《 Skip a Beat 》

Here's the thing...

Soon after they left his room, the same nurse passed them again. She noticed the cut running across Queenie's neck and hurriedly ushered her into a room for minor wound treatment, despite her repeated protests.

Within ten minutes, she'd emerged again with a white bandage on her neck, and she flashed the nurse a grateful smile before turning back to her friends and scowling.

"Don't say a word," she muttered, seeing their vaguely amused looks.

Nobody owned a house in England apart from the Scamander brothers, so Theseus let everyone live with him and Leta for a while... or however long it took for Newt to get back on his feet. If he got back on his feet.

Nobody wanted any dinner, which was lucky, because nobody wanted to prepare any dinner, so everyone unpacked their belongings and slogged off to their rooms. Theseus and Leta shared a room, and they had two spare rooms, but only one of them had beds in it. Queenie and Jacob took that one. Theseus found an air mattress in the storeroom, which he blew up and managed to fit through the doorway of the second spare room for Tina to sleep on.

She nodded her thanks, then watched him leave the room. Tina lifted her eyes to her little black suitcase, nestled in a corner.

The Goldstein sisters and Jacob had packed lightly when they were invited to England by Newt- they only planned to stay a week. Things started to turn ugly when they went sightseeing. Queenie wanted to see the roman amphitheatre ruins, but they were rudely interrupted by Grindelwald and his followers tracking them across Europe, then striking when they least expected them to.

Well, we weren't expecting it, that's for sure, she thought bitterly, moving to unpack her suitcase.

She'd almost finished when something in the pocket caught her eye. Tina pulled it out and smiled to herself when she saw what it was.

An elegantly carved frame, with silver ivy twining around it like a border and metallic leaves sprouting from the edges, but that wasn't what snagged her attention. It was the picture inside it- it had been taken just before Newt left New York in 1926, outside the Goldstein sisters' house. Queenie, Jacob, Newt and Tina stood side by side, their arms around each other. They laughed with each other, and at one point, Queenie leaned over and whispered something to Tina, which made her turn red and bat her away. Newt and Jacob laughed harder at her embarrassed face, though they didn't know what Queenie said. The four of them linked arms again and beamed at the camera.

Tina smiled at the photo, smiled at the memories, and a tear slid down her cheek. She missed Newt. She really did.

Tina let the picture slip from her hands back into the suitcase pocket. That way, she'd be able to see it whenever she opened her suitcase.

She set about unpacking everything else; clothes, files for work, books and whatever Queenie had managed to sneak into her bag. To her dismay, she found two pairs of dresses to wear out, which made her wonder if she was underestimating her younger sister's stealth.

"Teenie?"

She whipped around. Queenie was standing in the doorway clad in a pink silk nightgown.

"Are you going to eat something?"

"It's a bit late, isn't it?"

"I'm going to make something for myself."

"Go ahead. I'm alright."

Queenie opened her mouth, ready to object, then closed it again and turned from the doorway. Tina threw a glance at her blue-striped pyjamas, folded neatly amongst the rest of her clothes. She felt too tired to change, so instead, she flopped onto the air mattress and lay face-down, thinking about what the surgeons would be doing to Newt at that moment.