The Marauders: Year Six #Wattys2017

Of All Times to Come Out of The Case

Of All Times to Come Out of The Case

It was the creatures that drew Newt Scamander from the demiguise nest. They needed feeding. He could hear baby fwoopers crying and the erumpent was getting restless and the little occamies were calling for their mummy. Newt struggled to sit up, his face stained with tears, and he held out a palm for Pickett, who climbed onto his hand and rode up to Newt's shoulder, where he sat, holding onto the collar to steady himself. Dougal put a hand on Newt's back and the other little bowtruckles hurried to climb up him and straighten the tie at his neck. He slid from the nest, his boots hitting the floor and the baby hippogriff used his beak to tug at the trench coat, the little tebo bracing Newt up from behind by pressing his snout against the backs of Newt's knees... The momma fwooper flying before him, cheering him on...

Dumbledore looked up from the book he was reading - "A Brief History on the Medicinal Care for Dragons", a book Newt had written during a five-year stay in Romania in the early 1950s that was anything but brief, being over seven hundred pages long and quite involved. "Ah, Mr. Scamander," Dumbledore said.

Newt's eyes flickered to Dumbledore. He looked lost. His eyes sort of drifted to one side, away from Dumbledore's, and his over-large front teeth only just rested on his lower lip, which trembled slightly. "Gotta feed my creatures," he murmured, and he moved toward a shed where he kept the feeds, noticing the Moon Calves were quite a lot fatter than they'd been that morning, standing about the overturned wheelbarrow with nauseated expressions on their tiny round faces. "Except you lot, seems you've had quite enough already."

Dumbledore stood, leaving the book on the boulder where he'd been sitting as the creatures all flocked along behind Newt Scamander, including the invisible Dougal, who now hung from Newt like a backpack. "We were quite worried for you," Dumbledore said, including the creatures in his statement.

"So sorry," Newt murmured, opening the shed.

The erumpent stamped her feet in excitement.

Dumbledore drifted along behind him as Newt loaded up his pockets and gathered up buckets and bags of feed, cutting up bits of meat and letting a few seeds drop into the pocket of his coat for Pickett who squeaked a thank you from within. Newt shoved a couple buckets into Dumbledore's hands and he started off on his rounds through the case.

The fwooper took the funny coloured worms Newt held up and flew away to her nest to feed her babies.

"Mr. Scamander," Dumbledore said, "Mr. Kowalski has offered to feed your creatures for you..."

"I feed my creatures," Newt answered. "Every day, every day I feed my creatures."

Dumbledore nodded, "Yes, Mr. Scamander, but since you are a bit... under the weather..."

"I could be dying and I'd still feed my creatures, Mr. Dumbledore," Newt's voice shook as he spoke, moving between habitats... The baby hippogriff galloped along beside him, still too small to use his wings properly, he flapped them uselessly at his sides. Newt threw a few thick, dead rats into the hippogriff habitat he'd built and the little one ran in and started eating merrily. "They need me."

"Mr. Kowalski is perfectly capable of --"

"They need me," Newt replied, interrupting Dumbledore, stopping before the basin of occamies. He stared at Dumbledore for a long moment, then turned, biting his wand in his teeth, and tearing open a bag labelled roach pellets and dropping little pellets into each of the occamies mouths in turn, carefully making sure they each got their fill of pellets before sealing the bag and moving on, dropping more worms into the fwooper nest for the momma, and shooing the moon calves back to their silver-lighted hill over the bridge. "Off you hop," he told them, "Go on then."