Chapter Text
Waking up after an unremarkable, meaningless and lonely death, is not something Percival Graves had expected.
It could be a nightmare—so many of his nightmares start here, just as he is about to be taken. Just as his life is about to dive into despair. Tired despair rises, as he resigns himself to doing this again. As per the norm, he tries to force through the dream. It’s not like he didn’t have a lifetime to consider what he should have done, how easily he could have prevented the most terrible misstep he’s ever made. It won’t work. Trying to outthink his own nightmares is high up there on the list of depressingly futile things to do. He tries, though. For better or for worse, even his shitshow of a life couldn’t teach Percival Graves not to fight.
The bone-shattering curse flies to his knee and he twitches to the side like he always raged he should have done. The man—his assailant, just call him his assailant—pauses ever so slightly, not having expected—
Okay, so this is weird. Somewhat caught in the moment, his mind sort of—shuts down and he lets his body do what he had spent decades dreaming about. He doesn’t go for his wand. He’s never really needed his wand and this spell, this spell he’s spent twenty-odd years inventing and perfecting, just for this moment—
He throws himself backwards, barely noticing the shock of his shoulder blades hitting the wooden boards. More important things are on his mind—such as pouring every single atom of hatred, of shame and fear and rage and a life wasted into this spell—
It works.
The man flies to the wall, pinned up by, well. Easily a thousand solid-iron blades. Every single piece of iron in a five-hundred meter radius is currently embedded into the—into that. It’s. It’s barely even a body. A disgusting, organic pile of waste, in truth and—
—and Percival Graves had just murdered Gellert fucking Grindelwald in his own little manor house in New York.
***
He is in something of a shocked daze by the time reinforcements arrive. Can they be reinforcements if he hadn’t called for aid and the fight is over?
His Aurors—Are they his?—Fuck—The Aurors do a cursory sweep for harmful spells from a distance. Good work. Never approach a wizard exhibiting such blatant signs of hysteria as Percy is doing right about now. He is mute, shaking, pale and possibly weeping. It’s unclear. When they find nothing—Because there is nothing to be found—What are you talking about, there is so much to be found, fuck—
At least, points out the small part of his mind not sobbing, laughing or screaming, the case is clear-cut. Law of the land is sacred. Jump a man in his house and expect to get your fool self killed, is the comfortable consensus.
Killed is one thing, he argues back, because arguing with himself is clearly the best path forward, right now. Percy pulped the motherfucker. That there grotesque pile of blood and meat used to be a thinking, breathing, evil fucking human being.
“It’s Grindelwald,” Percy says—chokes, really, but who’s counting. “It was Grindelwald,” he corrects after a beat. Hysteria fills him, cut with a rather savage flavour of darkness. It’s almost comforting. He had become intimately familiar with that particular blend in his latter years. “He—in my house and I just—”
Abernathy raises both his arms in a performance of harmlessness so absurd that Percy would scoff if he wasn’t busy falling apart. “Anderson, try to get an ID on the. On the intruder. Director—Can I—The Healers are coming but. Can I. Can we check your wand?” Abernathy’s voice flows slow and quiet. He’s usually better than this. More professional. Seeing Percy like this must be throwing him off.
“Didn’t use it,” Percy says. Laughs, maybe. Hiccups wetly? “Couldn’t reach it in time. But go ahead. It’s in my holster.”
Keeping his arm straight takes just about all focus he is capable of. He’d support it with his other arm if it wasn’t trembling just as bad. Not very helpful, all told. The fact he’s somewhat lucid and cooperating does something to calm his once-second because he reaches out and slides Percy’s wand out of the wrist-holster.
“Shit, boss,” he says, one Priori later. “That’s some wild fucking wandless magic.”
Percy vaguely thinks that old-Percy—or young-Percy, what the fuck—would have scolded him, would have griped about maintaining decorum in the workplace. Maybe he should try, just for the giggles. How morbidly amusing would that be? Mostly, though, Percy is much too fucked up to do anything but laugh and laugh, burying his face into the v of his elbow so he doesn’t have to watch Abernathy’s eyes cloud over in worry.
“It’s okay, boss,” says Abernathy, clearly lost. “You’re okay. Just hold on for a few minutes more and the medics will pop you off to ‘Lewis, sort you out no problem.”
“I don’t have a scratch on me,” he says. “Gellert fucking Grindelwald laid in fucking ambush in my house and I am fit as a fiddle. He didn’t get to touch me, the motherfucking son of a—”
“Shit—Abe is that the Boss cussin’ like that—”
“Laelae now is really not the time. Where are fucking medics, something is not right—”
The pop-pop-pop of incoming apparition is not objectively that loud, but spellfire is spellfire. Percy’s magic rises like a fucking tidal wave, fear bubbling up, up, up his oesophagus, high enough to hurt, high enough to choke—
“Woah, hey, no, Boss, listen to me. It’s just Mayland and his team. The medics remember—” Abernathy’s voice grows increasingly choked—Choked and young—Why is his Second so young?—Fuck, but he hasn’t seen him for so long—
—Wait—Abernathy is dead—killed in an ambush, more than twenty fucking years ago—
—Imposters—but why now, when he’s alone and old and not of any use to anyone?
“—sedate him somehow, he will bring the house down—”
***
Percy wakes up in Mercy Lewis, in his family’s private room. He doesn’t even panic, that’s how confused he is by everything.
Alright so. That happened. Did that happen? Something sure as fuck happened. Something, somewhere is in grave error, because none of what had taken place would be possible if his was a mind operating within acceptable parameters.
Option one is sabotage. It always is, that much he can agree on. (With himself, Circe wept). Sabotage is a constant. Whatever it’s happening, it likely includes sabotage at some stage or another.
The question is at which stage? Is he a hundred and forty-one-year-old wizard who travelled back in time to fix his first-greatest mistake? Is he a thirty-eight-year-old wizard who has been put under some inventive torture that caused him to fabricate a life he hadn’t lived? Because it would be a torture technique, surely? Surely, forcing someone to live a life so potently miserable would have to be malicious, even if the life ended up being fictional?
But how did he know, then? How did he know what was going to happen? What has happened? What would have happened? (His tenses are staging a coup, it seems, and he kind of wants to let them have this one.) How did he know the iron-summoning spell? It sure as fuck should not have been possible in year nineteen fucking twenty-six, not least because he, himself, invented it in nineteen-eighty-nine.
His memories are—fuzzy is the thing. Everything he would theoretically assume about the nature of implanted memories would suggest that, even if such a thing were possible, his real memories should still feel fresh. Yet, emotionally, instinctively, he feels like an old man. Other than the abduction he remembers so very little about his young-life. His now-life? What he does remember, oh so very well, are the aches and pains of old age. Helpless frustrations of fading into obsolescence.
Does it even matter?
It does.
Does it?
Doesn’t it?
The medics arrive, headed by Healer Aethos. Healer Aethos who should be dead for a hundred years and just stands there, old and leathery and so fucking safe.
“I think this is it. I’ve finally gone mad,” Percy blurts, meeting his eyes. For better or for worse, Healer Aethos has been a staple of his life from birth to the old man’s death. He delivered Percy, he healed every single scrape, bruise and wound that he could get his paws on. He’s always been there is the point. Percy only has one way of handling that level of intimacy and care combined and that is abject surrender. “My mind—It’s jumbled and I have memories that can’t be mine—A hundred years of them—I remember dying—I was an old man and I died—Mika—”
If his stuttering wasn’t alarming enough, using the long-unused nickname child-Percy came up with makes the old Healer take note.
“Whatever that—filth—did to you, I can undo.” Says Healer Aethos. Fuck, says Mika. If Percy is to be mad, then he can at least not call the only semblance of family he has left by his last fucking name. “I want to give you a Calming Draught. Will you take it?”
No. “Yes.”
Mika’s eyes narrow even further, before his hand flies into one of a million satchels the man has tied about his person and fishes out two pills. “First, drink this.”
Aspirin. Fucking—Now they remember to check for fucking intruders. Where was fucking aspirin when Gellert fucking Grindelwald was running about halfheartedly mimicking Percy in his own fucking office—
He throws the damn pills into his mouth, chews them audibly so it’s clear salicylic acid is going to enter his bloodstream no matter what. They sit patiently for six long minutes to go by, while Percy goes to a weird fucking place in his mind, halfway between a panic attack and rage so potent he might choke and die from it alone.
“Oh, Percy,” says Mika, once it’s clear the madman gauging wounds into his own thigh is, in fact, not a very committed imposter. The moment of weakness passes before Percy can so much as blink and the healer puts on his battle-face. “Stop that. You are nowhere near old enough to prevent me from sticking your hands to your thighs young man.”
The thought of being restrained sends a wave of fear through Percy, so concentrated that he flinches. His magic rises in distress, wraps around his body, screeching in solidarity with the audible whimper coming from his throat.
Mikhail inhales sharply. “A calming draught. You consented. Here. Drink.”
After all these years of medically regulating his various episodes, he had gotten a handle on his phobia of mind-altering substances. He chugs down the damn potion without complaint, grimacing at the foul taste and the way he can feel foreign influence spread through his body like poison.
It’s fine. He’s used to it by now. He’d have done some truly gruesome things over the years if he hadn’t been able to drug his spiralling mind into compliance. It’s fine.
The artificial calm strangles his heart rate into a perfect rhythm and his thoughts slow down. There’s still too many of them, but the calmer he is forced into becoming, the more certain he is that whatever the fuck this is, it's going to stay. He feels no less an old man in a young body now—if anything he feels it more.
“Alright,” says Mikhail. “Now. Start from the beginning.”
What beginning? When he died? When he murdered the living shit out of Grindelwald?
“I murdered Grindelwald,” he says because that seems like a good place to start. “He ambushed me in my house and I tore him into pieces with a thousand iron knives.”
Mikhail’s smile is a thing of beauty. Old people can pull of menace with style. His wrinkles creak, the mean angle of his lips multiplies over his cheeks. It’s fucking terrifying. “I have been made aware. Fine work.”
“Something happened—right before I killed him. Like I had memories stuffed into my head. I still have them. They feel more real than anything that was there before.”
“Alright. I will cast on you now. Please don’t try the wizard-slaying spell on me when I do.” It’s a good way to describe it. Magic-folk are weak to iron. This spell, Percy’s spell, was designed to murder a magical, plain and simple. A single iron bolt to the body will kill if left there long enough. Percy designed the spell with the express aim of being thorough.
The potion keeps him sedated enough for Mikhail to work. Spell after spell fly his way and judging by the displeased crease furrowing between his brows, there is little to show for them.
“The only thing I can observe is an abnormal increase in brain function. Whatever was done to you, it was mind-magic. Thankfully, your own magic is working overtime to fix the damage. You aren’t, as far as I can tell, in critical condition.”
Good, great, perfect. Makes all sorts of sense.
“You can fix it, right?” He doesn’t even try to leech the desperation from his voice. “Because I can only describe my mind as a hostile place right now. My grip on reality is very fucking tenuous.”
Mika looks back, calm and terrible. “I can’t detect any sign of foreign magic. Without an idea of what, precisely, was done to you, by whom, when and for what purpose, there is very little I would dare attempt outside of an emergency procedure to save you from immediate death. Mind-magic is invasive, often irreversible and our grasp on it is tentative at best.”
Percy blinks, opens his mouth to speak, blinks, closes it back again.
“So then—what?” He asks. “Madness? Institutionalization?”
With a disgusted huff, Mikhail shakes his head. “No, child. Occlumency. Calming draughts. A treatment plan with a mind-healer. Just because there is not an immediate fix doesn’t mean there is nothing to be done. You will have to take some time off that damn job of yours but—”
The thought of going back to the Auror department is almost enough to tip him out of his potion-induced calm. Not a chance, not ever. Everything in his maybe-hallucinated life might have been terrible, but the one good decision he’d made was to quit that fucking job before it turned him into a monster he was supposed to guard people against. Granted, it took him some time to realize it in the maybe-future, but eventually, he had come to the right answer.
“I’m not—I can’t go back,” he says, breathes out like a plea for mercy. “I can’t Mika. I won’t.”
The healer brightens, straightens, looks him straight in the eyes with so much surprised pleasure that Percy feels like he’s seven years old and is telling him that he has been sorted into Pukwudgie just like Mika.
“Goodness, look at you. All it took you to realize you are wasted on that cursed place was to murder the greatest Dark Lord of our age. I have to say, Percy, while the origins of your newfound wisdom are terrible, I think it will be a start of a wonderful chapter in your life.”
Right. Sure.
“Not like I am fit to work anyway,” he says, trying to divert the topic to more comfortable waters than all the depressing things his mind is telling him wait for him in the future. “Fuck, the house. I have to sell that fucking house. Maybe burn it—”
Mika’s laugh is just as creaky and crackling as he remembers it had been. As Percy’s would have been, earlier today if Percy had had a reason to laugh. “You aren’t burning anything Percival Graves and you aren’t returning to that house either. Not only because you blew it up in a fit of pique, but because I don’t trust you alone.”
Where then? Percy has no actual friends. Maybe Seraphina, but even then, he barely remembers her. She wasn’t around in his maybe-memories for long enough that this young-Seraphina will only make anxious and guilty—
“Idiot child. You will be staying with me. I am old and particular and need a young person to boss around. Plus my wards are strong enough to keep the vultures away.”
Vultures—why would—
Oh shit, he’s killed Grindelwald, hasn’t he? Percival Graves has defeated the Dark Lord terrorizing Europe—the press will eat his fucking skin—
“Yes.” He says immediately. “Fuck, please hide me. I will write my resignation letter here and now, please Mika for the love of Circe—”