saturday snippet
thank you @claudthecat for the saturday snippet tag! luckily sunday still has an S so maybe I can get away with being late…
literally the last thing I write, which may not make much sense, but comes from a scene coming up in some point in “keep me in mind”. sort of theseus x percival but also sort of not…
And yet, even if everything had changed—
Dipping his chin, Theseus gave him a cautious look, almond eyes widening under his dark lashes. It conveyed something, Percival thought numbly, but he was raging with some inner fire. He could feel it, creeping up from the destroyed nerves of his leg, settling into a heat far different when it sank into the pit of his belly.
“I don’t remember anything.”
“They said,” said Theseus. His jaw ticked, then, never one to let it go, added: “But are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” snapped Percival.
A long pause stretched between them.
Theseus rubbed his shoulder. He was wearing navy today. The year he’d made Head Auror, he had gone through a spate of charcoal, Percival seeing this only in snatches of glances at internal security briefings and the dull technical conferences Theseus was still brilliant at. He had wondered whether it was the colour of a man stepping into a coffin or the shape of the person Theseus had always wanted to be. This reversion to navy was like coming back to life.
Then again, he’d always looked beautiful in both.
“So you—that is to say, with Grindelwald—you remember some of that? Of everything that happened?” Theseus lowered his voice. “Because I suspected, when I made the—the Vow—that wasn’t going to be a straightforward bargain. In these hostage swaps, it’s only a marginal number of cases where the subject isn’t retrieved without having had some crucial memory modification committed. And I don’t think he leaves his business unfinished.”
Percival had to sit. Theseus dropped into the seat next to him, lacing his hands together and leaning forwards.
“What bargain?” Percival said eventually.
Theseus pressed his lips together. There was a small scar bisecting the soft curve of his lower lip. That was new. “It doesn’t bear much talking about.”
“Damnit, Theo, if I don’t remember anything, I’m relying on you to tell me the truth.”
“I’ll tell you the truth about anything but the compromises I’ve made to survive,” said Theseus. Suddenly, he sounded very tired, his low voice scraped and worn along the edges. “You know, there’s right and there’s wrong. Never did you quite agree with that black-and-white thinking, I know, but—I have principles, still, and I know I didn’t compromise them, but something about it all still feels rotten. Even if it feels righteous, too.”
This caught Percival’s attention.
Theseus turned to look at him. All long limbs in that chair, the redirection of his attention made the distance between them feel very small indeed. He could feel the soft, rapid puffs of the other man’s breath ghosting his cheeks as he, too, leaned forwards. Theseus’s familiar anxiety. What was he thinking?
“They say there’s been murders. Have they told you about that? Because, trust me, it’s really something you ought to know.”
“Goldstein did. Yes.”
To his horror—to his relief—Theseus reached out and took Percival’s hand in his own. His long, elegant fingers were colder than Gellert’s had been. With a firm thumb, Theseus pressed across the crease of Percival’s palm, dried with the harsh carbolic they refused to switch out. Those were always the same, the bathroom rituals that reminded him he was a patient, broken. The smell reminded him constantly of the dripping tap, the tug of it all circling the drain.
“They’ve any idea who it might be?” Theseus asked softly.
“What are you looking for?”
Theseus examined Percival’s nails, flexed his knuckles, checked the bruise patterns along them. Perhaps there was magical residue he expected to find, or evidence of a fight Percival no longer had left in him.
“What have they been doing to you?”
“Making me wish you’d left me for dead.”
Terrible, Percival immediately thought, cheeks heating. The quality of his own breathing had dampened. Everything was wrong with him. He wasn’t meant to be an honest man. It was too dangerous to speak in the same tongues as Theseus did.
“That’s not right.”
“Nothing these days is goddamn right,” said Percival. He wrenched his hand away; Theseus’s chased his, fingers closing on empty air, and when Percival stood, he had no real intention of going anywhere. “If you’re here to talk about what happened to us, there’s nothing I have left to give about it. Every scrap of information I did have, they’ve interrogated me about, and it—it falls apart under any kind of attention, because I don’t know what’s mine and what isn’t.”
A fine shiver of disappointment went through Theseus. He nodded briskly, as if the matter was already concluded, as if none of that naked hope had flickered for a moment in his eyes. “Well.” Theseus raked a hand through his hair. He didn’t pull on it. Didn’t punish himself, in the little ways Percival had noticed he did.
I remember so much about you, but not about what happened to us, Percival wanted to say. They had been in there together; only, officially, MACUSA had been utterly bemused when he’d offered it as a suggestion, and Percival had said nothing more since. It had to be a secret. He didn’t know why, but Percival had never needed to much know why to keep state secrets. It was just his own mind that’d been severed, this time.
“They’re watching us in here.”
“Okay,” said Theseus, lifting his eyebrows.
Percival needed Theseus. The hunger was roaring, unexplainable, infatiguable. It felt as though the world was spinning on its axis beneath his feet. They’d established there was nothing else they could do. There were too many missing pieces, too many missing years.
“I want to think about it, but I can’t,” said Percival. “You know I’m not scared. Don’t you?”
“I know.”
Percival took Theseus’s shoulder. I want to take you to bed, he wanted to say, out of nowhere, as if they could reach back ten years and find one another in the blood and gore of the war. “I don’t want it to be my fault, that I can’t remember. Because it proves I’m not me anymore…and then Grindelwald has won. Fuck’s sake—if you look at this place…”
Theseus searched his face.
“I don’t understand,” said Theseus carefully.
Rarely had Theseus not understood before. The other man, his razor-intelligence, had always been able to understand, at least in the shadowed memories Percival had left in the pieces of his mind.
“I,” said Percival, “want you. If we can.”
Theseus stood a step back, swallowed. He’d gone very still. His eyes went to the door, then back to Percival. “Okay.”
Percival had hoped for a flush of want, for Theseus to move towards him as he’d used to, but it had been too long. Neither knew where to put their hands. That had to be it—that had to be—
