#tune in next time for Baki being confused as shit and baby Gaara being an absolute delight

[aethelar]

FB week day 5: Crossover

Newt’s not sure, later, exactly how it happens. There are spells. Dragon flame. Bombs. There might have been thunder, or maybe just more war, echoing off the sky as though it could reach out and swallow the stars.

War seems to reach everywhere these days, Newt wouldn’t be surprised if it could.

In the immediate sense there is the slick feel of wet leather under his aching hands, the dull sheen of rain on polished metal, the freezing bite of a storm as he struggled to keep hold. He hooks a numb arm around one of the ironbelly’s ridged neck-spines, fingers frozen and useless even in his gloves.

“Down!” he yells, again, bracing his shoulder against the wind. “Damnit Katya, land!”

She roars a frustrated denial, head whipping left to right as she struggles to see anything through the storm. Newt isn’t the only flier in the dragon corps but he’s the only one stupid enough to be airborne; they’re alone in the sky and though he trusts Katya to keep them steady he’s rapidly losing control of the warming charms that are the only thing standing between him and hypothermia.

Her wings flare out in a sudden turn and Newt is thrown sharply against his harness, the force of it knocking the wind from him. He wheezes, blinking through his sodden fringe as his chest pounds, and scrabbles desperately to right himself.

“Katya -”

The fire comes out of nowhere. Katya warbles in alarm and dodges again, but not fast enough; she misses the fire but the hulking mass of the horntail slams into her left side. Newt yells something incomprehensible, pushing forwards with a burst of magic to shield the delicate membrane of her wing. He feels more than hears the skitter-thud of impact as the other dragon’s spiked tail swings up against Katya’s armoured underbelly; her scales hold, but the horntail has her, talons wrapped around her wing joints and jaws angling for her neck.

Newt swears. He forces numb fingers to curl around the handle of his wand; one jagged slash releases him from the harness and with the second he points blindly at the horntail and summons. She’s too big to be moved so he’s flung upwards, and he spins through the air, wand aimed and squinting through the pelting rain - there, he can see her rider -

“Stupefy,” he spits. The woman - man? - jerks to the side and the spell dissipates harmlessly off the horntail’s hide, but it’s enough to break her concentration. Newt lands awkwardly, sticking charms on his knees keeping him from tumbling off, and immediately flattens himself under a shield to avoid her retaliation. It creaks under the onslaught and Newt grits his teeth in anger; he uses stunning spells specifically so he won’t hurt the dragons but clearly the other rider doesn’t have the same concerns. It means that Newt can’t dodge for fear of the horntail getting caught in the crossfire - he has to shield them both and he has to end this fast. Katya’s armoured and fierce, but tangled as they are the dragons are plummeting to the ground.

The rider spits an instruction and the horntail swings her tail again, wings flapping for balance. Katya bellows, tongues of her blue-white flame lighting up the sky around them but Newt has to trust that she can hold her own for a minute longer. He flings himself at the distracted rider, knees bent and shoulder first in the tackle Theseus taught him - she goes down with a yell, her wand already up and a spell cracking into Newt’s side - he hears bombs, or maybe thunder, or all of the above - the dragons roll and Newt hangs by the sticking charms on his knees - the other rider falls - the ground is too close - the horntail roars and the world is on fire - the rain stings against his skin and Newt can’t breathe -

He’s not sure, later, how it happens, but they skid to a tangled, messy landing. Newt is half-crushed under a scaled limb, the ground is gritty and hot beneath him, and he thinks his side is bleeding from the other rider’s spell.

His last thought before passing out is, but where did the rain go.

He wakes up slowly, wading through a molasses headache to a world that’s far too bright. He squints, the skin on his face pulling in a way that announces, delightfully, that it’s sunburnt. The arm he raises to block the sun is similarly tight-skinned and achy, though at least some of that pain is radiating out from his shoulder.

He can still move it though. Probably not broken. Which is good; skel-gro remains one of the most disgusting and unpleasant potions he’s ever taken, no matter how many times he’s had to use it. Dragon riding just isn’t good for his taste buds.

So: he’s sunburnt, but conscious, and he hasn’t broken his arms. The pain that flares out from his side when he tries to sit up suggests that his ribs weren’t so lucky - the spell the other rider hit him with has left him with a dark burn and at least one break, though thankfully it doesn’t seem to be more than a fracture. Beyond that his legs are scraped sore even through his thick leather chaps and one ankle is tender from having a dragon land on it, but he seems ok. A shaky episkey to patch over his side and he’s not even bleeding anymore.

Much.

Eh, it’ll do until one of the healers can look at it. There are other things to worry about - first being his dragon. She’s curled up not far from him, wings tucked in tight against her back. The sun glinting off her white scales is almost blinding.

“Katya?” he tries, testing his weight on his ankle. It holds, so he walks gingerly over to her. “Katya, malecha? You alive over there?”

She twists her head back, fixing one upside down eye on him with a warbling chirp. The knot in Newt’s chest loosens at her relaxed expression. “Katya,” he repeats, hobbling faster. “Let me see, poppet, show Mummy how bad it is.” She huffs, but hauls herself to her feet, too used to his fussing to complain. Each wing is stretched out for inspection - neither are torn, thank Merlin, though the thin membrane is in danger of drying out and cracking in the heat - followed by a slow turn to show the damage she’d taken.

“Oh, baby girl,” he soothes, running a hand down her neck. “My poor thing.” Her side is barely hurt, thick scales protecting her from the horntail’s claws, but the base of her neck is badly scratched. It’s right where the harness loops over, which both is and isn’t surprising; it makes tactical sense to try to tear a rider’s harness off as a rider-less dragon is rarely as great a threat, but horntails aren’t known for their use of strategy.

Horntail riders, on the other hand, are sometimes known for their use of the imperio curse. Newt’s mouth settles in a grim line. Even some of the ironbelly riders had used spells to control their dragons. They all swore they didn’t, of course, but dragons were unpredictable and they rarely liked the people that tried to fly them into battlefields.

When this stupid war was done, Newt was personally going to see the dragons set free - or at the very least given a good home in a reserve. He didn’t care about the contracts Gringotts had to buy them, he’d sneak in at night and steal the dragons if he had to. And the horntails, if he ever found out where Grindelwald’s forces were keeping them. It wasn’t their fault they were fighting against him. They were dragons. They shouldn’t be fighting anyone.

“Time to get this off you, malecha,” he says, peeling the harness back from Katya’s neck. It’s unwieldy for one person to manage but judicious use of feather-weight and levitating charms get the job done, and she shakes herself out with an approving rumble when it’s gone.

“Careful,” Newt cautions. “Let me look. It won’t hurt, I just need to see.” He keeps up the soothing commentary as he climbs up to her back, taking advantage of the wing she crooks forward to lift him up. It’s trickier without the harness but Newt’s had over a year of practice and she holds still enough that he makes it easily.

“Good girl,” he praises, smoothing his hands over the unbroken patches of skin. “My brave girl, the best of dragons. Just hold still for me Katya, just for a minute.” He taps his wand against the inner pocket of his jacket and retrieves a tub of faintly glowing blue gel. “Katya, eyes on me,” he says, holding it out. “Katya, look. Eyes on me.”

She cranes her head round as instructed and he waits until she’s acknowledged the tub before he unscrews it. Her neck spines flatten back with displeasure but she knows how this one goes, and does little more than hiss when Newt spreads the cold gel on her scratches.

“Best girl,” he tells her. “The very best of dragons, my bravest Katya.” He even reaches out to give her eye ridge a scratch in reward and she huffs at him, but presses closer for more when he stops. He laughs, obliging her with more scritches.

“We’re going to be alright, malecha,” he murmurs. Battles are always horrible and he’s got some fabulous new additions for his nightmares, but Katya’s wounds are minimal and his own are survivable, so that’s the important things down. It’s a relief that she’s ok, a frantic buzzing at the back of his skull that goes quiet and allows him to focus on the rest of their situation. Newt takes the chance to look around at the oddly bright place they’ve landed, trying to work out how far it’ll be to get back to the stables.

He blinks.

“What…?”

The stables are roughly twenty miles outside St Quentin. They’re hidden behind wards, muggle repellents, and trees, and are close enough to the Western Front that Newt knows the route by heart and could draw an aerial map if he needed to. The map would contain fields in varying stages of muddiness, dead trees, some living trees, a handful of towns and trenches and assorted people, and at least one river.

The map would not contain a desert. Newt’s pretty sure he could draw a map of the entirety of Europe and not find a desert like this.

“Katya, how far did you fly last night?”

She opens her eyes long enough stare disinterestedly at the blank wasteland around them and shuts them with an uncaring shrug. Newt navigates. She breathes fire. Nothing to burn, nothing for her to worry about; she nudges into Newt’s hands and demands more pets.

“Katya - no, not now little girl, Mummy needs - point me Theseus.” It’s the strongest form of the spell Newt knows, latching onto his care for his brother to direct him unerringly back home. It never fails. Sometimes it leads him astray, if Theseus isn’t where Newt expects him to be, but the spell has never failed. It wouldn’t. Even if Theseus were - it wouldn’t.

The wand spins.

“Point me Theseus,” he repeats. “Point - point me Katya.” The wand angles straight down, almost falling from his fingers. “Point me Theseus.”

It spins.

Katya croons, pushing her head against his chest and knocking into his broken ribs. That’s fine. Newt can’t breathe anyway. He shakes his wand and tries again for the same result, and he almost throws it away from himself in disgust because it’s broken, it must be broken -

Katya pushes harder, the rougher scales around her jaw scraping against the burn on his side. He drags in a harsh, shuddering breath and tightens his grip on his wand.

“We’re too far away,” he says, forcing his voice steady. “That’s all baby girl, we’ve gone off course. We need - we just need -” He stops, breathes, counts it in and out until he thinks he can talk again. He has to keep his voice steady. Katya’s shifting her weight, unsettled by his panic, and he has to keep her safe.

“We just need to find out where we are,” he tells her when he can speak again. “Find where we are and find the way back, and we’ll find Theseus when we’re close again, that’s all. It’ll be ok, Katya, you’ll see. We’re ok. We’re all good.”

He strokes a hand down her neck, staring blankly at the miles of desert around them. His hand is sunburnt. It’s almost glowing red against her white scales. How the hell did they end up in a desert.

“Everything’s fine, Katya,” he promises her. “We’re fine.”

They’re not fine. It takes until nightfall for Newt to be sure, but the sky confirms what every variant of scrying spell he knows have been trying to tell him for the past five hours: they’re a long, long way from home.

He can’t find a single constellation he knows.

He can find a moon, though it seems larger and ever so slightly brighter than he’s used to, and the white pinpoints of starlight against an otherwise black sky is also familiar. He doesn’t think he’s in a dream or a memory, and there’s enough natural magic on the edge of his senses that he doesn’t think he’s trapped in an object either. He can’t get a proper grip on the magic though to be sure - it’s oddly thick and sharp, skittering off his reaching senses like something almost physical. But it’s definitely magic and it’s definitely natural, which means the endless desert is an unfortunate reality.

So is the cold. And the hunger. And the fact that, real or not, he and Katya are hopelessly lost.

“Eyes on me, Katya,” he murmurs again, holding his wand up for her to see. She huffs in annoyance but turns her head to look, blinking sleepily at him as he casts yet another perimeter charm. It flickers into life around them with a flare of gold-green before fading invisible into the sand. Katya curls her tail in tighter around Newt; the charm won’t hurt her, but she’s intelligent enough to recognise a boundary when she sees it. 

“Best girl,” Newt promises her, and settles back against her as she grumbles a reply and goes back to sleep. The armoured plates on her stomach are too thick to let any heat through but the softer scales of her side are warm; Newt buries his fingers in his armpit and presses in as close as he can.

In his brown army jacket, he has a basic field medkit, a more elaborate dragon medkit, official papers identifying him as a member of Her Majesty’s Magical Airforce, his wand, and a lopsided drawing of a hippogriff Theseus had made to remind him of home. On his belt he had four flares, a now half-empty canteen of water, and a pocket knife that doubled as a quill pen and a corkscrew depending on which way he opened it.

“What we need, malecha,” he says, “is food. And water, but with any luck they’ll be together. You might be able to go a week without eating but your mummy, he’s not as strong as you are.” He folds and unfolds the hippogriff sketch restlessly, smoothing the paper out between his hands as he thinks. Katya doesn’t respond but he doesn’t expect her to - he’s more talking for the sake of it, in the vain hope of keeping himself calm. “What do you reckon, baby girl? Travel by day? Travel by night? It’s hot in the sun, you think you could be nocturnal for a bit?”

Katya groans and moves and lifts a wing over Newt, pressing it down like a particularly smothering blanket. He sputters out a laugh, pushing it until his head at least is free. “Ok, ok,” he relents. “No travelling by night, we’ll sleep. Breakfast can wait til the morning.” He bites his lip. He’s got three different ward spells running and even in the war that’d be overkill, but he doesn’t know where they are or what might be out there. He’s not the worrying sort but he’s not the reckless sort either, not when it comes to his dragon’s safety.

“Katya?” he says, lifting his wand. “Sorry baby girl, just one more."

The wards flare barely an hour before dawn. Newt scrambles awake, instinctively putting himself between Katya and the threat, wand raised to defend. Katya herself stayed still, wings tucked in to protect the delicate membrane and head lowered in watchful wariness.

On the other side of the wardline two figures jump back to a safe distance, crouched in battle-ready positions. They don’t seem to have wands, and they aren’t attacking, but they don’t seem friendly either; their clothes aren’t military in the way Newt recognises but with the matching i marked headplates they definitely look like a uniform.

“Hello,” Newt says cautiously. “I don’t mean you any harm. I’m lost.”

No reply.

“Bon jour,” he tries, repeating his statement in French, then Guten Morgen, and finally dobroye utro in a stumbling attempt at Russian.

One of the figures says something back in harsh, aggressive language - or that might just be the woman’s tone - that Newt doesn’t recognise.

“I’m sorry,” he says, reverting back to English. “I don’t -” he mimes, pointing to his ear and shaking his head - “I don’t understand.” He chews his lip in deliberation, then slides his wand up his sleeve in obvious, telegraphed motions and holds out his empty palms. “I come in peace,” he says, and tries not to feel too much like an idiot as he does so.

The wards ping behind him and Newt spins but Katya is faster, rearing up with a roar and unleashing a gout of flame at the intruder.

“Katya, Katya wait!” Newt yells, flinging his arms up to shield himself from the heat. The wards break with a static crack and Newt gropes blindly for Katya’s leg to try to climb up, desperately dodging her beating wings. He can hear the others shouting and a sudden, fierce wind sends him sprawling back - he cries out as it hits him, a flare of foreign magic-not-magic that leaves stinging papercuts over his skin. His ribs ache as he lands on them and the sand burns, molten glass from the dragonfire mixed in with the other grains.

Katya shrieks, furious and terrified, and Newt shakes the pain off to focus on her. The two figures have been joined by a third, same uniform, and between them they’re working in a smoothly coordinated attack that’s almost too fast for Newt to see. There’s no way he can hit any of them with a spell and with Katya in the middle of them he can’t use an area-effect either.

“Katya!” he yells. One of the three attackers splits off, flinging a pair of knives that clatter loudly against Newt’s shield. “Katya, up!” She growls, twisting her head round to look at him and letting out a high whistle of distress when she realises he’s too far away for her to reach. The knife-thrower has given up on projectiles and now appears to be summoning glowing air-blades that extend out from each hand; Newt reinforces his shield and wishes, desperately, that he knew more about the magic here and whether his defences would hold.

“Up, Katya!” he commands again, begging her to obey. She roars, sweeping another torrent of flame out in protest, but with a final leap she’s airborne and spiralling away. Newt grins. Bereft of their other target all three of the attackers now begin to circle him, testing his shield with their weapons and strange elemental magics. With dragon safely out the way though he doesn’t have to worry so much about using his spells.

He drops his shield and banishes the ground in one movement, stifling a yell as the force of being thrown in the air jars his ribs. One of the men wastes no time in following him, leaping thirty feet straight up in the air and landing a spinning kick to Newt’s solar plexus that leaves him gasping and tasting blood. He apparates, aiming for the ground in a panic and lands in a wheezing mess; he’s far enough away that he gets a second to get his wand up and shoot out a shaky freezing charm, slashing his wand in a harsh arc as he does so to cover a wider area.

One figure drops, arms pinned to its side and spine ramrod straight. Newt apparates again just as the other reaches him - then again, in panic, when a giant eagle made out of wind nearly eviscerates him. He’s breathless and running dangerously close to exhausting himself, and he needs to get away somewhere safe so Katya can find him again but if he keeps apparating like this he’ll splinch himself.

His magic flares a warning and Newt flicks his wand up in a shield charm but he’s too slow. Rough hands grab his head, hauling it back to hold a blade against his throat, and a foot slams into his wrist to make him drop his wand.

The man barks something at him, a single word command that Newt doesn’t understand. The meaning isn’t hard to guess, and he holds himself deliberately still. The next sentence that the man says though he doesn’t have a hope.

“I don’t know,” he says, trying subtly to lean away from the knife. The man repeats it, harsher this time with his hand tightening painfully in Newt’s hair. “I don’t know! I don’t understand you, I don’t know what you want!”

For a second he thinks that’ll be it, the man will try to cut his throat and Newt will have to risk apparating and probably splinch both of them in the process - then in a movement too fast to follow, he flips the knife and slams the blunt handle into Newt’s temple and Newt is suddenly, jarringly unconscious.