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He never saw it coming.
[---]
Mercy Lewis, it was dark.
It wasn’t a natural dark, either; it was a dark that was empty. He felt no walls or floors. He felt very little, as a matter of fact: No pain, no sense of claustrophobia, no discomfort either.
Only a constant, lingering sense of unease.
[---]
If he’d known he was about to be plunged into this seemingly endless darkness, he’d have drunk in the dim light of the room he’d briefly woken in.
There was a kerosene lamp on the table.
Newspapers, recent and old, blanketed the walls.
His hands had been tied behind his back. They were underneath him, painfully numb.
He tried to speak, but nothing came out.
Silencio, his groggy brain supplied.
All at once, a pale face was looking down at him.
The man was pale, eyes mismatched (gold and brown respectively), with blond hair slicked back in a style not unlike his own.
The man smiled, and he was reminded of so many criminals who looked that way right before they started throwing Cruciatus curses.
“Good morning, Mr. Graves. And goodnight.”
His last thoughts: Gellert Grindelwald.
I’m dead.
[---]
If this was death, it was boring.
And terrifying.
It wasn’t the darkness that frightened him, no; he wasn’t a child who needed a tiny lantern in his room to stave off the nightmares.
No.
It was the fact that he couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel his body. He didn’t even know if he was still in his body.
And most importantly, it was that he had no idea when it would end.
If it ever did.
[---]
It was impossible to measure time.
Maybe he slept, maybe he didn’t. He didn’t feel any sort of fatigue.
While he felt nothing physically, he couldn’t deny that the occasional moment of crippling, overwhelming panic occasionally overwhelmed him.
I’m never getting out, he thought as he felt all of the tension that came with panic, but lacked the limbs to twitch or scratch or lash out.
I’m never getting out.
I’m going to die here.
If I’m not already dead.
If I am dead, what the hell did I do to deserve this?
[---]
He did everything in his power to distract himself.
He sang songs.
He recited every spell he knew and what it did.
He listed every one of his coworkers.
He told himself stories.
Sometimes he just screamed.
And in the moments when he felt like he might actually break down and start sobbing, he pictured himself grabbing the nearest sharp object and jamming it into Gellert Grindelwald’s throat. Magic had its benefits, but frankly, sometimes the No-Maj way of doing things was just so satisfying.
[---]
At first, he thought he was hallucinating.
It fit, didn’t it? His brain was undoubtedly snapping under the strain of whatever hell this was.
It sounded like a scratching. He couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from, but it echoed as though he was standing in a concert hall.
scrtchscrtchscrtch.
“Hello?” He tried to call, but heard the words only in his head.
srtchscrtchscrtch.
Please, he thought. Please, someone, anyone.
Even Grindelwald. He’d take Grindelwald over this hell.
scrtchscrtchscrtiiiiiii-
The light was so sudden it nearly blinded him.
It was a tiny, faint ray, but it was there.
And it was temporarily obscured as something crawled into his prison.
It was a little…
The hell was that thing?
It had dark fur and shiny black eyes. It looked like a… What were those things- a platypus? Of course, it was still pretty dark. It still wasn’t even clear if this was a dream or not.
The little thing studied him for only a brief moment, and then plunged its long little snout into his pocket, hunting around until it emerged, triumphant, with his pocket-watch, which it proceeded to stuff into a pouch in its stomach.
“Where’ve you gone?”
And suddenly, there was light everywhere.
[---]
They lifted him out of the floor with magic, careful not to move him too much.
His eyes, he realized, were only half-open, and so he could barely see who was around him.
“Mr. Graves?” Tina Goldstein. He’d recognize her voice anywhere.
He still couldn’t move.
“Mr. Graves? Can you hear me?”
“Is he alive?”
Queenie Goldstein came into view, and she peered down at him with her wide, always-bewildered eyes. “Oh, he’s alive: He can hear everything we’re saying. He just can’t move a muscle. He can’t feel his body.”
Grindelwald! He screamed at her with his mind, expecting the man to melt out of a wall and kill everyone there. Grindelwald!
“It’s okay, Mr. Graves. They caught Grindelwald yesterday, got him all trussed up in a spell-covered cell guarded by at least four Aurors at all times. He’s not gonna get you again.”
And though he couldn’t feel it, he watched her reach up and wipe away a few tears he hadn’t even realized he was crying.
-End