aethelar:

Not everyone has a soulmate. Newt doesn’t. His wrists are bare of markings, no scrawling words detailing the first thing his other half will say to him, no one waiting for the first words Newt will say to them in return.

It’s freeing, Newt says. He runs through the seven continents of the world and collects his creatures to live in his case and sends letters home to his mother that say he’ll be home “at some point, but not just yet,” and it’s freedom. It is. What soulmate would let Newt put his creatures first? What soulmate would understand his itchy feet and his need to run and run and run and run –

It’s lonely, too. People who don’t have soulmates aren’t supposed to feel the ache, the burning need to find the person who’ll complete them. People who don’t have soulmates are supposed to fall in love slowly, gently, with whoever they want – they’re supposed to be able to separate and come back together and make mistakes and decide to be alone if they want. Some people look on them with pity, others look on them with envy, but the truth is that it’s neither better or worse. It just is.

Newt has never wanted anyone else. And that – what nonsense is that? Anyone else, anyone else from who? He doesn’t have a soulmate waiting for him. When he dreams, he doesn’t see snatches of their life played out in the flare of a sharp coat and the peaceful silence of the office at night. He doesn’t taste the whiskey they toast him with when they feel him lurking tentatively on the edge of their connection and he doesn’t make two cups of tea and set one out for them when he feels them reaching out to him in return.

He doesn’t have a soulmate. His wrists are bare. He’s dreaming.

You aren’t, a voice insists, stubborn and indulgent and patient. I’m in New York. I’m here.

Newt tries not to sleep because he hates waking up from the warmth and comfort of that distant voice and he hates remembering that he’s made it up. He avoids New York. America. All of America, he avoids it, because he can’t go and find that his soulmate doesn’t exist. He can’t.

The voice goes quiet. He’s not sure when – he hasn’t been dreaming, has been keeping himself firmly inside his own head – but the voice goes quiet. Newt finds a thunderbird that needs to go home to Arizona, and there are many ships he can take to get to America, but. The voice has gone quiet.

Newt takes the ship to New York and tells himself that it’s the easiest route. That he’s only thinking of Frank, of trying to get him home faster, of – of – he’s not thinking of the voice and the calm and the patient man that is waiting in New York. His wrist is still bare.

Bare it might be, but the moment Newt’s foot hits the concrete docks as he leaves the boat his wrist flares with fire and pain. He can barely stutter his way through customs and immigration because his soulmate is real and his soulmate is hurting and he stretches himself as far as he can but while he’s awake it isn’t far enough. He can’t find them. He can’t reach them.

He doesn’t get to sleep. He wants to, to slip into dreams and reach out and find his wayward voice, but there’re his creatures, and the holding cell at MACUSA, and the obscurial – on the roof, Queenie hugs him and doesn’t say a word to Tina and he hugs her back almost desperately. His left wrist is cramping from the constant agony and he can barely use his hand. His soulmate is screaming in the back of his mind.

Credence shatters under a hail of auror fire. Graves dissolves and Grindelwald takes his place. Jacob forgets they ever existed. Newt pulls his coat closer around himself and hides the way he’s shaking. His soulmate is cold, the creeping, biting cold that sinks into Newt’s bones and makes them ache.

“Will we die?” Grindelwald says, eyes flicking down to Newt’s bare wrist. He smiles, cruel and mocking, and leans forward to confide: “Just a little.”

Newt still doesn’t sleep. He paces, reaching, grasping for his voice – for Graves – trying to offer any thread of warmth for the other man to hold onto. We’re looking, he says, again and again again and he doesn’t know if Graves can even hear him. I’m sorry I thought you didn’t exist. I’m sorry I took so long. We’re looking.

“Anything?” he asks Tina when she stops by to update him. She nods, barely gets out the first couple of words – “We think -” and Newt has grabbed his coat, pulling it on as he strides down MACUSA’s corridors to the apparition point. Tina doesn’t ask why he has to come along. She doesn’t need Queenie’s legilmency to see what this means, what Graves represents to Newt.

She nudges Newt with an elbow while they’re lining up to apparate out. “We’ll find him,” she promises. “It’ll be ok.”

But it’s not. It’s not ok because, because –

Newt’s wrist is blank because Graves never says his first words to Newt. Graves’ is not. Graves’ wrist is encircled by Newt’s looping, desperate scrawl:

Hold on, hold on, don’t go yet please don’t go