Percival Rex: The Prologue
When Percival Graves had fought in The Great War he had fought alongside wizards and No-Maj’s alike. He often thought back to the mechanical beasts that the No-Maj men had built, had birthed from fire and iron and steel, and idly wonder what sort of person it made him to only think of objects of destruction when he thought of No-Maj inventions. He had idly heard of a man inventing something called a tell-foney that could be used to speak across great distances, much like Floo but with a series of wires and electricity. The No-Maj record players and gramophones were a hit amongst his peers, but he had only briefly paid the funny little contraptions any mind.
Crammed inside a tank along with two other wizards and four No-Maj men, he had witnessed a man strike a match to light his cigarette, struggling with the flimsy stick, and had reached over to light the end of the cigarette with his own fingers, a brief, telling show of witchcraft that had stunned the young man silent for the rest of the night. A week later Graves had waved his hand and scraped the remains of the young No-Maj soldier’s face out of the inside of the tank.
Credence Barebone was probably one of the few miracles of No-Maj creation that Percival Graves had ever deigned to pay attention to that was not an object meant to wrought destruction. When he dreamed his dreams were filled with No-Maj record players and cigarettes lighting themselves and tell-foney wires tangling, strangling him, lighting lines of pain across his limbs, across an arm that was no longer there, as he danced a morbid waltz that Grindelwald had composed for him.
A waltz he danced with Credence Barebone, instrument of his torment often times.
The dreams bled together, all a singular never-ending cycle of pain then relief, some moments more mild than others. Memories (the No-Maj girl who he had quietly given a tin case of eggs to, asking her in clumsy German to cook for him) and fantasies (sweeping Credence up into his arms to dance to the raucous jazz music playing in a sunlit apartment) mingled into one (Percival staring across the table in that ramshackle German apartment, the girl’s face was replaced with Credence as the smell of frying eggs and a few scant strips of bacon filled the air, the bruises on Credence’s arms the same as the ones on the poor German girl’s).
He thought of Franklin Kee, who had handed Percival his dogtags and his wand and stood, walking towards the enemy line, entirely unarmed, sedately strolling forward. He had walked into a fog of mustard gas and proceeded to let the deadly cloud of yellow smoke eat away at his flesh, fill his lungs and suffocate him to death. He thought of his own arm, thrown across the room, still clutching his wand, and Grindelwald’s purred out Incendio that had lit the flesh on fire. He thought of the smell of burning, cooking meat, the stomach-churning stench of it seeping into the wallpaper and bed curtains, blood and ash spattering the edge of the bed where the sheets and bedclothes were now slashed open. All of these moments melting together, the drippings of wax Easter candles held during Mass as he stood beside his mother, running scorching and painful over his knuckles, his eyes tracking the mingling lines as they ran and merged in one. Everything was a singular moment, every moment was a patchwork quilt of memories and feelings and experiences, muddled together until he couldn’t tell them apart.
He thought of himself in Franklin Kee’s position, of himself in Credence Barebone’s shoes, staring at the slats of his own bed and thinking of just... Giving up. Throwing himself into Grindelwald’s line of fire and hoping the man decided to simply put him out of his misery. Thought of continuing the fight despite all odds, despite every ounce of abuse poured into him. He thought of seeing Credence in the streets of New York, handing out flyers in the January cold, his fingers turned blue and the abuse of his mother’s rage evident in long bloody stripes across his palms. He thought of the girl, “Graves’ young schatzi” as the other soldiers had called her, standing in her own apartment, screaming and sobbing as soldiers, No-Maj and Wizard alike, pawed and laughed and grabbed at her until Graves stepped in, barking at them to leave her be and brandishing his wand. He thought of his schatzi and the bombs carpeting her town, of her corpse lost amidst the rubble, crushed and twisted and still-warm even as he dug her out from the ruins. He thought of Credence, of all the violent fantasies that Grindelwald had whispered into his ear like poison, the man cajoling Graves with ideas of how exactly he would break and ruin and destroy the boy.
He thought of every nightmare he had ever been afraid of and found that none compared to this horrifying reality.
When a deadly black fog rolled into his apartment, filling the entire building, peeling at the wallpaper, making Graves cough with the suffocating fullness of it, he wondered if his fervent, silent prayers to a God he hadn’t prayed to since the war had been answered. Grindelwald had finally tired of him, had decided to kill him, to rid himself of the nuisance of Graves’ continued existence.
He was in his apartment (he was in a small nameless little town in Germany), coughing around the air thick with magic (a shield thrown up at last minute to stop the roiling waves of mustard gas), the bedframe rattling and thrown aside (the dishes rattled in the girl’s grip as she set the table for two), staring up at Credence’s wide, terrified eyes (the boy’s face blended and merged and wavered with that of the girl who had looked at him as if he was a saviour even though he was one of the men pillaging her town, as if he had gifted her with divine intervention rather than foreign invasion).
“Mr. Graves-”
When he woke up it was too light.
The sterile, white walls of Saint Jude the Apostle Hospital for Magical Maladies stared back at him and he looked over as the mediwitch entered the room, her brows furrowed as she took his vital signs and sent off a patronus to inform someone of his return to consciousness.
He tried to lift his arm to push her away when she shone a light in his eye from the tip of her wand , only to freeze when he saw that his left arm was missing, from the middle of his elbow down. A memory of cooking meat filled his lungs and he gagged on thin air, retching up nothing as he rolled onto his side, distantly registering the sound of the nurse calling for help.
The second time he woke was to the sound of someone climbing into the bed alongside him. His eyes snapped open and for a moment his reality swam, catching sight of a girl with blonde curls who lived only in his memories, her eyes a sharp bright blue, before the image was brushed aside by a blink of his eyes, revealing Credence’s own inky dark gaze fixed upon Graves’ own face.
“What are you doing up, Credence?” He mumbled, reaching out for Credence with his left hand only to feel the absence of the limb more keenly.
The boy had numerous gashes from curses across his chest, back and arms, and his hands were bandaged up with salve. Grasping Credence’s wrist firmly, Graves pulled the boy closer, making as if he wanted to pull the bandages off.
“Who hurt you?”
Credence shrank before his eyes, the boy bowing his head and whimpering softly. “I’m sorry. He was just... It wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been you. And he - when they took him away you weren’t there and - and....”
Clarity came to him and Graves stared at the boy, “You found me.”
“I found you.” The boy whispered. “I couldn’t live without you.” His eyes were so earnest and dark and wide and brimming with tears, his hands trembling, one resting lightly upon the hand grasping his wrist.
“Oh... Credence...” Percival lifted the boy’s hand to his lips, kissing the heavily bandaged surface, letting the hand cradle his cheek. “You miracle, you wonderful beautiful boy... You saved me.”