel on the Nile- given the abuse his shoulder took, Newt decides it’s worth the expense.) He’s quite pleased with the progress she’s making; she’s taken to her new habitat quite well and she’s been very careful with her teeth. It’s been very exciting watching her growing out of her emaciated state (getting the right kind of raw meat is costing him a little more, but it shouldn’t be a problem for a while yet) and gaining confidence in herself.
Now that he can lift his arm over his head without wincing, it’s time to move on.
Newt hums idly as he looks at his maps and his calendar. He finds it hard to believe, but in just a month and a half he’ll have been in the field working on this book for a year and he’s not yet gotten over to the Americas. All of his personal notes cover creatures from Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Africa, working from his old sources. He found about a smidge more than nothing on creatures from the “New World”, so it’s time to look to South America.
Before he leaves he’ll send Augustus Worme the notes he’s taken on all the creatures he’s come across for proof that he’s working on his commission. He supposes he should send a note to Theseus. It has been a year since they’ve spoken.
The railways that exist are less reliable than a steamship between Egypt and the west of Africa, but there are enough of those railways plus roads to get him to Rio Muni* if he walks and hitches rides between them. On the outside he’ll probably need a week to make the trip, but considering he hasn’t been through the west of Africa that it’ll be a good opportunity. He can then books passage for himself on a steamship to Brazil. If he does that, he can send his note from Cairo and still keep Theseus in the dark as to his whereabouts.
Dougal grabs Newt’s hand.
Newt leaves his finger on a rail timetable and looks down at the Demiguise. “What is it?”
The demiguise chirps and climbs into Newt’s lap. He reaches for one of Newt’s research notebooks.
“Have you seen a creature nearby, is that it?” Newt asks. He opens a desk drawer to put his maps and timetables away and give Dougal easier access to his notebook. As he puts the maps away, his eyes land on the photograph of Percival Graves as he does. He bites his lip and reaches into the drawer slowly, taking the photo gingerly between his fingers. “I forgot about this.”
Dougal makes a grasping motion. Newt places the photograph in Dougal’s hand as he puts everything away and closes the drawer again. The demiguise is studying the photo thoughtfully and looks somewhat sad.
“What?” Newt asks again, rubbing his fingers across Dougal’s head.
The demiguise sets the photograph on the desktop and shakes his head.
Newt hoists Dougal into his arms so he can stand, smiling softly. “Come on, then. The hatched occamies need to be fed and I’m worried about those last two eggs. I need to think of some sort of new way to incubate them. Then you’ll have to show me what and where the creature you’ve seen is.”
+
Dearest Percival,
You missed our call. I tried ringing you the other day, but it didn’t seem like it went through- I’ve never heard that sound before. Are you upgrading your equipment without telling me? Hardly seems fair.
Assuming you’ve been kidnapped to an enforced vacation, I’ll try again in a week or so.
I remain yours,
Theseus
+
Dougal takes Newt to a place in the vicinity of the Citadel at the edge of Cairo. He’s surrounded by sprawling Muggle cemeteries on one side- and neglected hovels on the other. Newt thinks the neighborhood must have once been a fairly prosperous area, but the few elderly Egyptian men Newt sees in the streets glare side eyed at him and walk to the other side of the street when he passes.
Newt almost misses the building Dougal wants him to stop at, it’s so crammed in among other dilapidated buildings and hovels. It’s lucky that he has Dougal, invisible and clinging to his back, to insist on stopping; otherwise, he’d have simply walked by.
On a hunch, Newt checks for a Disillusionment charm. Sure enough, the whole building is under one.
He checks the streets on either side to be sure that nobody is paying him much attention- he finds them all but deserted- and then moves into the alley alongside the building to check for alarms or the presence of other wizards inside. Either the wizards who operate out of this place are confident in their Disillusionment skills, since the alarms are only on the backdoor and upper windows, or nobody is home.
Newt casts a Disillusionment on himself before going back around to the front of the building. He casts Alohamora on the front door and creeps in just far enough to close it behind him. It seems quiet, which is not necessarily an indication of nobody being home, but there’s a stillness to the air that Newt has come to associate with emptiness. He hopes he's right, as he doesn't fancy another altercation. There are various Anti-Apparition wards set in the attic and upper floors.
“Dougal, stay with the others, please,” Newt murmurs.
Dougal obligingly hops into the suitcase. Newt closes and latches it before continuing into the building. The wards are strongest leading to the basement, so that is where Newt decides to check first. it takes him about 60 very intense minutes of hoping nobody comes in and surprises him before he's able to co-opt the spell work and release the wards to go downstairs.
There are massive storage containers of all sorts in the basement. Some are stacked in piles to the ceiling. Newt spells one open and immediately recognizes all kinds of feed- much like he keeps for his creatures. Checking through several cabinet and cadenzas turns up caches of creature parts: Ashwinder eggs, erumpent horns, piles of fwooper feathers, vials labeled Phoenix Tears, and other horns and tails and hairs that most apothecaries wouldn't dare carry without very special licenses and in very limited quantities.
He's standing in a major source of black market materials.
Newt frowns to himself, sifting through the stores of materials more thoroughly, making mental notes of everything he comes across. Proper authorities should be alerted, but will this place even be here by the time he does? Though, now that he’s looking closer, there is a fine layer of dust on everything that isn’t enclosed in some way. Perhaps this place has been abandoned. Newt vaguely knows that there’s trouble between the British Muggle government and Egyptian Muggles, but how much trouble it causes the Egyptian Ministry is hard to say.
In the back of one of the cadenzas, Newt comes across a clear jar of red-gold feathers; feathers like Newt’s never seen before. He pulls one out and runs it through his fingers. It's the softest thing he's felt in months.
He slips it into his pocket, considering his options. An operation like this, so well stocked, usually starts up because someone has their hands on the creatures they get the most money from. Newt wavers just a second, then sends all the cached material into his suitcase so nobody else gets their hands on it and turns back to the rest of the basement.
The storage is all spelled to keep food fresh, and the spells haven’t worn off, so if this place has been abandoned, it’s fairly recent. There could still be creatures trapped down here. It’s that thought that has Newt searching for more alarms and wards. He finds a closet door which all but lights up.
“Mmmhm,” Newt murmurs, “What have we here?”
He gets started picking at the warding.
+
Dear Percival,
Antigone returned without a reply to my last letter. I have decided this was not due to rudeness on your part but because she waited three days and you were not there to reply. I thus send this by regular international post.
Your telephone still appears to be off the hook (is that the phrase?). Have you been discovered and made to get rid of the thing? I don’t hold it against you- you’ve had much less of a chance to make the office your own since your country lost so few wizards, I know.
News has reached of an upset in your politics. Anything I should know about? You could do me the courtesy of sparing a few words this time. We are colleagues and counterparts, after all.
Have you heard from Ms Pearl White lately?
I remain yours,
Theseus