The Underground

Chapter 24 - The Assignment

She found herself in an open field. The sky was dark as if the sun had just gone down and all light was fading from the world. A chill wind blew across the plain, and even though Elizabeth couldn't technically feel the cold, she knew it was there. She walked towards her parents, who were huddled together against the wind, and to her surprise, she found that they were not alone. A small group of people was nearby, also wearing different shades of black and grey. With a pang, she recognized her Aunt and Uncle standing among the others. The look on her Aunt's face was one of deep sorrow and worry, and Elizabeth turned towards the clear object of the memory, a newly formed mound of earth and a gravestone. The stone was roughly hewn as if it had been handmade, and the headstone read: "Telemachus Scamander - Devoted husband and father" followed by a date of birth and death. Elizabeth realized with a sharp feeling in her chest that this was the grave of her grandfather, and more importantly, her father had never mentioned him to her. Not once, not in all the stories he had of her mother and the war did he mention her grandparents.

She walked toward her father, who was sitting in the grass at the foot of the stone and stopped. She wanted desperately to know what had happened, what the reason for this memory was.

"Newt?" A soft voice said. Elizabeth looked up at her mother, tall and dark-haired, her face was pale in the growing darkness. Tina slowly sat down beside her husband- or maybe not yet husband, Elizabeth thought- and wrapped her arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer.

"I never thought this would happen," her father mumbled, almost to himself it seemed. "He was going to finish it, we were so close. Everything could have been prevented if-" He stopped as Tina took her arm off of him and took his hand instead.

"Don't blame yourself," she said gently, "we all failed, we all are partly to blame here. There was nothing else you could have done."

"Tina-" he stopped, then swallowed and tried again. "That was the last plan we had. It failed. We're out of options Tina. If we can't get the machine together again, 80,000 people will die. Innocent people Tina! All because we couldn't-" he trailed off again and leaned into her.

"We still have a chance."

He laughed bitterly, "Not much of one."

"We still have Dumbledore. He always has something up his sleeve."

"Tina, the Encible was his last trick. His last hope." Elizabeth's eyes widened, she had heard her Uncle mention the encible in passing when she was very small. It was a faint memory now, so far in her past that it had very little meaning. She kneeled beside her parents in the grass, trying to piece together the snippets of information she had to work with.

"Newt, your father tried harder than any of us, but maybe it went wrong by accident. Maybe something inside wasn't quite ready, maybe-"

"No. The encible itself was working."

"Then what happened?"

"He lost control, we were surrounded, Bregovitch was waking up and he couldn't keep up with it anymore. Everything was happening too fast."

Elizabeth glanced back at the headstone, then back at her parents, then up at the others. Something was very wrong here. She could feel it. She knew she had heard the name Bregovitch somewhere, and the bell it was ringing in her mind was not a good one. What was the Encible? What happened with Bregovitch? Why was she not told anything?!

And eighty thousand people on the line...

It finally hit her just as the memory began to fade. Bregovitch was connected to the murder of Beth-Anne Thatcher. She dimly remembered that evening, back when all she had cared about was chess and paint when William had begun to crack. It seemed like a lifetime ago.