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Organization for Transformative Works
"Hey," Thomas whispered, nudging Newt's arm with his elbow. His eyes were locked across the other side of the bar from their table, nudging Newt again for his attention. "That guy's staring at you."
Newt set his drink down and followed Thomas' gaze through the low-lit room, then darted his eyes away, bracing one elbow on the table and propping his head in his hand to hide his face. "Fuck," he mumbled.
With a curious little frown, Thomas asked, "You know him?"
"Not really..."
But he wanted to. He really, really wanted to. He was just scared for someone to know him.
Submission for @fluff-cember 2024 - 26 Forgiveness
TransNewt hc because it's 7 am and I'm still awake
He always loses his binder because he randomly tries to put it somewhere where storing clothes would be logical but can misplace it later without even noticing it
And every morning he's like "Fuck WHERE'S IT AGAIN"
At Garden’s Edge- ch8: A Day in the Life of a Newt(on Pulsifer)
The lights are too bright, and Newt can’t quite hear what the lady in front of him is saying over the cacophony of beeps. His head also feels quite.... strange. He’s pretty sure that it’s not supposed to feel like it’s floating half a foot above his neck while also feeling like it’s stuffed full of cotton.
Some of the beeping suddenly stops, making it so much quieter in the ER, and Newt can finally understand what the nurse is asking. He tells her he thinks he’s fine, only he managed to hit something in the middle of the road with his bike and that sent him sailing towards the curb, which his bike tire hit at the wrong angle, and that quite firmly ejected him from his seat. And actually, he’s not at all quite sure how he got here, or why he’s here.
The nurse comes closer before he realizes she’s holding a tablet to enter his information in. By the time he realizes, it’s too late.
There’s a sound much like a mosquito hitting a trap lamp with a bright Bzzt! and then tablet goes dark in her hands. Newt grimaces.
It snowballs from there.
She shushes his apologies and uses the flip hospital phone that they use now instead of chargers/beepers to call the nurse station and request a backup one. It, accordingly, powers off halfway through her phone call. She shakes it with a frown and grumbles about the board of offices being cheap with their equipment, turns a sunny smile on him, and brightly says “well, I’ll just take down the basics and get your vitals while we wait. Do you have records here?”
“Uh. Maybe?” probably, “Which hospital is this?”
“The Brugmansia Hospital.”
“Oh! Yeah. I was born here. Uh. I changed my name though. Still Pulsifer for the last name though, figure there’s probably not too many of them around,” he laughs nervously, overly conscious of how awkward he is and how unable he is to do anything about it.
She still smiles, ever professional, and jots down his information. “First name?”
“Oh! Right. Sorry. It’s Newton now. Newton Pulsifer.”
“Thank you Newton, now I’m just going to take your vitals now.”
“Oh- I, uh, don’t really think-”
It’s too late, she’s come up to take his temperature with their new wireless, laser thermometer and it promptly errors out. It continues to error out no matter how many times she restarts it. The heavy seed of dread in Newt’s stomach grows larger. This is exactly why he tries not to go to places like this.
“I’m sorry. Uh, do you happen to have something maybe not, uh, electrical?”
She gives him a funny look for that and he shrinks back.
“Well. Let me get your blood pressure and o2 readings.”
Newt looks dubiously at the machine setup she wheels over to him. Miraculously, it goes okay when she wraps the cuff around his upper arm, and even when it starts. Everything avalanches when she puts the wireless o2 reader on him. Immediately everything in his room fritzes out, the lights even flickering before coming back, but all of the machines are still down or in the emergency boot up system restart.
“Oh bugger,” he sighs under his breath, quietly enough that the nurse fretting over all the technology can’t hear how resigned and unsurprised he is.
The avalanche continues when a nearby nurse ducks in and his tablet powers itself off. The smartwatch he’s wearing starts having three different alarms go off on it, and then there’s some shouts of alarm from outside Newt’s room that he’s really not sure that he wants to know what they’re about.
There are four people in his room now, in varying states of bewilderment and frustration, trying to figure out why everything’s malfunctioning in his room while also trying to get it back up and working. No one’s listening to Newt when he tries to explain that if he could just leave, it’d get better, but then, he’s mostly used to being ignored at this point.
More and more people trickle into the room, Newt spots the tech support guy he wished to be, frowning and scratching his head as he looks at everything. And then he looks at Newt.
A quick mumble about using the loo and Newt escapes out of the room, IV still attached to the weird metal stand and his arm but at least they’re not electronically powered. Just good engineering and reliable gravity.
He figures if he can put enough distance between him, and the rest of all that technology crammed into one small spot, that everything will boot back up just fine. And if not, Newt could write out exactly how to fix it.
So he heads to the loo, because now that he’s made the excuse, he figures he might as well try and also he’s betting on there being a whole lot less fancy technology in there. If only he could actually find said loo. Or any loo, really.
He’s waylaid by a small girl about ten minutes into his wandering of the halls.
“Oh. Hullo there.”
The girl is missing three teeth, has brown hair, and is looking at Newt as if he’s the newest attraction in the city zoo. Under her stare, Newt almost feels like one.
“Wut’er you doing?”
“Er... looking for the loo.”
She looks at him, looks in the direction he was heading in, looks back at him and matter-of-fact-ly says, “you’re going the wrong way.”
He blinks at her, which she takes as permission for her to reach up and grab his hand and start pulling him in the other direction. Bewildered, he followed.
And thus began a brand new game called “Lead the Newt” which had a revolving cast of characters, all under the age of twelve, each insisting they knew where the loo was, and each hiding him from sight any time an adult employee came near.
This scavenger hunt of a game ended at, not a loo (which made Newt extremely grateful he didn’t actually need one), but at a recreational sort of room. There was an old tv in one corner, an open treasure chest filled with costumes and toys, and a few bookshelves. The floor was spongy beneath Newt’s feat and looking down left him staring at brightly colored interlocking foam mat puzzle pieces.
For some reason, all of the co-conspirators find him funny, and really the only tech he might fry in here is a rather old tv that looks like it’s been outdated so many times it can’t recall if it’s outdated or retro at this point, so all in all... This is probably the safest room for Newt to be in. And certainly more interesting than the loo.
And that’s how he finds himself, an hour later, dressed in a paper hat of some kind (its supposed to be a jester’s hat) leaning against his iv pole, making elaborate gestures with his free hand, and telling terrible terrible jokes to a kid in a paper crown and to the amusement of the other kids around him. It’s most certainly a bizarre scene, but no one has commented on it as of yet and due entirely for the fact that the secondary game they’re all playing is ‘Hide the Newt’ any time an adult wanders by. Closets, corners, and blankets have all been heavily featured by now in this game.
So Newt can hardly be blamed for jumping near out of his skin when, after telling a particularly bad punny joke, he hears an adult’s laughter. So he jumps, jerks, and tries to turn to face the voice all in one motion and ends up somehow practically hogtieing himself in his iv cord and going down.
He ended up in a heap of limbs, metal pole, and iv cord wrapped all around him, and his glasses hanging half off his face. “Oh bugger...”
There was a snickering above him from the adult voice and the children alternating between giggles at his fall and joyful cries of “Crow Crow!”, “Mister Crow!”, and “Miss Crow!”. As Newt struggled to untangle himself, with the help of a few kids who both made things worse and better in turns, the other children began pleading with the Crow? Crow?? to pleeeeease let them keep Newt.
The stranger is crouching down to the kid’s level by the time Newt gets mostly upright, and they look a lot like they’re trying very hard not to laugh. “Now. However did you magpies manage to steal a whole person?”
Laughter sounds and they’re throwing themselves at the redhead and the two bags they set down. As the majority are immediately distracted by the prospect of sweets and the passing out of them, the stranger turns to Newt and raises an eyebrow high above dark sunglasses and says, “well? How’d they manage to kidnap you?”
Before Newt can respond the kids answer with excuses that pile over one another ranging from “he just wandered in!” to the actually mostly truthful “he was lost so we were showing him around!”.
“Oh really now?” they seem to be biting back laughter as they continue, “he was lost so you decided to help him by keeping him here?”
Some of the kids looked abashed while others look outright proud of themselves and to Newt’s surprise the stranger threw back their head with a short bark of a laugh before grinning as if proud of them.
Just in case he was reading the situation wrong, he’d done that with people more than a few times, Newt tried pushing through his embarrassment and awkwardness with an “It’s, uh, alright. Really. It’s been kind of fun, actually.”
“Ah. Yeah, they really grow on you.” The Crow glanced at the kids with a mischievous look, “like a fungus.”
Groans and laughter sounded before all of a sudden a shushing and pointing as an adult was seen wandering their way. Before Newt could blink they had him hidden out of sight shoved in a closet between some coats, puppets, and something slightly sticky that he had no intention of exploring further.
He could hear the somewhat muffled conversation of the kids pleading with The Crow to keep their secret before a new adult voice joined the conversation. The voices dropped away a bit, except for the nervous kids right in front of the closet attempting to whisper between each other, before he can’t make anything out at all. He waits, nervousness beginning to creep in because just how long was he supposed to stay in the closet? Actually, about that, he’d really had enough of closets and hiding in them. Terribly stifling and awful and much better really to be out of them.
Eventually there’s the sound of foot falls coming closer and closer to the closet and for a moment Newt’s heart picks up, certain that he’s about to be found and get in trouble. Then the doors are opened and it’s the red headed stranger who jokes, “ready to come out of the closet?”
And Newt’s still full of nervousness and it expresses itself by making him immediately blurt out “already did that once really. Was sort of hoping to not have to do it again.”
There’s a pause where the red head stares at him and the realization that he’s said that out loud crashes over Newt who flushes hotly. “Oh gods, I said that out loud...” and then The Crow tilts their head back and laughs.
“Been there, done that!” They agree with a grin and reach in to pull Newt out. “C’mon, ‘parently they’ve been running a missing patient code for half an hour looking for you.”
Newt relaxed fractionally, “you figured all that out from the nurse in five minutes?”
“Nah. Heard about it when I snuck in through one of the back windows. ‘s right beside one of the break rooms.”
“Oh, okay, that makes- wait. Did you say window?”
But they were already talking to the kids, “Alright you mischievous little magpies, you had your fun but we need to get him back now.” A chorus of “awwwws” and “but!!but!!”s sounded off but The Crow continued on, “if he’s here, he probably needs some help to get better, and I’m sure once he’s feeling better he’ll come say hi again.” Here they glanced over at at Newt expectantly, so Newt nodded since it seemed expected, and then they continued, “alright, so say bye to...”
“Newt.”
The Crow stilled, tilted their head to the side and asked disbelievingly, “really?” as if they didn’t also have the name of an animal.
“Yeah.”
“Alright magpies, tell Newt bye.”
There’s goodbyes and promises to come back and right as they’re leaving the first girl that had caught Newt comes up to The Crow and, in a whisper so very loud she might as well be talking, says “you hafta be nice to him!”
“Oh do I now?”
She nodded furiously, “he doesn’t ree-lize his jokes are reeeeally bad!”
The Crow seemed to choke on something before spluttering into a laughter the kid shushed them for.
“Sorry, sorry,” they managed, fighting back their grin and not looking sorry in the least as they chanced a quick glance at Newt.
The girl frowned, “you’re not sorry at all!”
“I am, I am!”
She looked unimpressed but when bribed with an extra pastry she let it, and them, go.
They’re on their way back to the nurse’s station (Newt didn’t even know what room they put him in) when he breaks the silence to ask, “is your name really Crow?”
“To the kids, yes. You can call me Crowley.”
“Oh. Nice to meet you Crowley. Did you really come in through a window?”
Newmann fandom, I have a request. On Archive of Our Own many years ago there was a beautiful newmann story where Newt was Vanessa and trans. I remember that the author deleted the story because of assholes, but I recall that some of you kind folks had copies. Would anyone know where to find a copy? I really appreciate any help!
@marveliciousfanace & @porcelain-dionysus text post about trans women Newt changed my life & cleansed my soul I had to sketch out this third eye open idea.
It ended up being a LOT more than I planned, but really, Trans wlw Newt is galaxy brain and it’s what she deserves.
Continuing throwing stuff at the Newt is a trans woman homemaker headcanon / self insert, because of the post talking about the need of stories of Aziraphale pining away.
I'm conflicted because obviously this has to happen after to notpocalypse, which means despite their apparent recognition of feelings for each other we have to annoyingly walk it back to allow Newt's transition and settling into happy domesticity. Presumably after the showdown something happened, let's say Crowley was trying to convince Aziraphale after his visit to heaven that in reality Az would be happier on Earth with Crowley, like, "you know, it was a bit stuffy up there. No sense of style at all." And Az thinks Crowell is like taking shots at his style and is like, "Perhaps they just need someone with a little fashion sense like you."
Anyway this goes on and Crowley goes off to invent Emo while Aziraphale accidentally invents hipsters and in the midst of all this Aziraphale has been writing out with a quill this extensive poetry about how the demon haunts his dreams and fills his wings with light and has the whole of his heart - yet carries all these burdens without a single care, seemingly infinitely light of heart and unburdened by the overwhelming love his angle places in this long, slender hands.
So anyway, Aziraphale actually thinks these poems are pretty subtle and has never caught a single clue from Crowley but he has discovered he quite likes taking tea and biscuits with Newt during the afternoon. One day he brings these writings to Newt because something Newt does on the side is editing the odd spot of writing.
They're sitting over tea, Newt reading through page after page, carefully, her eyes flicker and sparkle across the angel's words, the only sound rustling pages and the clink of porcelain. That, and Aziraphale's legs shifting back and forth, betraying the desperate desire to hear what Newt has to say which he is utterly failing to keep from his face. Sometimes a smile forms on Newt's lips, and periodically the angel sees tears glitter in the corner of her eyes. She makes little shorthand notes on a separate pad of paper, unable to bring herself to mar the perfectly artful angelic writing.
They sit for an hour. The tea goes cold and the shadows grow long. Newt sets the final page aside and tilts her head at Az, who is struck by the way the evening light halos around Newt's hair, like the flame of another-
"Az," Newt interrupts. "Have you ever... told Crowley how you feel about him?"
"W-Why- What- Crowley? Nnn- What do you- I'm not writing about, ahehem, that is I mean, these aren't." Aziraphale's hands can't find a single place to settle, as he tries to straighten his spine and tame his unruly legs. "Young lady, I don't see how this had anything to do with editing. I mean," he splutters, "what is this, grammar school?"
Newt's hands settle over Aziraphale's, calming them to the table, stilling him. The angel slumps a little in his chair and quietly says, "I love him. Like a fool."
Newt bends her neck to look Aziraphale in the eyes. "My silly angel, more fool than you know." She tilts up his head. "You idiot. He loves you. He always has."
The angel's mouth tries to form words, but no sound comes out. Nothing but tears flow for a minute until he asks: "How? Can you... know?"
Newt smiles a knowing little smile. "Because sometimes we are the last ones to know the... the things about ourselves which should have been the most obvious in the world. And that's okay. Because it's never too late. Not for any of us."
Queen lyrics: "Can't we give ourselves one more chance? Why can't we give love that one last chance?" This has so much angst potential
Warnings: Fighting, almost breakup, dysphoria, accidental misgendering, and mentions of transphobia
Ship(s): Newt/Anathema
Tag list: @adoratato @iamdevilantlysatan @bri-cas @that-gender-bender @scum-of-the-earth @pieces-of-annedrew @scampycat4999 @elrilsf @my-emo-child @always-reading2 @larrklopp @l-garnxtt @halbarryislife @ninjacatinsanitycrazy @impossiblynervouscycle e @audder17 @boredafsposts @i-really-dig-the-purple @mycrappylife01 @lostwolf-fandomlover r @hamiltrashphannerd @she-who-must-not-be-named @sundry-whovengerslocked @deceitfullyanxiousprince @booklover223 @twdlover03 @drunkinfandomstuff @catsarebestest t @sonic-spade @reprehensibleghost @to-dance-among-stars-in-dreams @afternoon-sunlight @danifandxm @oddpopsicle @rise-abxve e @shipping—hell
Anathema really didn’t want to do this. Newt was such a sweet thing, and he was so good to her, but this wasn’t the life that Anathema wanted. No matter what Agnes said, there was no way that this was the life she was destined to live. She wasn’t even attracted to men, for one, and she could never imagine herself taking a man’s last name. Newt did feel different, almost as if Anathema could love him, but she knew it was her loyalty to Agnes engrained inside her talking. The package addressed “Mr. and Mrs. Pulsifer” had greatly disturbed her. It seemed to bother Newt as well, so maybe this wouldn’t crash and burn quite like she thought it would. She turned out to be wrong.
“I don’t...I don’t understand,” Newt said shakily, setting down the plates in his hands so as not to drop them. “Did I do something wrong?” Anathema’s heart broke at the hurt in his voice, but she persevered.
“No, you haven’t done anything wrong. I just know that this isn’t going to work. I don’t love you, Newt. It’s impossible for me to.” Newt grimaced as if Anathema had just physically struck him. Anathema quickly hurried to fix what she’d said. “Not like that! You’re absolutely wonderful. I just...I don’t like men, that’s all-“
“You don’t?” Newt’s eyes were wide. “Really? You mean that?” He seemed...excited. Then his face fell. “You don’t see...trans women as men, do you? I wouldn’t think you’re that kind of person, but...” Anathema raised an eyebrow.
“No, they’re real women just like any other. Why? What has that got to do with anything?” Anathema asked, skeptical. Newt looked down at his hands, biting his lip nervously.
“I’m...because...” Newt stammered helplessly and his hands began to shake as his eyes welled up with tears. Anathema waited patiently. Newt’s aura was dark, and troubled. Whatever he was about to say was weighing a lot on his conscience. “Because I’m a girl!” Newt blurted. Anathema blinked.
“You...really?” She asked, surprised. Newt nodded and tears began to fall. Anathema’s face softened and she gently wiped the tears away from her partner’s face. “What’s your name, sweetheart? I don’t want to keep calling you the wrong one.”
“It’s Emma,” she said softly, a wide grin spreading across her face. She closed her eyes. “It feels so good to say that out loud...” Anathema smiled and wrapped her arms around her.
“Emma,” Anathema cooed, smoothing her hair and kissing her forehead. “It suits you.” Emma smiled bashfully and rested her head on Anathema’s shoulder.
“It doesn’t yet, not really...I still need to-“
“I know. And I’ll help you get where you need to be,” Anathema promised. “I’ll be here every step of the way.” The faint traces of love she felt before now swelled to an unimaginable size. It made sense now, why the prophecies regarding Newt were so obscure and vague. It was because he didn’t exist.
“Does that mean we can try again?” Emma asked timidly, that familiar shyness making Anathema’s heart flutter.
everyone knows that newt is a trans woman (and anathema is a lesbian). but i have the Proof
Anathema has her PhD. Therefore, if she were to marry Newt and take her last name, they would be Dr. and Mrs. Pulsifer. Or Pulsifer-Device. The package was addressed as such. Agnes knew this, but of course her further prophecies were torched. This also rectifies the egregious omission of Anathema’s title from the story.
