Work Text:
Percival Graves has had a melody since before he can recall. Exactly as he should: to the best of anyone’s understanding, the music was meant to guide lives like a circuitous arrow, sketching a path that might lead him to the other half of his Ensemble, his soulmate. The one and only person who could give the melody a true meaning, fill it with words, make it whole.
Played out, it was just a couple of notes at first. Sounds to be found in his toys, repeating until his mother planted him before her piano. Then, a string of single keys, and a single chord, not yet a motif.
As he grew older, so did the music. It gradually grew with him, evolved and changed together with him. It took on new form, when he was eleven. His parents exchanged glances as the melody began repeating around some new element. And then there was school, and the melody evolved again and again, more complete, refined, and emotional each passing year.
One chord and a string of notes. Then a full measure, two, and three. A string of chords, a motif. A refrain, a melody, a theme. A child growing, learning to be a man.
Sometimes it echoed so loud and persistent in Percival’s head that he wanted to sing along, felt it press to his teeth and lips. As a child, he had, until he was asked about the words and couldn’t reply. Futile without knowing the words; and that was to let alone the fact that Percival could barely sing at all, didn’t have any tune in his bones but his own. He hummed the melody instead, letting the sound soothe the piercing feeling into something that made him believe the stories, made him believe that he truly would, eventually, meet the one who would sing it right.
It was the way things worked, the way their world lived, filled with music and rhymed texts that always, almost, always found their match. Melody and Lyrical, brought together to make Song.
Still young, Percival imagined that once he graduated Ilvermorny, he would meet someone with the lyrics to his melody. Would it be at work, in the streets of New York or somewhere completely unfamiliar? Or it could happen even sooner: classmates came back from each summer, bright-eyed and singing, filling Ilvermorny with music.
It never did.
So he told himself, patience. Wait. He was no hopeless romantic, worrying for his match like a sore tooth, but got on with it. Romance was distracting, even Ensemble relationships could be tumultuous.
After all, he had a job he loved, he was climbing the career ladder faster than most. His teachers had liked to call that talent, called him a natural, like endless hours of practice was simply natural. His superiors said the same: he was a ‘gifted’ wizard. And a fiercely dedicated one, focused entirely on the task at hand.
Better to build a life that he could offer alongside the melody, a career that could offer stability to the person he’d commit to.
Years slide by; practice scales. Patience, wait.
Percival couldn’t say that he adored the sleepless nights spent uncovering the most intricate of crimes, but the mornings, when the excitement was draining from his muscles and his caught crook was sitting below in the cells, when they were all over, when the folders got shut and the case closed, as it thumped down onto his superior’s desk, the feeling was so rewarding, that he wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the whole world. It filled him up like nothing else did.
Music, always more compulsion than a proper hobby, was hard-pressed to compete — a slightly better sleep schedule wasn’t worth anything at all by comparison.
He worked.
Being so focused on his work, he had no time to worry about the music that was meant to shape his life and lead him to… he really hadn’t the foggiest idea where. Who. The melody didn’t exactly scream “an auror”, did it? Too restless. He couldn’t imagine giving up the city, his work. Couldn’t imagine that a soulmate wouldn’t have resented it, hundred-hour weeks at bizarre times.
So he played, when he thought to, on the big MACUSA piano in the conservatory, sometimes during breaks if he had them, sometimes late in the evening, just before heading back home. He tapped it, feeling the notes as a physical movement, against his desk, or wand, or anything available. The music remained with him through the years, through the dull grind and the horrifying savagery of the war, through the worst and best of times, no matter what happened, the music remained something that never changed.
A heartbeat, if hearts never raced: it didn’t change, but he did.
Urgency faded, under work and stress, with age. So what if he never knows what the song is about? Meeting his soulmate didn’t matter anymore, if it ever really had. It was not the reason why he played, to draw the Lyrical to his melody. He was happy with his life, as it is. Content.
MACUSA knew the sound of his melody. It was tapped against wood, against wool, against steel. It wandered over ivory keys at shifts’ end, and was hummed over coffee. And many wondered if it was supposed to be wordless.
Some people’s were, some melodies needed space to ring clear. Not everyone’s heart was a duet.
Percival Graves’....it sounded complete as it was, and sometimes aurors stopped by just to listen. Never long, the boss wouldn’t stand for it, and wouldn’t linger himself if he caught anyone watching too intently.
It was a lovely melody — beautiful, to most ears. But not... Not cheerful. It did sound hauntingly doleful at times, restless, looping.
Nobody dared to mention it though, Percival Graves was too much of an authority for comments or pity smiles.
It was a surprise when he stopped. Only a month of silence, but still, a surprise that starts one day and stretches.
No one quite knew when he’d stopped, and certainly no know knew why.
No one asked.
He played again, eventually. Flat, perfunctory, like he’d forgotten how.
If only his aurors could have seen beyond it, if only they could have known, if only anybody cared enough to notice that after that one raid went totally wrong, when he… when nobody actually returned.
Just a shadow in his clothes and with his face, a completely different man, a fake.
At first, Gellert Grindelwald kept the auror in his own flat. Which seemed far worse than any other place it could have been, a type of experiential stain that would never fade out of the wainscott and the floors. Having healed his wounds only enough for Graves not to bleed to death, extracted his memories one by hard-fought one, Grindelwald chained him with countless binding spells and decided that this was enough to keep his victim at bay.
There was no torture. Not the way the world understood torture. Not the way a soldier of the Great War knew torture, no mustard gas or dragonfire burns. No mud, no food shortages, no scent of dying, no sound of boys weeping terror into their bedrolls. Definitely none of the base agony of amputation or splinching wounds, no thousand-fold cuts or lightning strikes. None of the creative insults that criminals used to maintain the pecking order in a world even more secret than Prohibition, broken bones and slow bleeding and panicked gasps bouncing off the wrong side of a pine box lid.
He watches his own face and body move at a mind-twisting distance, and loses the management of the limbs attached to him like he’d been deemed incompetent with them. No torture, save for having to watch his captor wear his own face, and Imperious curses forcing him give over the tedious details of his life. Drink his coffee, walk, act in certain ways, be it furious or surprised, as Grindelwald practiced his performance. It hurt—Grindelwald had only healed him just enough to live, not more. Imperious didn’t seem to care, and his movements offered no quarter to slow-knitting tissue. He’d hate Grindelwald for it, and he does; but he doesn’t kid himself into believing he’d have been much kinder to himself if he’d been free.
Losing the satisfaction of a well-earned coffee was a minor grief. There were greater losses to mourn.
He took Percival’s melody, played it day after day. Grindelwald wrote it down, grinning — he burned it and just when Percival thought he might be satisfied, made him lift a pen to inscribe it onto paper once more. Made him give it over, the movement casual, like he gave over his heartsong every day to narcist madmen. And played it until it rang in Percival’s ear, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Grindelwald played it over and over, in hope that he will get it just right, because those are the small details that matter the most. One could act completely out of character and it would slip by unremarked, if the gestures, the music and other insignificant details, like a favourite pair of cuffs, are firmly in place.
Grindelwald sometimes asks him, whether he is an exact replica of what Graves once was, with a slick smile Percival cannot recognize on his own face. He hates it.
Percival doesn’t answer, won’t make a sound unless Imperious drags it from him. He’s resolved: he won’t make it any fun for his captor, who seems to crave his attention and dismiss it by turns, and he’d rather be willfully silent than silenced. So he stares ahead and hopes that this pineapple-headed bastard is wrong. That his department is better than this, that they will notice, given enough time. That he is nothing like Gellert Grindelwald.
His fingers don’t tap, his throat stays quiet. He can’t tell if the song in his head is quieter, or louder, or if he’s losing his mind.
Dust gathers on the windowsill, as the days get longer and the sun starts shining brighter. Spring is over; Percival doesn’t like summer, it’s always too hot for his liking, and he usually waits impatiently for it to end. But now he’s counting days, watching for the slightest chance to get out. His count stops on day fifty-two, when Grindelwald notices with a terrible chuckle and puts a charm on the window. The scenery behind it freezes, fades to dark. And then the only way to tell the time is watching a dieffenbachia on the windowsill slowly wither away, as his captor gets too busy to water it and it starves for want of the light. A thoughtful gift from the Goldstein sisters for something he’d have waved off as the duty of a mentor, it once was a beautiful plant. He’d been careful not to neglect it.
It isn’t any longer.
Fifty-two days merge into one neverending night. Percival comes to think that, perhaps, he is — like Grindelwald. At least to the extent that nobody can tell the difference. And if they can, well… then Percival has no idea why it all goes so incredibly smoothly for his captor.
Does nobody notice how this excuse for a man butchered his song, how he can never get it right?
Perhaps… Perhaps nobody ever listened close enough. He’d caught people watching sometimes, but maybe they’d thought of it as...as some sort of elevator music, something meaningless, void of any personality or feeling.
Some people’s melodies are best played alone. It’s sad, but not everyone has a mate waiting, and their music reflects that. Too hollow to complement anyone else’s, so empty they just — disappear.
It makes a terrible sort of sense.
Being in captivity is painfully embarrassing and frustrating. Percival tries to escape several times, leaping at the small mistakes Grindelwald makes like they might be the perfect opportunity. There aren’t many of those exploitable mistakes, but he watches for them, saves his strength for the next.
But all his efforts turn out to be futile in one way or another; he is caught every time and Grindelwald doesn’t torture him. He’s thoroughly punished for his attempts, but like a naughty child: banished to a corner, Imperius’d silent and still, to stare at the wainscot and the floor. Everything hurts; he sits on the floor like a toy soldier abandoned for bed. He can barely breathe, and he does not tap, and he does not hum.
Futile. Grindelwald, after all, is an incredibly powerful wizard, his strength is too great for Percival to overcome. He tries to think what he might say to one of his aurors, after he’s driven himself too dizzy with self-recrimination to think of another escape route. Tries to breathe, to convince himself that failure after failure like this isn’t unexpected when dealing with such a powerful wizard. After all, nobody in the whole of Europe had been able to put an end to the dark wizard’s deeds, and he tries to remember than he’s just one man and one man was never going to be enough, but if he stays calm, and is very, very clever, perhaps —
But it sounds like a lie in his head and he wants to rage and weep for how useless he feels, how helpless he is now.
He should have been more careful — they all should have been better prepared, more wary. He should have protected his aurors — should have sent them back, when suddenly it was chaos instead of an orderly incursion. Should have shielded their retreat, and perhaps escaped himself — he could have been a coward, even, when everyone else had fallen, he could have run. He could have used an unforgivable curse, something Grindelwald wouldn’t have had a chance to block, and he didn’t even think of it. He could have blown the whole building to bits, made his aurors’ sacrifices mean something and joined them, defiant. He could have been a sensible Department head and delegated, just stayed back in his office and not presented the temptation of a high-ranking target for Grindelwald’s amusement. His mind floods with regrets.
He swears to himself: the next time he faces a Dark wizard with aspirations of world domination, he won’t be so foolish as to cling to MACUSA’s rules.
As the days slip past, it seems clear that there won’t be a ‘next time’.
The only thing he manages to do, something that bleeds sharp pride into his aching belly and sharper shame, is give his captor enough trouble to grow tired of his company. It isn’t much, isn’t enough, but persistent silence and stoic resistance is an effective prod.
He doesn’t know what day it is, when he first ignores the food Grindelwald leaves like an after-thought. Grindelwald doesn’t notice, that first day.
He certainly notices the second day, though. It proves to be the most effective tactic of resistance Percival has managed, in all his time as Grindelwald’s captive: in a fit of pique, Grindelwald turns him into some kind of object, which comes dangerously close to being shattered against the floor, and is instead entrusted to one of Grindelwald’s subordinates to hide.
Percival struggles, first grimly triumphant, and then sincerely frightened, until the spell makes his head go quiet.
Teapots have none of the music of their stovetop cousins. He is inert, voiceless.
He is quiet for a very long time.
***
Percival, of course, cannot know it. When the spell fades away, he finds himself alone on a deserted rocky island, small enough to cross in exactly two minutes. He has no idea where he is, or how long he has been a thing instead of a person. All he knows is that he’s all alone, and around there’s nothing but cold rocks, sharpened by wind and ocean waves.
Everything hurts.
Over hours that ache like days, he exhausts ways to escape this rocky island, but without a wand he is not capable of much. It’s almost physically hard to think. Remembering even the simplest spells gets challenging, using them — even harder. He mutters a warming spell and feels it take as much of his magic as a patronus charm once did. He’s weak, and his hands tremble, but not yet from the cold. Surely he could still swim, but just as surely he would drown: the land is nowhere to be seen. There is no potable water, and there is no food.
Better, perhaps, to leave a body; someone would find him, someday, and to drown was to disappear entirely. He sits — he groans to do it, because everything hurts and pebble beaches are no more comfortable than bare wood floors. The only thing he can do is to look at the waves crashing against the sharp cliffs and remember his melody, gradually accepting his fate. Looking at the stars and thinking about the fact that somewhere out there, far away, someone's words will never find their match in music.
He sits, and hurts. He taps, and hums, and watches the waves as the sun sinks.
***
It’s either that genius extends to all his skills, even acting in all its imprecision, Gellert has decided, or that Graves’ subordinates are terribly unobservant. His research indicates that their Director was nearly famous in MACUSA for playing the piano, trailing restless fingertips over melancholy keys, and here Gellert stands, securely in his place, living his life, fingers still and keys dull since he hasn’t gotten it right yet. He might not bother at all, but the Plan demands exactitude and dedication, and he fancies himself a perfectionist.
Once the most qualified aurors are gone, sent away for missions or transferred away to remote offices for minor infractions — once the amusement of taunting the Director has been abandoned — his attention to it wanes. No use investing anything in sustaining that farce; even if someone does see the difference, they’ve chosen not to act.
But for the impact on his plans, Gellert Grindelwald does not care about someone else's melody, nor their coward employees: the Plan demands his utmost attention. He has his work; an obscurus to be found, laws to be twisted and broken in a spectacular array. He is not interested in unwritten songs he can’t hear, he is not interested in songs that are incomplete and meanderingly pointless, wooing someone who wasn’t there.
Who would have thought that everything would go awry so quickly? That sending an annoying Brit to die might be the catalyst not of global war but his own minor failure here? That the obscurus might turn out to be the squib boy, not his useless brat sister? That an auror would turn against him, and more, that only one auror would turn against him.
Loyalty above all, indeed, he thought, and nearly giggled.
Oh, the evening had been full of surprises. Gellert already knows that his arrest will be no setback. He will escape, and almost half of the congress is now loyal to him, swayed to his truth, while the other half is, well… there is no union among them, they see the enemy in every shadow, a plot in every move, too suspicious to notice anything going on in plain sight right under their noses.
People in that state of mind are easy to trick and even easier to manipulate.
And if Grindelwald encounters someone who isn’t, well, Imperius curse copes with the task just fine. After Graves, these will feel like child’s play.
In the meantime, there shall be a temporary lull for New York. Aurors loyal to President Picquery can take a breath they hadn’t realized they were holding, as the rain washes away the destruction and the raging obscurus and the thunderbird soaring into the skies, out of city’s memory.
The traitorous page of Percival’s melody lies on the piano in the atrium, forgotten in the turmoil of the night's happenings...
***
“Please wait here! And don’t touch anything,” Tina tells Newt, leaving him in the MACUSA atrium, “I will be right back, I just need to…”
What exactly she needs to do, Newt doesn’t catch, too distracted by his surroundings to really listen to what his friend has got to say. Surely he’s been here before, it feels like he’s been dragged through every corner of this building in the last three days, but the insides of the Woolworth building are impressive enough to marvel at them once more. He stops by the grand piano, and looks around. He has seen this instrument already, remembers the polished gleam of it, like the Niffler’s back. Last time, however, there were no sheet music left on it, and the circumstances did not contribute to excessive curiosity. Now… now he wants to take a closer look.
Lyrics always have it easy , they say. Nothing to worry about, when it’s all written down, no desperate scramble for the right thing to say or do. Someone else might say that Newt has had every advantage, could find his soulmate without any complications but those he built up for himself. Plenty of someones had said exactly that, scoffing at his hesitance and worries until he learned not to say anything about it at all.
His skill with a keyboard suggested that he was the one carrying the melody. He didn’t like to disagree, would duck an awkward gesture and mumble away something vague, but it was not true.
The words he was born with were strange. Not unknowable, just — without tune and tone, they were merely pretty scraps of poetry. And incomplete, which was a strange thing for someone so far out of childhood. Almost incomprehensibly vague, the meaning hiding under the words had been a mystery for a long time. A mystery he tried to solve, of course, but it had faded in the face of new words, new languages, that carried their melodies with them. His life’s work was filled to the brim with learning to speak to amazing creatures, and Newt…
Newt doesn’t look for a melody.
If he stumbles upon one — great. Maybe. If not, well, it’s really not a big deal. He annoys people, anyway.
Right now, with Tina disappearing in the depths of MACUSA, restlessness tugs at him: he’s got absolutely nothing to do while he waits. He could have offered to go with her, but Merlin knows how he hates all those tables with their endless stacks of papers, documents and permits. Bureaucracy revolts him, makes him twitchy and claustrophobic, his heart pounding too hard in his chest, so if Tina is willing to deal with it for him — Newt will let her do it, with no questions asked. He will thank her later on the way to the docks; she promised the President that she’d escort him, prevent any more creature mishaps.
But right now… His fingers itch, the ivory keys are at once repulsive and beautiful, and there’s nothing to be done for the creature they once were, so why not play something while he waits. He doubts that anybody would protest; MACUSA is too busy now to mind the noise, with a Dark Lord having wreaked havoc. He gently touches the keys with his fingers, eyes focused on notes written in unfamiliar handwriting.
Curious looking tune.
At first, as if trying to taste the music, he slowly drops sound after sound into the air. Raindrops, a slow tapping. Then they drew him in, smoothed the tapping to a soft patter, flowed, and the music takes control over him.
And it seemed... vaguely familiar.
No, not vaguely. As familiar as shaving, as near as his own magic, his own wand. His. But not.
But how can this be, bearing the words in his heart, remember the melody as well? Is it some kind of magic trick? A charm, perhaps? He has never heard of somebody discovering their heartsong by playing it themselves, from written notes. A soulmate was supposed to do that, they were supposed to meet. To see each other, and not just…
Music fills the building, echoing off the walls, and some staff members freeze in their tracks. They haven’t heard this haunting sadness in the notes, it faded over the past six months, and now it is finally clear why.
Aurors passing by freeze — gazes dropping and shoulders slumping — shamed, as the music strikes at their consciences. The Director would be disappointed — he had relied on them, in vain, as they had let the intruder take their superior’s place. Someone, overcome, weeps. A few swell up with righteousness, furious at the trespass: to play someone's melody, without even knowing the person was a cruelty. They are sure that the British magizoologist does not know what it is. Whose it is.
And then Newt starts singing.
It’s startling, to be surprised by his own mouth, his own lyrics, but once he’s started he doesn’t stop because — the words fit the music perfectly, complementing it, and complemented by it in response.
The winter may pass and the spring disappear
The spring disappear
The summer too will vanish and then the year
And then the year
Now the words, always so vague, seem finally meaningful. Hope lights up in his chest for a second — really? After so many years, the dust has finally been erased from the words and they have found a place, a time to sound, and for the first time ever so loud? Now as a Song .
Hope is a fragile creature, and it flickers desperately in the face of terrible loneliness. He feels suddenly as lonely as an augurey’s cry, and he wonders if this feeling has something to do with the melody itself or the way he discovered it. He hopes it’s the latter, fears what such a sad melody would mean.
But this I know for certain: you'll be there with me
You'll be there with me
And just as we promised I'll find you waiting then
I'll find you waiting then
His fingers find the keys blindly as his vision steals away, find it even when he shakes while an unfamiliar picture rises before his mind’s eye: waves. Rocks. The piercing wind seems to crawl to the bone, cold even when the atrium is warm, and Newt still does not understand - does not want to understand, does not want to be seeing true - what he sees. Diminished in the midst of towering rocks and icy waves that mercilessly smashed themselves against the stones, the figure of a trapped man shivers and wraps his arms close, embraces himself in a vain desperation to keep the remnants of warmth.
God help you when wand'ring your way all alone
Your way all alone
God grant to you his strength as you'll kneel at his throne
As you'll kneel at his throne
Percival hears a stranger’s voice. He hears the words, which he had never heard before, that spear him through, ripped apart and made whole. He can’t hum any longer — no water and hours of cold have reduced his voice to a fair imitation of the rocky spit of land he’s trapped upon. It doesn’t seem to matter, the shape of the melody pressing out regardless. He knows what it means: somewhere far away, his melody, taken by force and left carelessly somewhere, written in his own hand, in which he has in the span of some few hours unwittingly placed all his present hopes and his despair, has found its other half.
He hears a stranger’s voice, a shock since it probably ought to be impossible but it is nothing but comfort, this voice that brings some much-needed scrap of warmth back to his soul. It sings a promise.
He repeats them, soundless, lips dry from the cold and salty wind, as if trying to feel as that other voice sings them. Knows the shape of the melody better than breathing, struggles to learn the words as they slide slippery over his lips. To make his hazy brain comprehend, to feel them and hoard them close, the brightest memory of his otherwise faded life, before finally…
He closes his eyes, focusing fully on the song. It has become one already, a song, not just a stray collection of chords, restless and looping without its meaning. It engulfs him, his tired soul, and brings him a measure of peace. His body no longer aches for the effort of shivering from the cold. He isn’t bothered by the wind or the rain that has kicked up to torment him.
In those last moments of consciousness he feels not sadness, nor pain, nor disappointment. The words ask of him to trust and so he does, without question or doubts.
He waits.
Tina returns to the sound of music, so familiar she had almost dared to hope. She offers Newt a weak smile, guilty for how disappointed she was to see copper hair and a bright blue coat, right where she’d left him.
A long black coat over an immaculate suit and piercing dark eyes would have been a miracle. MACUSA wasn’t that lucky.
Newt continues to play the Director’s melody, and she dares not to interrupt him, not to scold him for his restlessness nor beg him to stop for the pain of grief. Having found him singing, the thought of scolding slips away. Instead she stands there, quietly watching him. The sound is as chill and lonely as ever, and Newt seems trapped by it, left silhouetted and stilled, but she hopes that it’s just a fleeting impression. Clings to that hope with all her strength, and prayed for a happy ending after all. For herself, for Percival Graves, for her terribly dear new friend — for everyone, that is.
The song sounds sorrowful. It has before, months ago, a stiff and stoic refrain, as if that were the last goodbye, and now it does again. It’s frightening now, feels too portentous in the face of all that’s happened in the night, notes spelling out their author’s doom.
It’s wrong, all wrong, that all the hope the Thunderbird had brought them is being stolen away after a night of unrelieved pain and loss. It’s all wrong, that there’s strengthening dawn light in the high windows and Newt is playing the Director’s melody, singing like he’s already grieving, like his heart’s breaking as surely as Queenie’s has. It has to be wrong. Tina has to believe that it doesn’t mean a thing. Not a single one, she can’t bear to see all this suffering come to naught.
Grindelwald is now in captivity, he will be interrogated, he will tell them where he has been holding Mr. Graves all this time. They’ll find him, will save him, from where-ever Grindelwald’s hidden him away. He’ll heal, he’s always been far too stubborn to stay at home, he’ll return to work, take back his office. Probably too soon, really, but she can’t bear to think that he might be so terribly hurt as to prevent it. And the aurors will have to prove themselves again, give him better than their best efforts and prove that he can trust the work to them, even though they’ve failed him. They will, they’ll prove it to him, that he can take the time he needs to heal.
And, and surely he’ll play again on this piano — and surely, certainly, he will be told about his melody, even though Newt’s leaving tomorrow, surely he’ll come back, give Mr. Graves the chance to play for him. Surely there is more than this scrap of paper suggests, more than a looping requiem that ominously softens with every repetition.
Newt doesn’t look her way, he keeps on playing like he can’t look away from the sheet music, like he can’t stop his fingers on the keys. The refrain is lingering, then comes the next verse — there are no words there. The music is entirely too soft, and the stanzas are running out beneath his fingers.
“We will find Mr. Graves,” she says, not quite daring to look Newt in the eye. “You know, I’m sure that he is alive. He is not a man who would just — give up.”
As if in response to her words, Newt's shoulders shudder. His song… its words have never come to him completely, the end has been open, unfinished. Strange, for an adult, but he’s always been odd. It’s never occurred to him to fear it.
He stumbles, the music stops, but only for a second, stuttering at his fingertips. The last verse, the last four lines, overwhelms him like the coldest wave.
Now you are in heaven waiting for me
In heaven for me
And we shall meet again love and never parted be
And never parted be.