#mind the gentle content warning in the ao3 link if you're on the spectrum

[uefb]

The Business of Worrying (link)

A story about Newt’s first year at Hogwarts, featuring communication, bizarre wizarding expectations of ability, autism, ableism, nonverbal magic, and accessibility. (Also, with a side of 'Hogwarts is a Mess' and 'Complicated Families are Complicated'.) Starts at age 5, and ends at age 12.

SUMMARY: Newt has always had plenty of people worrying about him, so he doesn't bother with it much himself. But that doesn't mean things are always easy; and just because talking doesn't come to him naturally doesn't mean he has nothing to offer, or nothing to say at all. Luckily—sometimes—people manage to recognise that. Over time, though, Newt realises it's more important he simply believe it himself.

Opening Scene:

Newt is five-and-three-quarter years old when his mother takes him to St. Mungo’s for the first time. 

The day before had been a “disaster” and the Underage Magic Officers had very crossly told his parents they needed to “figure something out”. That command had apparently been what sparked his mum to gently wrestle him into his cleanest trousers and the itchy sweater with no holes that morning, before rushing him through their chores, tossing him an apple, and carting him off to London. She’s knelt before him, now, with that smile on her face that makes his heart beat like hippogriff wings on a late summer updraft, and she promises him over and over again that everything will be alright.

“Just try your best to talk so they can help you. Let them inside that brilliant little mind of yours. Think you can do that, cinnamon?”

They meet his aunt-the-mediwitch in the hospital lobby, and then Newt is ushered up behind her to the Children’s Ward, placed in a room with his mother seated behind him and a woman he doesn’t know across the table in front. 

The chair is too big and his legs are too small and he does not want to answer her questions. 

After several long minutes of discomfort, he lets his gaze drift to the wall and he pretends he is somewhere else ( anywhere —the doxy nest in the back garden); and when he starts paying attention again, he is suddenly and viscerally aware that his mother is crying. She’s pulled up her chair to sit directly beside him, and she is leaning slightly forward—toward the healer, who frowns at him—and she is vibrating with the kind of repressed and desperate energy he gets himself when he very much wants to leap for the next branch but knows (with his brother watching, for example) that it would be entirely inappropriate.

“Once a week, I think, Mrs. Scamander, should break him of the quiet.”

Newt blinks, watches the quivering reflection of the charmed lights on the enamel table top, swings a leg in agitation. 

“His father can be like this, though... Isn’t it possible he’ll grow out of it? That’s normal for children, isn’t it? Things like this?”

The healer he doesn’t know is rocking her head back and forth as if considering, and he thinks she looks a bit like a plimpie, bobbing about when stuck in an eddy.

“And your husband, when he was a child…” the healer is kindly saying, in the sort of voice Mother reserves for skittish hippogriffs. “Has your mother-in-law reported this kind of accidental magic? This single-minded mania?”

Newt looks up at his mum and watches her shake her head and bite her lip (No… No, nothing quite the same… ); and there is a part of Newt that wants to crawl into her lap and pet her head the way he does the stray dogs in the village, when they duck away from contact and skitter fast into the shadows. 

But he does not know this place so he does not move.  

They’re talking again, and Newt does not like it here, and he wishes his father were there with his steady voice, and firm grip; the enchanted paper he’d taught Newt to use to communicate when his words are a fog in his mind (but he wasn’t allowed to bring it today because the point was to talk ), but Dad is at work so he’ll see him at home.

“Well, we’ve no way to know about that,” the stranger-healer is saying when he starts paying attention again. “But if something happens again—like yesterday—it would be the Ward’s recommendation to admit Newton for observation.”

His mother is crying particularly hard now — she sounds like she’s choking on something very big and very important, perhaps even her heart, he thinks — and Newt feels that buzzing anxiety just beneath his skin, and he shakes his hands out from his wrists to stop the magic.

No one notices.

“Mrs. Scamander, I’ve sent a note to be placed in his file at the Improper Use of Magic Office, that his parents are reacting appropriately to the Ministry’s concerns.”

His mum pulls a handkerchief embroidered with flowers and griffins from her coat pocket, and she dabs her eyes and is herself again. Newt doesn’t look at the healer, but he watches her press some papers into his mother’s hands, listens as she rattles off the date he is meant to come back.

(Newt distinctly does not want to come back.)

His mother hasn’t carried him in years—not since he got too big to ride pick-a-back as she worked in the barn—but she scoops him up anyway as they leave the office, hefts him onto her hip as she says goodbye to her sister-the-mediwitch at the door to the Children’s Ward, floo’s them to his father’s department at the Ministry so they can all go out for lunch. 

His dad even clocks out early to take him to the menagerie and the bookstore after they eat. 

It is when Newt is on his tiptoes peering inside a terrarium that he suddenly realises his mum has begun to cry again, but this time it seems to be because he won’t stop talking (asking the man behind the counter if he can please see the kneazles! and telling him all about the horklumps he’s been studying in the garden).

It makes no sense, so Newt clings to his father’s hand and pretends it is not happening.