#ywai

[bringthemtome]

[aethelar]

Your words are ink: Ch 1

Ch 1 : This is not Graves’ day series tag - read it on AO3

Everyone has a soulmate. Some people have two. In rare cases, people have three, though those aren't usually publicised so much. However, the fact remains that everyone has at least one perfect match, even someone as hard and married to his work as Percival Graves.

Graves himself has never paid much attention to the idea. Soulmates are usually discussed with tittering giggles and longing sighs, or half hidden smiles and soft fondness. It's the classic story, the timeless romance, the one thing that will always go right in someone's life.

Graves has seen too much of the worst of humanity to believe in that. He deals with criminals, murderers, and the scum of society on an almost daily basis. He spends hours in interrogation rooms with poor besotted fools trying to defend their soulmates, as if the fact that someone is loved excuses the atrocities they commit. He's seen people grimly hanging on to a relationship that's destroying them because their soulmarks are shackles they can't escape, and he's seen people pushed beyond the limit just turn around and... break.

There's no other way to describe it, what happens to a person when they kill their soulmate. They break. Souls are not made to withstand that kind of trauma, and the empty shells that Graves and his aurors arrest are no more people than the corpses he finds them kneeling over. The death penalty, he thinks, is a kindness in these cases.

So no. Graves doesn't go in for that fairytale happy ending crap. The ink that winds around his wrist is no more interesting than the pattern of stubble he shaves off his chin each morning. He hasn't memorised the first words his supposedly perfect other half will say to him, nor has he spent hours idly tracing the messy scrawl with his fingers to learn the loops and curves of his soulmate's handwriting. He doesn't cover the words with a cuff like so many people have started to do, nor hide them more subtly under a glamour charm or an enchanted watch. He just ignores them.

And if he ever meets his soulmate, he'll just ignore them as well. In Graves' mind, it's as simple as that.

"Are you people contractually obliged to create paperwork?" Newt complained. He was sitting on the corner of Tina's desk, shoulders hunched as he rested his weight on his hands and feet swinging like an impatient child. With an irritated huff, Tina added a cushioning charm to the wood so that his heels stopped scuffing the polish.

"If you'd registered everything before you arrived I wouldn't have to do it all for you now," she said without sympathy. Her quill hovered over the next part of the form with something like dread. "Have you, or has anyone you've been in close contact with, been exposed to dangerous dark items, creatures or curses in the six months prior to entering New York?" she read aloud.

"No," Newt lied easily. Or maybe it wasn't a lie - he had a definition of 'dangerous' that didn't quite match that found in appendix 3b, subsection iv. "And that doesn't actually make less paperwork, it just spreads it out over a longer time period which might even be worse."

"Yes, but at least I wouldn't be the one dealing with it. When were you in Sudan?"

He paused on that, a flicker of an old hurt flashing across his face, and Tina regretted having to ask. "I'm sorry," she said, gentling her tone. "But Graves - Grindelwald - recorded the obscurial you found, and they'll flag that as a dark magic encounter."

Newt set his jaw mulishly. "They shouldn't," he groused. "It's completely harmless in its bubble. And it's not dark magic anyway, it's just - it's accidental magic. Condensed down and given semi-sentience by repressed feelings. Not dark."

Tina sighed. "I know, Newt. But - the paperwork. I just need something to put down on the paperwork." And, because she did know, and because she also knew that the aurors would be overreacting in the wake of Credence's - in the wake of the incident, she added, "Standard quarantine period for unknowns is thirteen weeks. If the magic has remained stable for that duration, it's assumed safe to be released into competent care."

She kept her gaze focussed squarely on the customs forms. Technically, it was freely known information, and technically sharing freely known information didn't count as aiding a suspect in evading the law. Technically.

Ethically she should turn in her newly instated auror badge and have a long talk with herself about moral choices and recording falsehoods on official documentation, but if she was being the truly law-abiding auror she claimed to be then she'd have to report Queenie for continued fraternisation with a no-maj, Jacob for somehow evading the city-wide obliviate (that would probably come back to Queenie as well, actually), Newt for giving a no-maj a case full of clearly magical occamy egg shells to use as collateral at a no-mag bank are you kidding me, Newt for half the animals in his pocket zoo that he steadfastly wasn't admitting to bringing into New York, Newt for -

She'd have to report Newt for a lot of things which she didn't feel like doing. So. Technicalities were fine.

"Am I competent care?" Newt asked. Tina buried a somewhat hysterical giggle and seriously considered spelling the forms to complete themselves without her. In mermish.

"Yes, Newt, you're competent care."

He was silent for a second, something like pride and something like happiness warring on his face. It would forever remain a mystery how Tina could have thought the goof was a threat to New York, seriously.

"Eight months ago," he finally said with a lopsided, if slightly sad, smile. "I was in Sudan eight months ago. And that's - that's actually when it was."

Eight months. Tina made an addendum note of the date of the obscurial's capture and made the executive decision to answer 'no' to the remaining five questions on the form.

"And that," she said, spelling the form dry with a flourish and sending it off to file itself, "is done. Welcome to New York, Mr Scamander, you're finally officially cleared. Congratulations."

There was a staccato rap at the open door.

"Miss Goldstein," Graves - the real Graves - said. He was haggard and thinner than he should be, his usually tanned skin pale and tinged grey. For all that, he'd lost nothing of his authority, and his gaze was sharp and hard. "If I might borrow Mr Scamander?" It was phrased as a question, but clearly wasn't one.

"Of course," she said, standing up from her chair. She glanced over at Newt, but he was fixedly looking at the door handle and his blank expression gave nothing away.

Graves nodded once in what might, in a gentler man, have been thanks. "Mr Scamander," he said pointedly, stepping aside and gesturing at the doorway.

Newt looked up, transferring his stare from the door handle to the window in the corridor over Graves' shoulder. His shoulders were tense and his feet had stopped swinging, and Tina had a sudden moment to wonder if he knew that Graves had been recovered after Grindelwald's capture.

"Are you going to give me the death sentence again?" Newt asked mildly, proving that he was a) probably aware that this was the real Graves, because who would ask that of an actual Dark Lord, and b) a little shit who would definitely ask that of an actual Dark Lord, who is Tina even trying to convince here.

Graves took a strangely long time to answer, enough that Tina had to suppress the urge to fidget nervously. Newt's question could, she supposed, be taken the wrong way, and Graves - evil doppelganger or not - wasn't a man to cross lightly.

"I assure you," Graves finally said with shaken forced calm, "I would rather your continued survival than your untimely death."

Newt weighed the words. He apparently found them acceptable and hopped down from Tina's desk, giving her one final jaunty wave as he left the room. She didn't wave an answer his goodbye, too distracted by the way that Graves swivelled in place to stare after him. He looked rattled. Off-kilter. Even more off-kilter than he'd looked when they'd received the distress call and found him, limping, half-dead and severely pissed off, out of a back-alley sewer.

It was strangely unnerving to see the unflappable man so... flapped.

"Sir?" she managed when he made no move to leave. His head snapped to her with alarming speed, expression closing down into his usual frown. He nodded, tugged the cuff of his left sleeve down to more firmly cover the tumble of dark ink encircling his wrist, and strode after Newt.

The cuff. Of his left sleeve. Over his wrist.

This was the first time Newt had met Graves, the real Graves, wasn't it?

Tina sat down heavily behind her chair and fervently hoped that she was reading things wrong.

[aethelar]

Your words are Ink: Ch 2

1 . Ch 2 : This continues to not be Graves’ day series tag - read it on AO3

Graves was silent during the walk. Newt kept himself one step behind, following where the other man led - he'd become familiar with the walk from the front door to dusty desk in the corner of the records room that Tina called an office over the past week or so, but the rest of MACUSA seemed to be laid out in a pointlessly confusing manner. The insistence on using vertical space in particular; even if magic made it as natural to walk up the side of the sharp-angled pillars as to walk along the obsidian corridors, it was frustratingly difficult to orientate oneself.

Graves' footsteps echoed, each stride measured and solid. Newt shuffle-stepped beside him, trying to catalogue the differences between this Graves and Grindelwald's interpretation. They held themselves with similar confidence and easy grace, though Newt wasn't sure if that was down to Grindelwald's good acting or to similar personalities. Exhaustion dragged on Graves' shoulders that hadn't been present before in Grindelwald-Graves (Grindelgraves?), but he held them resolutely square. His jaw was set, brows drawn low over dark eyes, the expression familiar in its form but harsher, somehow, than Grindelwald had ever managed.

Tina had insisted, still insisted, that Graves was the very embodiment of a good man, but Newt had to conclude that he didn't seem a particularly kind one.

They took a lift to the final floor, foregoing the gravity-charms that they'd used to walk this far. It was excessively modern, made more of gilded mirror than any other material, and the stark minimalism felt oddly out of place. Muggle, perhaps, or just the embodiment of an efficiency rarely seen in the wizarding world.

The doors melted into existence, a fourth mirror joining the other three to surround them. Graves' wand hovered over the panel to his right, but he made no move to touch it to the surface.

"What are your views on soulmates?" he said suddenly, the words at odds with the low voice that spoke them. Newt raised an eyebrow (both eyebrows, he'd never been very good at raising one) at the odd question.

"Is this part of immigration?" he asked hesitantly. "Do I need to declare my soulmate?"

Graves shot him a sharp look that Newt fought the urge to flinch from. "Have you found them?"

It wasn't a personal question, as such, but it was a bit presumptive. Newt tried to find something to focus on to stop his gaze from jumping around, but every surface of the lift was mirrored. Even the ceiling was mirrored - and oh, the floor was glass, how delightfully terrifying to see quite how far down they could fall if the levitation charms failed.

Graves was still waiting for an answer.

"Hard to say," Newt said, deliberately careless. "But probably not." The precise letters tattooed into his skin weren't the most banal he'd seen (his father had had "Hello" on his wrist, of all things) but were hardly unique. He'd gone through a period in his youth of saying the most outrageous things to people he met so that at least his soulmate would be able to recognise him, but it had done little more than earn him a reputation for being odd. Odder.

If he'd been looking at Graves, perhaps he would have seen the wince the man wasn't quite able to suppress. As it was, Newt was fixated on the reflection of his topmost coat button, and missed it entirely.

Graves moved his wand to press against the command panel. It flashed gold, and the lift began its smooth ascent.

"My apologies," he said, the words slow and strangely heavy. Newt looked at him curiously, and he continued, "It was not my place to ask."

The front mirror dissolved away and Graves was walking out with his too-long strides before Newt was able to respond. He hurried to catch up.

The president's office was angular. Every surface was reflective in some way, with crisp corners and sharp edges and no trace of friendly knick-knacks or stray papers in sight. It was, if Newt was honest with himself, rather intimidating, what with the predominance of black and the precise gold edging. Somehow the light pouring in from the enormous windows only made the room seem darker in comparison, and the president herself was reduced to an ominous silhouette that may or may not be staring right at him, he really couldn't tell.

His mind withdrew from its background musings on doxies, and he frantically tried to think of any laws he'd broken recently that Tina might have forgotten to warn him about.

Or that she'd known full well he'd broken, but had disagreed with on moral grounds and therefore decided to remove them from her consciousness so as not to be complicit in illegal activities. It was hard to tell with Tina.

"Mr Scamander," Madam Picquery greeted. Her voice was soft and pleasant, and it made Newt straighten his spine to painful stiffness and try, as subtly as possible, to check his teeth for errant spinach.

Graves completely failed to stick around for moral support, even dubious support, and wandered over to one of the mirrored walls. He loitered there, dark gaze sitting heavy on Newt's back. It didn't help much.

"Madam President," he managed to say in a (mostly) even tone. "Good morning. Ah. Afternoon. To you."

She turned, her profile highlighted with unfair dramatic flair, and raised an eyebrow. Newt manfully refrained from apparating away.

"Good afternoon," she returned. "Mr Scamander, I've been led to believe that you have experience in dealing with magical beasts."

Well. That depended entirely how you defined dealing with, because New York's attitude towards beasts seemed decidedly hostile to the extent that Tina had originally thought he was writing a how-to manual for killing the poor things. Which. No. He did not have that sort of experience.

Thankfully, Picquery didn't wait for answer. "Something is killing my no-majs. I want it to stop."

"A totally understandable position," Newt agreed before he could stop himself.

Tina was going to be so unimpressed if he got deported the same day that she finally finished his paperwork.

Newt braced himself for another raised eyebrow, maybe a silencing hex or two, except that it didn't come. Instead, Picquery tilted her head towards him and allowed the corner of her mouth to quirk into a smile.

Somewhere in the background Graves' looming silence became decidedly choked, and Newt mentally awarded Hufflepuff a house point.

"I'm glad you think so," the president said. Graves had progressed from choking to leaning against a polished bookcase for support, would you look at that. "Your assistance in bringing the beast in would be greatly appreciated."

And that dawning horror on Graves, face, that must be worth another point - what?

"My assistance?" Newt repeated dumbly.

Picquery nodded, sweeping across the room with ridiculous quantities of elegance and grace to pick up a file from her desk. "The deaths aren't caused by spell work, nor any beast our auror department recognises. They have been attributed thus far to the obscurus, but their persistence after that creature's demise would suggest otherwise."

She held the file out to Newt and he took it, boggling both at her dismissal of Credence as a human being and at what she was asking him to do.

"You identified the obscurus with barely a glance at its effects," Picquery continued. "I am confident that your support would be valuable to this investigation."

Newt stared at the neat, quill-point type on the file. Then at the precise curl of hair over Picquery's right ear. Back at the file. He opened his mouth and closed it over the wheezing croak that wanted to come out.

Picquery stepped back and delivered the killing blow: "We would hope, of course, to capture and relocate the creature to a more suitable habitat, but our first priority must be our people and our ability to uphold the statute of secrecy."

She didn't elaborate further. She didn't need to elaborate further, Newt could read between the lines well enough.

"I find myself hoping the same," he said weakly, and with those six words resigned himself to protecting an unknown creature from over enthusiastic aurors with leeway to use lethal force on whichever hapless sod got in their way.

Perhaps, maybe, Tina would have preferred deportation?

"Excellent," Picquery smiled, a tighter and colder one than she'd given before. "Mr Graves will debrief you and introduce you to the team you'll be working with. Your expenses and salary will be drawn up shortly, and in the meantime I'm sure Mr Graves will answer any questions you may have." With a final nod, she glided (glided! What was she, part lethifold?) back to her desk and proceeded to ignore Newt's existance.

How would a part lethifold work? Could lethifolds interbreed with other species? They seemed to lack a certain tangibility that would usually be required. So probably not traditionally, Newt concluded, but magic was rarely a traditional process and -

A strong grip on his elbow brought him back to reality. Graves stared straight forward as he steered Newt around to face the door and began to march towards it, and Newt scrambled to keep pace.

The wait in the lift was in stony silence. Newt amused himself briefly by looking at things through the glass floor and making his eyes lose focus on them. The file was a heavy weight in his hand, and he decided that it was probably not in his best interest to ask Graves any questions, no matter what Madam President had said.

Five points from Hufflepuff, Scamander, for spinelessness.

[bringthemtome]

Howls Moving Castle (2004)

[bringthemtome]

Think my minds playing tricks on me

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not afraid