=============================================================It’s raining in New York, the December nights long and dark despite the burn of the electric lights in the city that never sleeps. Percival Graves walks the distance from the office to his home, and his steps are slow and measured only because he makes them so. The rain beats on the cloth of his umbrella, and despite its shelter the damp creeps inexorably into his muscles, into his bones and sinews, making his body ache where the old scarring still lies. December is a bad month for Percival Graves. The long nights bring back bad old memories, and repeat them in nightmares that somehow never tire of reruns.It was on a cold December evening, on the first day of the month in fact, that he made his terrible mistake. Two months of hell it had led to, and a lifetime of regret and fury and scars that don’t fade. Percival closes his eyes against the memories, draws in a breath of filthy city air, and doesn’t let the darkness take him.By the time he arrives home, his internal battle is at a stalemate. His mood is grim despite himself, and the long winter night seems like a comment on his state of mind. He lets himself into his grand town house, in the most expensive residential part of the city, and when he looks up from setting his umbrella in the stand, it’s only then that he knows he’s home.Newt greets him in the hallway, bringing the scent of roasting beef with him, the taste of wine on his mouth when Graves leans in for a kiss. The sound of voices spills out from the open door at the end of the hall, and Percival raises an eyebrow in that direction.“Tom and Sophia. Emmanuel’s here like he said, and Tina as well, but just for tonight,” Newt says, slipping his arms around his neck. “Welcome home.“There had been a time, after his sister and her family had moved back to the countryside to take over the ancestral home, during which Graves had lived in the town house on his own. A beauty of modern architecture, bought by his parents with the money they’d shrewdly invested in no-maj gold mines, the place had been made for an extensive family and their servants. Graves had lived in it alone, like one of the wizards of old hidden away in his private tower, a bastion of solitude in the middle of one of the most populous cities in the world. He’d closed up the top two floors, used but one of the four bedrooms on the second, and entertained no-one but himself in the downstairs sitting room. It had been a lonely life, but he’d not noticed it at the time.After Grindelwald, but mostly, if he’s honest, after Newt, that had changed.He doesn’t even really understand how it came to be, but these days Graves’ house is a far cry from the cold and empty shell of the past. Newt fills it with his presence, with the accoutrements of his profession and his passion. There are three Kneazles, the licenses for which even Percival had agreed were thoroughly tedious to obtain; four Puffskeins, rescues all so covered under the rescue and rehabilitation laws; and a nest of Salamanders that live in the now ever-burning fireplace, present under the dubious banner of a research exemption. And it’s not just the beasts. There’s people too, and this is Percival’s doing. The pain of being replaced, of others not noticing it, had shocked him to the core. To his shame, he’d almost broken beneath the unaccustomed weight of wanting someone to care. And then afterwards, filled with spite for every vicious, self-destructive thought that tried to drag him down, he’d picked himself back up and got on with fixing it. Because that’s what Percival does. He’s stronger than everyone else, so he can take the beatings. He survives when other people don’t. He fixes what others can’t, and he doesn’t give in, because he’s Percival thrice-damned Graves and no-one, no-one is taking that from him. Thus Percival’s house, so big and so empty, is open these days. His aurors, his team, come to visit, and sometimes they stay and they too fill the place with their presence. In the beginning it was mostly the new staff he’d drafted in to replace the ones Grindelwald had poisoned, and of course they’d been easier because they had no experience of his previously distant attitude. But in watching them and watching him, his older aurors had started to show cautious interest in the informal research meetings he’d allowed to take place in his library. Percival Graves has a lot of old tomes on very specific areas of magical law enforcement and if people want to come study them, well, these days they’re welcome. They get coffee and sometimes he’ll engage his visitors in shop talk, and sometimes he leaves them alone, but the point is the house is alive again. It had gone on like that for months, and slowly shop talk turned to casual chat, distance to familiarity, and now people don’t come for advice found in books, they come for the advice only he can give them. Sometimes it’s even work-related. Other times there are holidays and families oceans distant, or no families at all, and no-one ever needs to outright say why they’re here and not there, but Graves’ house is open, and these days the people that turn up in his kitchen aren’t just aurors they’re friends too.And now it’s Christmas again, and in the darkest part of Percival Graves’ year, his house is full of people and light, food and laughter. He basks in the warmth of it, wine glass in hand, leaned back in his chair with Newt’s hand on his thigh hidden beneath the table, and his friends, his friends shouting insults and laughter over his kitchen table at one another.Later, when the house is quiet, he lets Newt lead him up to bed, and stands obediently as he’s undressed in careful, gentle movements, his heart filling up with something he cannot name, an emotion that trembles in his limbs and makes his breath come short. It might be desire, it might be love, but it feels like both and maybe neither. Newt draws him down into his arms and presses them together, surrounded by the warmth of their bed, and the heat of each other’s bodies. Percival lets himself be lost in touch, in kisses, and finally, in the sharp, shocking pleasure of release as he presses himself desperately into the tight curl of Newt’s fingers.It’s been eight years since Grindelwald, and the world is marching on to whatever its future holds. The winter is drawing in, dark and grim, but here, in the heart of his home, there is warmth and love and safety. Here, the world no longer turns, and the shadows are no longer welcome.
