《 Skip a Beat 》

Sweet, crazy love

Newt slouched further down in his chair, eyes half-heartedly skimming the pages of his book on Nicolas Flamel.

"Stop squirming, you'll make it worse!" hissed Tina. Newt stopped squirming.

"Don't cut too much off," he mumbled to her over the sound of the radio. He couldn't see if she nodded or not, but he could hear her scissors snipping quietly behind him.

"I won't. Queenie would be worse."

"Hey!" snapped a voice from the kitchen.

"She cut off a whole chunk of my hair a year before you first came to New York," Tina continued, gently snipping away. "And I cut it again after you left."

In the small, grubby mirror, Newt stole a glance at her new cut. He'd noticed it when she'd first arrived in England- a short, elegant bob. Queenie hadn't done this one- it looked like she'd been to a nice salon, perhaps...

"Hm."

"Normally, using magic would be easiest... but it'd look better if I just did it manually. In fact, you mi- stay still!" chided Tina again. Newt hadn't even realised- he was swinging his legs.

"He doesn't like having his hair cut," contributed Theseus from across the room, watching the pair with amusement.

Newt gently urged her once again not to cut away the fringe.

"I'm not, I'm not... just trimming a little," she defended. "All those months in hospital let your hair grow quite a bit, that's all."

Tina shuffled over to the front, dusting off her blouse and carefully beginning to snip at his fringe, nibbling her lip in concentration. Newt found himself hosting a smile.

He'd been smiling a lot recently. Especially with being able to come home and be with all of them again. But this particular smile was just for the brilliant young thunderbird before him, carefully trimming his fringe and occasionally telling him to stop wriggling.

"Is Nicolas Flamel a seer?" Tina questioned absently, eyes focussed on her silver scissors.

"Nope," he replied.

Nothing else could be found on José Velázquez, bar the simple entry in the book Jacob found. That didn't help, apart from handing them another mystery name. Nicolas Flamel.

No one found anything more on José, so the six of them turned to researching his relative, in the vain hope that they could find something about the mysterious prophecy.

Nothing so far.

"Why are we even doing this?" Theseus moaned from the living room, dropping his book and slouching right down the couch until he was sitting on the richly coloured rug.

Tina sighed, exhausted with dealing with both Scamander brothers at once. Her sister wasn't much help- she was busy preparing dinner (it was a popular demand that either Jacob or Queenie always made their food). And Jacob had gone shopping for groceries, with Leta tagging along out of curiosity of seeing a muggle grocery store.

"We're doing this," Tina sighed, "because we need to know who made the prophecy in order to give us clues."

"But why?" Theo moaned again, dragging out the second word with emphasis.

Tina screwed up her eyes in concentration, and Newt tried to stay as still as possible to make her job easier.

"Because..." she began to answer him, dusting off her blouse again. "... This means something to us. It involves some of us. We kinda have to figure out what it means."