Chapter Text
It was December 23rd and Niall was highly ranked enough that he could foist working Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off on other people. He’d picked up the few groceries Breanna had asked him before coming home.
“Hey.” He kissed her. “Sorry I’m late. You should have seen the line.”
“Last minute Christmas errands are always terrible. I wouldn't have asked you, but thought we had more eggs than we did. I promised your mother we would bring eggnog tomorrow.” Breanna took the grocery bag from him. Niall secured his pistol in its locked drawer before crouching down to pick up Rebecca, who’d come running out. He followed Bree back into the kitchen. Evan sat on the floor, banging a wooden spoon against it and gurgling with delight at the noise.
“Does she want us to bring anything else?” Niall asked.
“I don’t think so. Your brother and his wife ordered a Yule log from some new Polish bakery so they have dessert handled.” Breanna slid the eggs into the refrigerator.
There was a knock on the door. “Expecting anyone?” Niall set Rebecca down on the counter.
“That might be Mrs. Callahan. I told her she could borrow the folding table.”
“I’ll get it then. The table’s in the hallway closet, right?” Niall called over his shoulder as he went to the door. When he opened it though, Graves stood there. Niall reflexively tensed. There was no way he could get to his pistol in time…
Then he noticed how haggard Graves looked. He was still impeccably dressed, clean-shaven, undercut perfectly faded, but the silk-trimmed black coat hung loose on his shoulders now. His hair was greyer than Niall remembered; fine silver threads ran from front to back. He clearly wasn’t sleeping. He was leaning heavily on a black walking stick, but he was alive and walking and frankly both of those things were a miracle.
“I’m not…” Graves spread his hands helplessly. "It's me. For real. I swear."
“I know,” Niall answered. He blinked. “You used the door?”
“I figured if I apparated into your living room, you might shoot me.”
“That wasn’t you.” Septima Fletcher had tried to explain---potions or transfiguration--- but either way, he’d known that that something was wrong. He gestured back towards the living room. “Won’t you come in?”
“How did you know?” Graves stepped inside and let Niall close the door behind him. “I...even my Aurors…”
Niall had never seen Graves at a loss for words. The man had always been cocksure, confident, at ease in his own skin, not gaunt and faltering.
“Ain’t their fault, I don’t think,” he said. “I got the idea I wasn’t worth his time to deceive. He got in my head to figure out who I was but he picked up things I hadn’t told you.” Graves looked so worn; maybe it would cheer him up. “We gave Evan your name. Evan Percival Cavanaugh.”
Graves started to smile but it never reached his eyes. “Shit.” He looked to one side. “That just makes this harder.” He opened his coat and withdrew a different wand than Niall was used to seeing-- a lighter wood with hints of red.
“Percival, what?” Niall took a step back when the wand came to bear on him. Breanna had come out holding Evan on one hip but she froze in the entryway of the kitchen.
“I can’t let you remember this--remember me. I nearly got you killed, Niall. Septima told me. You threw out your wedding rings. It’s too much of a danger. I’m too much of a danger. I get people killed.”
This wasn’t about Niall. Or it wasn’t only about Niall. “Credence,” he said quietly.
Graves flinched. His lips pressed together and he looked to one side. “He’s dead.” He had none of his calm, none of the dry wit. “He trusted me and he’s dead because of it. That bastard went through my head and found someone he could use and...my own fucking Aurors, Niall. My own team killed him and I can’t...I can’t tell them…”
Confirmed bachelor bullshit. “That they killed someone you loved.” Niall stepped forward and pushed Graves’ wand to one side. “Well, I ain’t one of your Aurors.”
Graves’ wand dropped and his shoulders started to shake. A single broken sob escaped him and Niall couldn’t help it. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around the other man. The touch seemed to break the last of Graves’ reserve and he wept.
Niall’s collar was damp by the time Graves was done. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have…”
“Don’t apologize.” Niall shook his head. Bree had quietly taken Evan back into the kitchen and given them some privacy, but she came back out now with three placemats rolled around their silverware.
“You’re staying for dinner,” she told Graves.
“I shouldn’t…”
“Sit.” Bree’s eyes were shiny with tears as well and the older man obeyed. The colcannon and sausage was hardly fit for company, but it was something--- and probably more than Graves had eaten today. The plate that Bree set in front of him had an extra pat of butter nestled into the colcannon and Niall felt a sudden surge of love for his wife.
Graves had set the wand on the table and Niall glanced at it. He’d supposed that Graves would need a new one, but he’d expected something similar to what he’d had before.
“Fir.” Graves must have noticed Niall’s curious gaze. “The survivor’s wand. They say the wand chooses the wizard, so this one must have a sick sense of humor.”
“You can come back from this,” Breanna said. “I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but you can.”
“I…” Graves changed the topic. “So whose idea was inflicting my name on Evan?”
“Both of ours,” Niall let him off the hook. They’d talk later. “Bree was reading Sir Thomas Malory---”
“--Chretien de Troyes--”
“--Chretien de Troyes and she liked all the names.” He shrugged. “And we know a Percival, so…”
“And making it a middle name means Becca has less of a mouthful to pronounce,” Graves concluded.
After dinner, Niall gathered the dishes. “Percival, you’re on drying duty.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” Graves followed him into the kitchen. Niall ran a sink of hot water and handed a flour sack towel to the older man. The room was mostly silent besides the clinking of glasses in the sink and Graves occasionally asking where a pot or plate went.
Niall debated how to begin. “We were at the Second Somme Offensive, you know. My unit-- the 106th. Only for about a month, but still. We’d been on reconnaissance at Ypres, laying the groundwork for the Brits, so the Somme was our first time in the trenches.” Even now, it made Niall shudder. “I hated it. The mud and the rats---there were so many rats and I swear to God, they knew when we were about to get shelled. When we went after St. Quentin’s Canal, my lieutenant got his head blown off right in front of me. I had nightmares about it for years.”
“Where are you going with this?” Graves asked.
“Talking to my sister, my flatmate, Bree. It helped. I think it was the only way I got my head out of the trenches.” Niall shrugged and then glanced up at him. “You say you can’t tell your Aurors about Credence. I doubt you want to tell ‘em that you aren’t sleeping or eating either-- yes, I can tell and so can Bree. I guess where I’m going is…do you have anyone you can talk to?”
Graves didn’t answer but his hands went still on the dish he was drying.
Niall had guessed as much. “That dish goes in the cabinet to your right,” he said and left the kitchen, heading towards the linen closet. When he returned, he thumped a bottle of whiskey down on the counter between himself and Graves. “You talk. I listen. Both of us get drunk enough to not remember it.”
Graves arched an eyebrow. “Don’t you lot still have Prohibition?”
“Yes. We do. But my captain elected not to notice Red Jacob’s contraband disappearing once the bastard was in jail for good. So this is as much your whiskey as mine.”
They drank. Graves talked. Niall listened. The older man talked first about being taken in Europe--- desperately piecing together clues and following Gellert Grindelwald to a manor in northern Germany, only to be ambushed.
“I thought we were all...oh god. Thes.”
Listening to Graves realize that he didn’t know if his best friend was alive or dead and that Theseus Scamander might have died thinking Graves had betrayed him had to rank among the worst experiences of Niall’s life. Graves barely remembered anything from May to December; the Imperius Curse was a dream-like haze that rarely parted. Still, he knew he’d docilely answered every question, betrayed every secret, unraveled every ward.
“They didn’t notice. A mass murderer, a fascist, Europe’s most wanted Dark wizard and they didn’t even notice. Six months.” Graves’ voice was unsteady and rambling from the whiskey. “It took Theseus’ little brother, some junior Auror I don’t even know and a goddamn No-Maj-- I’m sorry. That’s not fair. You and Jacob Kowalski are both smart as hell. Smarter than anyone I’ve ever trained apparently.”
Now was probably not time to ask who the hell Jacob Kowalski was.
“I just sounded like him too. ‘A goddamn No-Maj.’ Is that why? Are we that similar? That people could…” Graves’ voice broke.
Niall shook his head to clear it. Thinking was harder now; he didn’t know Gellert Grindelwald besides the terrifying thirty seconds in the church alley and what Graves--- and Septima-- had told him. But the two were innately, inherently different and he struggled to articulate it in a way that Graves would understand.
“So...the wand chooses the wizard, right? Whatever that means.”
“Yes. They’re semi-sentient. Different woods, different cores. A wand that’s...inimical to you will refuse to perform magic. Most wizards will feel right away if the right wand is---I’m rambling. You don’t care about wandlore. Where are you going with this?”
If Niall wasn’t trying to convince the older man that he didn’t in any way resemble a mass murderer, he might have been amused that drunk Graves apparently pontificated. “Okay. Okay. So your wand is like you, right? And it won’t do magic for someone who isn’t like you. That’s the idea.”
“Yes. And my wand did ma--”
“Blew up.”
Graves blinked. “What?”
“It blew up. Grendel---Green-- Pineapple tried to use it on me. It blew up.” Niall gestured widely and nearly knocked over the bottle of whiskey. “So if it wouldn’t work for him, then you ain’t like him.”
“I...Fair.”
Niall reached across the table to where the slender fir wand rested and thumped it on the table in front of Graves. “Also. Survivor,” he concluded. “So there.”
Sometime around midnight, Breanna came in to tell them goodnight.
“Don’t stand up; you’ll fall over,” she told Niall and kissed him. “You make him stay here; he shouldn’t be…disappearing drunk or whatever it is he does.”
Niall kissed her back. “Love you. Night, Bree.”
She kissed Graves on the corner of his mouth just as fiercely. “You are not alone, you hear me?” she said. “Goodnight.”
She left and Graves touched his mouth quizzically, glancing after her. “She…”
Niall shrugged expansively. “You’re family,” he said, more than a little bit drunk, and Graves wept again.
Niall’s hangover the next morning made him reconsider all his previous animus against Prohibition and the increase in crime that had come with it. Liquor was absolutely the Devil’s drink.
The cop had eventually insisted that Graves sleep on the couch and the older man hadn’t argued.
“My house, Niall. I look around it and I can’t help but think ‘Is this where he sat to put on my shoes? Did he use these glasses? Did he sit here when he drank my brandy?’”
Niall hadn’t known what to to say at the naked pain so he had settled on nonsense instead. “Don’t you lot have Prohibition?”
“No. Life’s...hard enough without your Puritan bullshit.” That he was Catholic and thus had as little to do with ‘Puritan bullshit’ as Graves did had seemed irrelevant at the time, so Niall had just gone to bed.
The two men hadn’t quite gotten to neither of them remembering, but they’d made a valiant attempt. Right now, however, even the sound of Bree making coffee in the other room made Niall’s head hurt and the scent of it made his stomach churn.
Graves’ eyes opened on the couch and he groaned. “Oh, to hell with this.” He disappeared into a puff of black smoke, only to reappear approximately fifteen minutes later with two vials of a foamy green liquid.
“Drink,” he said, handing it to Niall. “Hangover potion.”
“You are a gentleman and a scholar.” Niall didn’t argue and knocked it back; No-Maj or not, the magic worked. His head cleared; his stomach settled.
Breanna made eggs and bacon and put a third egg on Percival’s plate without asking him. “Do you have a place to go for Christmas?”
“Because otherwise you’re coming with us and she’s passing you off as a cousin from Boston,” Niall translated.
“Because Percival Gondulphus Graves sounds so Irish,” Graves commented.
Bree smiled in a way that Niall knew meant mischief. “No, but Percy Lynch sounds like a lad from Ulster.”
Niall couldn’t help it; the indignant look on Graves’ gaunt face was priceless. It made the older man look like himself again. He started to laugh and after a long moment, Graves did too. It was rusty and ragged and almost sounded like Graves was surprised by it, but it happened.
“I’m going to my sister’s,” he finally answered. “Staying through the New Year.”
“That’s good. You shouldn’t be alone.”
Graves looked down at the eggs on his plate, the faint sticky mark on the table where they finally had spilled the whiskey. “I get the feeling that I’m not.”
Graves didn’t leave right away. He charmed the dishes to clean themselves. Afterwards, he sat on the floor to help Bree wrap presents. Becca climbed into his lap and insisted (loudly and repeatedly) that Uncle Perce tell her a story. The older man obliged with an elaborate narrative about how Santa Claus’ sleigh was constructed and why it functioned. Niall was mostly sure that Graves was making it up.
He seemed better when he was engaged, though his face was still gaunt and haggard. He lost the thread of the story he was telling Becca halfway through; staring into empty air until Becca reached up and tapped his face. “Perce?”
It wasn’t perfect. It wouldn’t be perfect for a long time, if ever, but it was a start.
Around noon, Graves finally rose. “I ought to get going. I should shave and pack some things before I go to my sister’s.”
“We’ll see you in the New Year?” Niall asked.
Graves nodded. “You will. And here.” The older man dropped something into Niall’s palm, tickling the skin strangely and closed his hand around it. “I’ll see you in the New Year,” he promised again and vanished.
Niall blinked and opened his hand, looking down at it. He was holding two thin gold wedding bands and a pearl-and-sapphire engagement ring.
Written on the same palm in a sweeping, elegant script was Thank you. P.