Flares // Newtmas alternate ending

Of course.

What's better than spending the day alone under a tree trying to catch up on sleep?

Spending the day in a cluttered basement surrounded by people and being forced to go through a bunch of old stuff when you haven't slept for thirty six hours.

Yipee.

Why be alone when you can be around people, especially excited people.

It was horrible, to say the least. Most of it, anyway.

After breakfast, they all gathered in the basement of the main building. It was honestly like a maze down there, piles of crap pilling high. We each took different sections, so that we could go through things easier.

As much as Newt didn't want to do this, he couldn't say it wasn't interesting. He'd never thought of all the things he hadn't had when he was a kid that people had before the Solar Flares. There was a range of things from DVD's to colored pencils (which had been extremely rare and Newt had never had them).

When he was a kid, he'd had a few books in the old bookcase that his parents had had and that was about it. He was lucky he'd had Sonya.

Speaking of books, he'd found a bookcase in his section. And this made him excited. Being stuck in the basement of an old house for half his life had been boring, so he'd read each book his parents had had approximately ten times each, though his favorites he'd read close to twenty.

He started rifling through the books on the shelf, taking them out and looking at the title and reading the first few pages seeing if it seemed interesting or not.

Until he came across a particular one.

He completely stopped and set the book he'd been looking through down. He reached out and took the other book and held it in his hand looking down at the gleaming title.

This had been his favorite book-- as well as his favorite series. His mum's copies were old and ratty but these seemed new-- or had been maybe thirty or so years ago before the Solar Flares. They'd obviously hardly been read at all.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

That was his favorite book from the Harry Potter series. He'd read it the most out of all the books in the series-- reading those books had always given him an escape to another world in which there was magic and snow and people had friends. The sun hadn't scorched the world; people weren't going insane from a disease; people weren't living in their basement in fear of going outside. There he was with Harry and Ron and Hermione and he was sneaking into the Ministry and searching for Horcruxes and fighting dementors and flying a broom and trying to win the Triwizard Cup. He'd done it all-- along with the Golden Trio. That might've been the only thing that had kept him... okay.

He'd always been okay, nothing more, nothing less.

The only exceptions were when the Cranks came, banging on the door, begging for food and his father had to go upstairs to try to drive them away. His mother had huddled close to him and Sonya and they had stayed in the corner of the room under a blanket.

But the books had made everything... okay.

"Newt, buddy, you alright?" Gally called from a few paths over. Newt realized that his hands were slightly shaking and he'd been staring at the book for a little while.

"I'm okay," Newt said. He set the book on top of the table next to the bookcase and started looking for the rest of the series. A whole bout of memories had just hit him in the face, albeit not all were good.