Chapter Text
Dear Newton,
I lied to you. As your eleventh birthday arrives, and since it can remain hidden no longer, this is my birthday present to you: the truth.
I am not your neighbor and I never have been. Honestly, I don't live anywhere near you. This won't make sense for some time, but I arrive through the shop fireplace a few streets down, and walk to your home from there. I couldn't risk my parents finding out what I've been up to. Strictly speaking, ten-year-olds aren't allowed to use the floo network alone; but that's when it started.
That's when I found out you existed.
Curiosity got the better of me, I suppose. I knew my parents were wrong about you. There's proof of that now. I have it on good authority that there's a letter on its way to you at this very moment--but I want you to read this one first. This is technically cheating, but it isn't the first time Professor Dumbledore has made an exception for me. You're going to like him. Or at the very least, he's going to like you.
I'm getting ahead of myself. I should explain.
Actually, the first time Theseus Scamander snuck out to meet his little brother, he stole one of his mother's hippogriffs. One could argue that this was a far more dangerous activity for a ten-year-old than using the floo network.
"Theseus Lysander Apollo Scamander," his father hissed. His boots clacked heavily on the wooden floor, his striped pajama bottoms bunching up at the ankles. Theseus knelt low in the third stall from the door, little knees sunk deep in hay. Dotty, the hippogriff behind him, huffed and nipped at his collar. He batted her away and clapped a hand over his own mouth. He breathed shallowly.
"Theseus," his father repeated. "Come back to the house. Big boys do not throw tantrums." He prowled the walkway between two lines of hippogriff stalls, slow and cat-like. Theseus watched, one wide eye pressed against a hole in the wood. "Let your mother and I explain. I promise you'll understand when you're older."
He passed out of sight, taking the light from the tip of his wand with him. Theseus blinked in the moon-lit darkness and leaned back on his heels. The gate on the far side of the hall opened. Then it creaked closed.
Theseus turned and craned his neck. Dotty stared back at him severely. Mother always said that if any beast was intelligent enough to judge you, it would be a hippogriff. She also said he should never visit them without supervision. However, she never thought to tell him, Don't go and fly one without supervision, because the knew her son to be a clever boy on most days.
This was not one of those days.
Slowly, Theseus stood, sparing a glance out the window to spot the light of his father's wand. "Hello," he whispered. "You know me, don't you, girl?" Dotty huffed again, hot air blowing the bangs out of his face. They flopped right back down. Father's threats to cut them were becoming more and more serious each day.
He swallowed. He clutched the paper in his right hand to his chest and bowed. Dotty squawked impatiently--at least he hoped it was just impatience--and he remained there, head inclined toward the floor, curled protectively around a crumpled letter.
She raked her talons across the hay one, twice, and then bowed her regal neck. Theseus trembled. This was a bad idea. Bad, bad idea.
He'd never really been frightened of hippogriffs. He grew up surrounded by them, after all. If anything, growing up around them fostered a lack of appreciation for danger in the boy. Watch a monster at its calmest, at its most content, and it stops looking like a monster at all.
But monster or not, the potential for slipping off her silky feathers in mid-air and plummeting into the pitch black night was terrifying.
"Help me out, please?" Theseus asked. He gave Dotty a scratch on the neck and she bent so he could reach her head. "There's someone I need to find."
And the letter in his small hand was not something he would ever forget. Nor was the click of the latch that night, the phase of the moon, or the soft padding of hippogriff talons and bare feet in the grass. He would always remember the bend of Dotty's strong limbs as he swung a leg over her back, and the ground speeding beneath them, faster, faster, and his stomach dropping as her wings stretched and she flew, the wind flattening his hair, and still he clutched the forbidden letter in the hands wrapped around Dotty's neck.
He shivered and pressed his face into her feathers. The cold snuck up his pajama sleeves and down his back. High in the clouds on a cold autumn night, Theseus Scamander, ten years old, cried on a stolen hippogriff at midnight. He wasn't sure why he was crying. He didn't need to cry. It wasn't the cold or the height or the prospect of getting in trouble. It certainly wasn't the letter he'd found on his father's desk that afternoon, that had a Christmas tree stamp in the corner and was delivered by a muggle postman who couldn't find their house.
No, Theseus wasn't sure at all how he felt about that, but he certainly wouldn't cry over it.
What he would do is follow the return address. Because his mother was right:
He was a clever boy.
Dotty's talons and hooves hit the ground at a slowing gallop, and Theseus held on tight through the bumpy landing. She held her head high and came to an ever-so-elegant stop. Theseus' teeth chattered and he removed his stiff limbs from her neck. The cold had frozen through his joints. He wrapped his hands around his elbows, letter and all, and looked around.
A farm of sorts. A garden. Sheep milled about in a large pen. There was a barn sat a bit away from the house. A few cows, a few horses. Pigs.
Theseus sneered. He wasn't sure why.
Then there was a noise. Haunting and terrible and everything that inhabited a child's nightmares, a song rang out into the night. It emanated right from the muggle house like a warning.
Shivers wracking Theseus' small body, he slid off Dotty's back, who'd knelt all the way to the ground to make it easier for him. She made a bird-like noise in the back of her throat and nuzzled his arm.
"Alright," he said. "You wait here and I'll..." He looked at the sleeping house, windows dark and doors locked. Turned back to Dotty. "You wait here."
He wandered around the side of the house. Dotty grazed over to sniff at the nearest point of interest, and the sheep bayed in alarm. So long as she didn't eat any lambs or fly home without him, Theseus didn't much care.
She probably wouldn't leave. Mum always spoke proudly of how loyal her hippogriffs were.
Theseus paused at a window. Empty house. Armchair, carpet, table. He moved on. Kitchen. Living room. Dining room. Then...
He didn't do it on purpose. He didn't even properly think about wanting the glass to be gone. Just one moment it was there and the next it wasn't and then he was climbing through the glassless window.
Theseus' bare feet hit the floor with a dissonant plop. He shifted the letter restlessly in his hands and approached the bed.
There, curled on his side, his little body rising and falling with the peaceful breath of slumber, was Theseus Scamander's little brother. Theseus didn't even know his name but he existed. He hadn't really believed it, not with his heart, until this moment. Until that curly mop of hair. Until the faint smattering of freckles on his four-year-old face. Until those little arms wound tight around a fluffy teddy bear.
That sound, that haunting song bit the air again, and this time no walls separated it from Theseus. It was in the room. He stumbled into the dresser behind him, eyes wide, staring at the place where his little brother's bed hovered over the floorboards--
You probably don't remember this, Newt, but there was an Augurey beneath your bed that night. It's what the muggles had written their concern about--they wanted to know if your magical ancestry was the cause of the odd noise emanating from your room. I'm not sure exactly how they thought that explained it. To be fair, though, I'm also not sure how exactly the Augurey came to be under your bed in the first place.
Of course at the time I didn't have a clue what it was. They're not dangerous omens of death like most wizards think. Auguries sing to predict storms, you see, so it might've been helpful if I'd known. Then I could've been prepared for the torrential downpour on my way back home.
Theseus tugged at the sopping fabric of his sleeve, but it clung viciously to his skin. Lightning cracked and lit the sea of clouds. He peered over Dotty's wings and watched rain droplets plummet to the invisible ground. Mum was going to be furious.
Mum was far beyond furious.
Mum might even be the least of his worries. The space between him and the ground threatened Theseus like a hungry maw, fit to devour him, and clouds and water tangled together to blot out the sky. There was no more moon. No more starts. There might never be again.
But I was fine.
He was going to die. He'd either fall or be struck by lightning, and all his parents would have to signal where he went was a missing hippogriff and a stolen letter. Said stolen letter was reduced to a fragile, floppy mess by now, tucked preciously beneath Theseus' dripping button-down pajama shirt.
Theseus had never thought about dying before. That was the sort of thing that happened to grown-ups. Old ones or soldier-y ones. Not to children.
A blinding light split the downpour and Dotty reared back mid-air. Theseus clawed into her feathers, hard enough to make her screech, and Theseus screamed with her. A person appeared amidst the black. They grabbed his arm and tugged and Theseus was weightless, no longer on the protection of Dotty's solid back, he was falling, he was going to die, he was--
The night warped and flattened and the air left Theseus' lungs and then he was on the ground.
He dropped to his hands and knees and wretched in the garden--his mother's garden.
Oh, and his mother's voice, calling out behind him. His mother's hands grabbing his arms and turning him around and hugging him tight to her chest.
She was so warm.
"Mum," Theseus cried. He said nothing else and neither did she for a good couple of minutes. He was home. He was on solid ground. He was enveloped in his mother's warmth. In all likelihood she was less warm so much as she was not as frozen as Theseus was, but he clung to her nonetheless.
"You were right, ma'am," said a man with a broomstick behind her. Theseus squinted through puffy eyes. "He was on the hippogriff. Mid-air in a storm. Had to apparate him out."
His mother pulled back a bit, not letting go. "And Dotty?"
"We've another Auror bringing it back safely, don't worry. Maybe keep an eye on that kid, though."
Theseus looked at the man. He was everything he'd ever heard about Aurors: dressed up all proper, wand at his side, serious expression. That man had saved him.
"Theseus," his mother said, taking him by the shoulders and looking him in the face. Rain dripped down her hair and plastered it to her forehead. The raindrops reflected the light from his house. "Theseus, this is important. Did you find him?"
Oh. Him. The boy he was never supposed to know about. Of course they'd realized what he'd run off to do. Theseus curled his hands protectively around his stomach, where the ruined letter was still pressed between his soaked shirt and damp skin.
I know it was wrong to lie to you. But you must understand, Newton...
His mother's eyes told the whole story and Theseus was full of very childlike fears. What if they erased his memory? What if they never let him leave the house again? What if he was never allowed to see that four-year-old with the same face as him, all alone in the world with just those muggles for company?
"Theseus," his mother repeated. "I need you to tell me the truth. Did you find him?"
I lied to them too.
Theseus looked his mother in the eye. "No."