Chapter Text
Greg knows better, usually. He knows that DIs don’t do house calls. Knows his time would be better spent working cases and relearning the laws regulating evidence. Maybe schmoozing a little or catching up on the recent reading for IPV cases. That said—He is still a beat copper in his heart. The promotion caught him by absolute surprise and he still hasn’t had time to wrap his head around t. He, Greg, a Detective Inspector, leading cases in the violent crimes unit. Who’d have thunk it?
There is nothing wrong with it, he reasons. You can walk the beat now and again if you want to. So what if he misses it? Makes sense, frankly. Yes, he does good work, and the perps he puts away now are precisely the type that need it, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss the feeling of being a part of the community. He doesn’t get the chance to prevent crime these days, only uphold the law after the fact and—
But the money is good, and Lav is proud of him, and the new uniform is kind of snazzy. He has an office, now, and a car to drive—in London, which, okay—
The point is, DIs don’t respond in person to a seemingly harmless B&E. Greg just happened to be near and he recognised the kid’s name over the dispatch. Harry is a good egg, which is a damn miracle considering how much of a twat he could have been. Greg had seen him around the neighbourhood since he moved out of his parents’ place and bought a flat in Brixton. There hadn’t been any trouble, ’s far as he can recall.
Now, though, Harry is pale and shaking, looking like a kid, not a professional footballer, born into every advantage to be had. Greg makes sure his body language remains easy and relaxed and he strolls forward, wraps an arm around his shoulders and says a generic greeting or another. Immediately, the kid burrows into him. Huh. He must be really shaken. Of course, there is nothing wrong with seeking comfort, but it’s vanishingly rare that it happens among men.
“Hey, there,” he repeats. “What’s this about? I’m not seeing any injuries”
“Ye—Yes. I am. I.” The kid finally shakes himself together and steps back, wrapping both arms around himself. He’s in his pyjamas, Greg notes with half a mind. He’s barefoot, in his jammies, standing in front of his apartment holding his phone in his hands. He doesn’t even have his wallet. “Someone—A man broke into my flat.”
Greg feels the familiar focus of a job enveloping him, settling on his shoulders. “Yeah? Did he hurt you?”
Harry blinks giant, liquid eyes. “No. He just—I was sleeping and there was a noise, and he was just there. I didn’t hear him enter and I don’t see how he could have. I—He is in a bad way, sir. He—” The kid swallows a couple of times, eyes filling with tears. He’s such an oddly gentle kid. “He just sort of collapsed and—I didn’t—I didn’t do anything to him, just sort of screamed a little cause he was in my bedroom, but he was on the ground and—Cut up and stuff. Blood was everywhere, and he was crying. Weeping, all quiet and terrified. I couldn’t—I tried to talk to him but he just—nothing.”
Greg’s focus narrows further. “Blood?”
“Yeah, yes.” Harry makes a small sound, like a cross between a sob and a hiccup. “He is—like something out of a horror film, you know?”
Right. “And he didn’t hurt you?” Best make sure he’s got that part right. For evidence if nothing else. “Didn’t speak to you at all?”
“He doesn’t look like he knows where he is,” Harry says. “I—I don’t care about my flat, sir, but—I think he is in trouble. I think he was—I don’t know what happened but he is real scared and looks like he was hurt for a long time. I’m a head smaller than him and he kept crawling away from me like I’m a threat. Couldn’t stand.”
Fuck.
“Right then, Harry,” he says, cringing a little at the informality. He really should not be so familiar with a victim of a case you’re working, but—He’s so young and frightened, he can’t Mister Potter him right now. “I’ll go figure out what to do. In the meantime, do you have any neighbours you’re good with? I don’t love how blue your toes have gone.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure, there’s Hagrid on the ground floor; he’s pretty cool.”
Greg casts his mind about. It’s a familiar name— “Big fella? Hair, beard, cartoonishly cowardly Great Dane?”
“That’s the one,” Harry says, calming down a little now there’s a concrete plan of action and an adult that will take the responsibility of a beat-up junkie off his hands. If that’s what has happened. It’s a junkie or a kidnapping victim, and why would a victim climb to the fourteenth floor of a high-rise in Brixton? “Will you—Can you help him? I don’t wanna press charges or anything. If I need to testify, I’ll tell you I invited him inside, okay?”
Jesus love you, kid, you already gave your statement. Everything you say to a police officer on call is recorded. Still, he doesn’t need to get into it now. He doesn’t need to get into it yet. “I’m going to go in and talk to him,” he says. Stupid. He should wait for backup. He should— “See what this is about. You just go to your neighbour, there’s a lad. Off with you, now.”
A quick argument with Fiona about his recklessness later, and he’s cautiously stepping into Potter’s flat. The kid left the door open, which is both good and bad. It’s chilly and dark and the choked sobbing he can hear coming from the inside makes it all sorts of creepy. He tunes out Fiona’s shrill voice coming from the earpiece he reluctantly agreed to put in and breathes.
“Hello,” he says, voice nice and calm. He flicks on the light and gathers his composure. If his hand is hovering over the gun, well. He’s dealing with a man experiencing, at the very least, some sort of nervous breakdown. “I’m going to come in. Don’t be afraid, okay? I’m just here to talk this out. Figure out where we go from here.”
The sobbing goes down in volume but doesn’t stop. Maybe encouraging? The man is clearly somewhat lucid, in that he can hear and interpret speech. He can, he reminds himself. Doesn’t mean he will.
No wonder the kid is upset, he thinks a couple of seconds later. Damn. The stranger is a mess. The junkie theory flies right out the window. This is a kidnapping and torture victim right here. The rags he wears cover maybe ten per cent of his body, and the rest shows signs of brutal violence. Torture, yeah, there is no other word for it. From the state of his hair, beard and body weight, he was kept somewhere for a good long while, too.
He realises he stopped dead in the doorway, watching the poor soul cowering in the corner. Something is wrong with his hands and feet, Greg notes distantly. Breathe, Lestrade, you’re a DI, you’ve seen worse.
Has he? Has he ever seen a torture victim? He hasn’t. This man is clearly—he didn’t break his hands himself. He wouldn’t have what looks to be infected wounds on his wrists and neck very much in the shape of manacles. He wouldn’t have so many straight—deliberate—cuts going down his arms, to say nothing of the less regular but more sickening ropes of scar tissue crisscrossing his chest and back. He wouldn’t—
“It’s okay,” he hears himself say. He crouches down, keeping his hands in front of him to show he’s unarmed. “I won’t hurt you. I’m Detective Inspector Lestrade, an officer of the Met. I’m here to help.”
The man makes a sort of hacking, confused noise but he picks up his head a little. His face—
Greg never went to war, but he imagines this is what war prisoners look like. Terrified far past the point of coherence, all notion of human dignity stripped away, until they are little more than a bundle of nerves bound with misery, hurting at all times.
“Can you tell me your name,” he asks gently.
He doesn’t expect an answer, honestly. With this level of damage, he wouldn’t expect even this much coherence. Which is why he almost jumps when the man answers him. “Percival Graves.”
His voice fits his overall state of ruin. It trembles and creaks and cracks, nearly but not completely inaudible. Like the rest of him, the glaring fact that Greg can tell it had been gorgeous once only highlights the tragedy. Is it possible to survive this? Is it possible to recover from it? He kind of doubts it.
“Cheers, Percy,” he says. He can hardly recognise his own voice, it’s gone so hollow with fear. Maybe Lav is right; maybe this isn’t the best line of work for him. Maybe he should have— “Again, I’m Greg.”
Unsurprisingly, Percival Graves doesn’t offer any comment.
He must be cold. He’s—
“I need to know if you have any urgent injuries,” he settles on after a while. He’s so far off-script, he doesn’t even blame Fiona for screaming at him. “My team is on their way with an ambulance,” fuck, but he hopes that’s true, “but I need to know if you need immediate help.”
Percival Graves doesn’t, for a minute, stop shivering. A small glint of awareness enters his light grey eyes. “No-maj? Why—Why would he send me here?”
No—what?
“He,” Greg says, a bit more sharply than necessary, judging by the flinch. “Somebody sent you here? Was he the one who—Who did this to you?”
“Yes. Grindelwald,” the man says. The unexpected crispness of his tone, American or not, is strange to see. The raving maniac is looking at Greg like he’s nuts. “He wanted—Master of Death. He wanted the Master of Death. So he—He sacrificed me.”
Right, right. Cult shit. Okay.
“Okay,” he says out loud because what else is he going to do? Call the torture victim crazy? “Where are you from, again?”
“New York,” Percival Graves says. Behind all the grime and bruises and horror, Greg thinks he is frowning. “Where—”
Okay.
“Do you remember coming to London? Do you have any—”
Whatever burst of adrenaline, drugs or pain keeping the man awake is running out. His body is growing lax, wilting before Greg’s eyes. He needs his answers, truly needs them. He is not monster enough to claw them out of this man.
“It’s okay,” he says instead. “You can relax. Rest. The world will make more sense when you wake up, you’ll see.” Here’s fucking hoping.
A victimless B&E isn’t a big deal. A B&E at Hadrian ‘Harry’ Potter’s home a day after Halloween, is a different game, even without the bewildering show of human cruelty. The kid’s flat has fantastic security. His windows and walls are bulletproof, and the building is covered with cameras that record and back up in real-time. He’s pretty sure the Blacks bought a satellite specifically for this purpose. Greg doesn’t move in those circles, nor does he care, but he was eight by the time they threw Riddle into jail the first time; it was a memorable time. To say nothing of the escape and subsequent Black scandal.
Whatever, never mind that. The point is that, as far as Greg, his team and Scotland Yard can tell, the man just appeared in Potter’s flat. It must be a trick of some kind, an intimidation tactic or something, but it looks like magic. It looks like magic, and the only person who can say one way or the other is self-ID’d Percival Graves whose state of unconsciousness smoothly continued into a coma.
It’s a cursed mess, all of it. Two days into the investigation, Sherlock bulldozes his way onto the crime scene and Greg has just enough presence of mind left to thank every deity he can think of he was present at the time. If he wasn’t, who knows what’d have happened. As it is, Sherlock isn’t harmed or arrested when he swoops through the flat like a coked-up squirrel, twitching and all but hissing at seemingly random intervals. Greg, at this point, doesn’t want to know.
“The Potters aren’t filing charges,” he tells the impatient prosecutor. Diana likes him, usually. He likes her, sometimes. She’s fair, isn’t career-mad to the point of cruelty, and never once pressed Greg when he asked her to turn a blind eye to a life-mad teenager acting out their feelings. They’re natural allies except—
Except, while they both started similarly, Greg grew dismissive of the upper class, and Diana grew solicitous. A case like this, which directly impacts a family as well connected and loaded as the Potters, has made her nervous, which is making her stupid.
“What kind of precedent are we setting? What will happen if it comes out that people can break into the apartments of celebrities and we won’t even charge them?”
Good grief.
“Obviously the man—Graves—didn’t break in. He couldn’t even stand. You saw the reports.”
“Still—”
Greg eyes her wringing hands—actually wringing, like a Goddamn cartoon character—and doesn’t give in to the impulse to shake some self-respect into her.
“Lily Potter herself called me to ask about his health and if there is something they could do.” Jesus Christ, why does he have to use that card? Why? “Harry was really concerned about him, too.”
“Right, right, that’s true. We should take their wishes into account.”
Don’t interrupt her when she’s rationalising in the direction you want her to go. Even though it should have been damn obvious Graves, whoever he was, was in no way capable of breaking into anything, much less Potter’s flat.
“For now, let’s just focus on finishing this up quietly. The longer it goes on, the more chance there is of the press catching wind of it and we really don’t need that right now.”
At least they are united in their mutual revulsion of the press and how much of a mockery it has all become. People should know, yeah, but people have no Goddamn sense of proportionality or decency, especially when it comes to their celebrities.
“Thank you, Detective Inspector, please email me the hospital records and the official investigation results as soon as you finish them.”
Greg knows things have gone to the absolute depths of awfulness when Mycroft Holmes, a team of nondescript men with the mien of every single special forces unit in the world, and a phalanx of lawyers storms the hospital where the still unconscious Mister Graves is staying.
“Detective Inspector,” he says, “I am afraid this is outside of your jurisdiction. We will take things over from here.”
Greg finds that he isn’t at all willing to move from the door of Graves’ bedroom. The staff of the hospital are being rounded up to sign NDAs. His head throbs.
“I’m going to need a warrant.”
Mycroft’s eyes flash. His head tilts. “Is that so.”
“I’m not releasing anyone anywhere until I know what is going on,” he says, hiding all the pent-up frustrations from this case behind a facade of a dull blue-collar peon. “As far as I am aware, the Crown waived its right to file charges. I have the paperwork somewhere.”
“Mister Graves is wanted on matters of national security,” Mycroft says.
Greg blinks and pushes the instinctive wave of anger down. There is something—expectant about Mycroft.
“Let me just clear this up really quickly,” he says slowly, trying to pick up on the unspoken cue.“Mister Graves is not under arrest.”
“Not at this time.”
“Because if he was, you would have to give me something. CPS already dismissed the case.”
The beat of hesitation is, to Greg’s mind, deliberate. Or performative? It’s a hint, it has to be. “CPS can not act without the permission of the Attorney General who himself cannot act without being given the go-ahead of the Parliament.” Meaning him, Mycroft Holmes. “We have reasons to believe Mister Graves has entered the country illegally—”
“He was trafficked!”
“—And, once again, is a threat to national security.”
Right. “Until you can produce paperwork to that effect, I’m afraid I will have to stay right where I am.” Mycroft’s eyes narrow. Greg relaxes and tries not to show it. He’s known Mycroft for a few years, most of them featuring Mycroft at his lowest. He knows a performance when he sees it.
“While I’m waiting for that paperwork,” he continues, half a hair too loudly, “I will be sure to ring Lily Potter. She’s been asking about him, you know. James Potter too, which means Sirius Black is practically a breath away. And young Hadrian, of course, he’s been beside himself with worry.”
You won’t be able to bury this, he says without saying it. And I know you don’t really want to,. So, here: I’m giving you a reason not to try.
“Maybe young Ms Granger could be persuaded to pause her work in the States to pop back home and help Harry out. I’m sure a young man in his position can always use a friend to advise him on his rights and his responsibilities. His civic duty, as it were.”
“Well, Detective Inspector,” Mycroft says, eyebrows arched, “this has been an illuminating conversation. I will get back to you as soon as I am able. Good day.”
Jesus fucking Christ, he just got in a scuffle with Mycroft Holmes of all omnipotent bastards. Really, Greg, capital work.