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“What’ve you done to yourself now?”
Graves looked up, right hand flat on the desk and wand between his teeth. “None off yer bishness,” He spat around one of the most powerful and dangerous weapons in a wizard’s arsenal.
Theseus rolled his eyes and shut the office door behind him. “Another one of your jerry-rigged attempts at self-repair?”
Graves removed his wand from his mouth, wielding with his left hand and keeping the right one flat on the table. “I prefer to call it American ingenuity.”
“I prefer to call in log-headed stupidity.” Now that he was closer, he could see Graves’s right hand better: There was vibrant bruising along the fingers and knuckles, and his ring and middle finger were slightly off-kilter. “Broken?”
“I may have lost my temper with your boss, Travers.”
“He is a bit of a prick.”
“There’s that classic British understatement. ‘It’s just a flesh-wound’, he says as I’m digging a bullet out of his ribs. ‘It’s just a bit of rain’, he says as a goddamn tornado bears down on us-”
“It was not a tornado.”
“You don’t have tornados in England, you don’t get to make that call.”
“We absolutely do get tornados in England, they’re just not- No, no, no, no- You’re not doing that.” Theseus snatched Graves’s wand out of his hand. “You’re in pain and you’ll cock it up.”
“You got a better idea?”
“I’ll do it.”
“I’d rather apparate in front of a Whippet again.” Theseus frowned, squinting at him, and Graves rolled his eyes. “Am I the only one who actually bothered to learn what the muggles were using in the war? Because every time I use basic military jargon for equipment we all saw in the war, everyone looks at me like I’m speaking friggin’ Parseltongue.”
Theseus didn’t comment as he set Graves’s wand down and pulled out his own; truth be told, Graves was a bit of an oddity amongst Wizarding kind, if only because he did dedicate an unusual (by their culture’s standards) amount of time trying to break down and understand muggle technology and culture and customs. He understood them better than the average wizard did. “It’s fine, I’ve just remembered it- one of those tanks, right?”
“I’d sure hope you’d remember, since you were the one who had to yank me out of the way before it could flatten me.” Graves grit his teeth as Theseus pointed his wand at his hand and started knitting the broken bones together. “God-”
“How did you even manage to break bones doing this?” Theseus exclaimed. “I know Travers is hard-headed, literally and figuratively, but not hard enough to break your hand.”
“One of my punches might have missed and hit the wall. And I might have thrown a few punches after that. It was all a bit of a blur, I kind of lost my head a little after Travers started sounding off about some of my people.”
Theseus’s eyebrows went up. “Who?”
Graves sniffed. “Eh, a couple of the new kids. One of them, Goldstein, she summoned a book from a shelf without looking and it clipped the side of his head, so he started getting real pissy about her, and-” The smile he flashed Theseus was toothy and without humor. “-you know how that gets to me.”
“Yes, yes I do,” Theseus remarked vaguely as a reel of scenes scrolled before his eyes: Graves getting into a shouting match with a French Auror that had made a nasty remark about one of his men, a brawl that had started when a Scottish Auror had cut up one of Graves’s with a broken bottle- No, Percival Graves was not a man who responded well to his fellows being beaten or insulted on his watch. “So you took him into a private space and started beating on him?”
“No,” Graves insisted calmly, cringing again as his ring finger made an audible ‘crack!’. “I politely asked him not to speak that way about my men, on my turf, and he decided to puff himself up and act like an asshole, so I decided to remind him whose yard he was pissing in. Jesus!” He growled as his middle finger ‘crack!’-ed into place as well. “This is why I don’t like it when you heal me.”
“It’s better than you trying to do it with your non-dominant hand when you’re in pain and prone to screwing it up,” Theseus retorted. “I don’t suppose this is why you didn’t go to the infirmary, or whatever you have at MACUSA that passes for it? Didn’t want Travers knowing you broke your hand on his jaw?”
“I like to maintain an air of invulnerability. It-” ‘crack!’ “-Damn it!”
“Your stoicism is truly an example to us all,” Theseus remarked dryly.
“Bite me, you friggin’ Tommy.”
“You first, Doughy.”
“It’s Doughboy.”
“I know- I’m calling you a doughy old man.”
“You know, the first thing I’m gonna do is break my hand on your face when you’re done,” Graves remarked mildly. “Seriously. The minute you’re done, my fingers are gonna be broken again. Remember that when you’re spitting out your teeth.”
“Please consider your advanced age- I’m certain arthritis is right around the corner.”
“Think you’ll be able to put your nose back into place if I punch it real hard a few times? Because noses are notoriously hard to fix.”
Theseus snorted. Threats had always been banally been tossed between them; the threat of smaller injuries for minor insults had been surprisingly effective stress-control in a time when they’d been threatened with mustard gas and having half their heads taken off by bullets. Graves had an appallingly morbid sense of humor that had encouraged Theseus’s milder one, and they had spent most of the war silently propping each other up with humor and snark. It had kept them sane- or as sane as one could be in the trenches of Europe.
“Alright,” Theseus muttered, “I think you’re good. Move them for me?”
Graves did, frowning with discomfort. “Not broken, but still painful.”
Theseus waved his wand and tapped Graves’s hand; if he’d done it right, a chill comparable to holding a piece of ice on it would have covered it. “Better?”
“Much. You’re such a good nurse, Scamander. And I’m sure you’d look great in a dress and cap.”
Theseus rolled his eyes. “Alright, then? Not going to die or maim yourself? Because I should probably go make sure you haven’t killed my boss.”
“Go right ahead,” Graves encouraged, “And tell Travers that memory of me knocking his face in is going into my Pensive! I want to remember it forever, and I’ll be glad to break it out any time he needs humbling!”
Theseus grinned for the first time since entering the office. “Might have to take you up on that.” He offered him a salute as he backed towards the door. “Until your next battle-wound, Graves.”
Graves returned it as he took a seat at his desk. “Until your boss hops you across the pond again, Scamander.”
And so they parted in good humor, as they always did.
-End