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There have been a number of events over the course of Graves' life that he Does Not Talk About. For instance, there was the time in his fifth year at Ilvermorny when he and his friends got tipsy on stolen firewhisky on Halloween, and one of them had dared him to spell an unpopular proffessor's robes to lengthen a few inches so that he would trip over them. He had missed and hit the headmaster instead. Nobody ("Especially not you, Picquery, it was your idea in the first place.") is permitted to speak of that incident, or the weeks of detentions he had served afterwards. Or about the time a few years later, as a junior Auror, when he had gotten completely smashed at an office party and woken up wearing nothing but his socks in the wand permit office with no memory of losing clothes (which were never located) or how he had gotten there. (To this day, he suspects Picquery. On principle.) Or the time when- well, you get the point. Graves has embarassed himself a great many times in his life, and most of those events had involved alcohol in some capacity.
So in the grand scheme of things, it really should come as no suprise that Graves has drunkenly gotten a tattoo. It could be worse, all things considered. At least it isn't anything particularly embarrassing or located in an indelicate spot, and he hardly remembers the pain of the needle throughout the whole process. He simply woke up the morning after his 25th birthday party with a spectacular hangover and a nundu the size of a galleon prowling the length of his collarbone.
("Why did you let me do this," he'd asked Picquery the next day at work.
"It was your birthday, I wasn't going to deny you the opportunity to memorialize it forever on your body."
"Picquery."
"You should call her Betty."
"Picquery.")
Much to Graves' chargin, the name Betty stuck. It wasn't uncommon for Aurors to have tattoos, but a tattoo named Betty was just too much for people to resist teasing. That was, until Graves pinned them with his most unimpressed stare until their life flashed before their eyes and they fell silent. A few months later, and a few silenceing charms on all of his shirts, Betty is just one more bullet on the list of things not to bring up around Graves if you want to keep your job. Possibly, your life.
He's perfectly content to fondly shush Betty and conceal her residancy on his chest for years, until Grindlewald gets him. As if it wasn't humiliating enough to be assaulted, held captive, and used for polyjuice as as a dark wizard masqueraded all around New York wearing his face, the magic-resistant bonds he was held by meant that he couldn't renew the silencing charm on his ragged shirt, leaving Betty free to yowl and growl as loudly as she pleased. Grindlewald's laughter when he discovered that the original tattoo, unlike its polyjuiced copy, was charmed was incredibly patronizing, mocking him.
(It didn't stop Graves from talking to her whenever Grindlewald wasn't around, just to keep himself sane. Especially when Grindlewald stopped coming at all. Graves was viciously happy at first, but still chained away, and now without any way to get food or water. Betty was about the only thing he has to keep himself going. And when he finally slipped into a coma after a full week without sustainance, it was Betty who roared and yowled until he was found.)
After that, Graves is a little fonder of her. He still spells all of his shirts silent, but sometimes he'll still absentmindedly chat to her when he's left alone while convalescing in the hospital. Sometimes he actually answers inquiries after her wellbeing ("It's a tattoo, Picquery, why are you asking me this." "Because I care, Percy.") instead of responding by glaring the inquirer into oblivion.
In the hospital, he hears that Betty isn't the only one he had to thank for his rescue. That apparently, one Newton Scamander had played a crucial role not only in capturing Grindlewald, but also in following a pet kneazle to where Graves was stashed away in a cellar on the edge of the city. Apparently he was in possestion of a real nundu too, and had a whole menagerie of all manner of deadly- not to mention horribly illegal- creatures under his control as well. Apparently he was whisked away by urgent business in Cairo involving a basalisk and the Egyptian Minister before Graves could wake up, but would be back in New York in a few months to visit Tina with a copy of his book. Graves decides that he would very much like to meet this legend of a man.
Mister Newton Scamander doesn't arrive until three weeks after he said he would, because, as Graves was acutely aware, rescue missions don't tend to stick to any sort of schedule. Nevertheless, the delay gave him enough time to recover more fully, to become steadier on his feet, after he gets out of the hospital. When he walks into the office after a meeting one afternoon to see an unassuming man with a bright blue coat and battered case sitting on Tina's desk while deep in conversation with her, he is able to approach without a limp. He can just barely make out Betty's proud purring from under his collar. He clears his throat to cover the noise, but smiles to himself as well.
"Mr. Scamander, I presume?"
Scamander nearly falls off of the desk in suprise. "Ah, Mr. Graves! It's good to see you, er, conscious."
"It's good to finally see you at all, Mr. Scamander. I understand that I have you to thank you for my continued consiousness?" Scamander's cheeks bloom red in what appearsto be an odd mixture of embarrassment and pride.
"Oh, don't thank me. That was all Maggie. She's the one who tracked you down." Graves mouths a confused Maggie? over Scamander's shoulder.
"His kneazle, Mr. Graves." Tina clarifies. She pauses for a moment, looking introspectively between her boss and her friend. "Newt should imtroduce you sometime. She's pretty sweet, when she's not biting your ankles."
Newt shoots her a suprisingly venomous glare, considering the fact that he's still a rather becoming impressive shade of red about his ears. "That was one time, Tina!" The whisper of Betty's almost offensively laugh-like snuffling sneaks from under his shirt, and Graves glares at her. Or, he glares at the room at large and assumes that she'll know.
Poor Scamander, however, seems to misinterpret his sudden stormy expression. His earnest eyes snap to Graves' and he begins rattling off, "Maggie's really a sweetheart, she was just playing around. I promise you she's practically a housecat at heart, there's-" Graves places a hand on his shoulder and the verbal vomit abruptly cuts off.
"Mr. Scamander-"
"Newt."
"Newt. Your kneazle sounds very nice, and it would be my pleasure to meet her. She did help save my life." Newt unfreezes himself to glance at Graves' hand on his shoulder, and then back to him. Behind him, Tina is trying and failing to hide her annoyingly knowing smile behind a stack of paperwork. "How long will you be staying in New York?"
An oragami message rat scurries up the side of the desk. "Just a few days, I expect. I promised Theseus that I'd be home in time make an appearance at our father's birthday next week. So, ah. Not too long." His eyes drift back to Graves's hand, large and heavy, where it is still splayed on his shoulder. His fingers twitch and he debates whether it had been there too long, if it would be too awkward to remove it at this point, if there were rules about this sort of thing.
After a second-too-long's pause, "We'll have to figure something out soon, then. Perhaps later tod-"
"You'll have to take a raincheck." Tina has unfurled the paper rat and is staring at it with displeasure. She glances up at them. "There's a commotion in the Bowery. Somebody started a brawlin Ruffolo's, and it's getting out of hand." She snatches her wand from where it lay beside her ink and promptly apparates away.
Graves is only a moment behind, appearing with a crack right into the calamity in the speakeasy. He sees Tina and Mitchell vigorously stunning and hexing rowdy wizards and herding others out the door. He sees Newt, who he hadn't let go of before fucking apparating gasp a soft "Oh Merlin."
"Fuck, Newt, get behind the bar!" A stray curse ignites the shoulder of Graves' coat. Newt extinguishes the flame with raised eyebrows as the shock on his face falls away. His eyes are flicking all around the crowded bar, assessing the situation more calmly than Graves could manage because Newt is a gangly, mild-mannered magizoologist, and Graves has somehow managed to drop him in the middle of a barfight in a shady establishment in the bad part of town.
Except, Newt is making his way over to where Tina is trading hexes with a wizard who looks about ready to drop his wand and move onto using his hands. And Newt hits him with an eccentric bat-bogey hex, which is somehow completely effective in giving Tina the upper hand. Meanwhile, Graves is still standing like a target in the center of everything, staring at the (gangly, mild-mannered) magizoologist drop men twice his size with spells that Graves had hardly used himself since he was a schoolboy. Fuck, he repeats to himself, for entirely different reasons.
Another curse nicks him, singing a hole through the front of his shirt. He swears, Betty yelps, and Graves finally springs into action. Shooting spells and corralling combatants blurs like muscle memory with Tina and Mitchell, and somehow Newt manages to slip right in like he's been fighting beside them for years. Where did Newt learn to fight like that, no hesitation and full of a confidence that certainly isn't apparent at any other time? Graves thought Theseus told him that his little brother worked with dragons in the war, that re rarely saw direct combat.
(Well, he reasons when he watches Newt seamlessly transfigure somebody's teeth into bright feathers, he's not exactly using military grade spells. Is that spell even legal? It seems... very painful.)
They do eventually contain the fight, despite Graves blatently stopping to stare in wonder amazement at Newt numerous times. More aurors come to collect the arrestees. Tina is talking to the owner of the speakeasy while the rest of them cool their heels around a table in the middle of the floor. Nothing got out into the street for no-maj eyes to seer, and there were no terrible injuries. (Except perhaps the man with tropical feathers bursting from his lips, who's gums are bleeding profusely and who looks to be crying. Newt is unnecessarily apologetic about this.) By all accounts everything went smoothly. In the chaos, though, he's completely forgotten the gob of curse-magic that's still trying to eat through his shirt and shields.
Mitchell whistles, low and long, "Now that's some nasty shit, Mr. Graves. You'd better get that fixed up."
"Fuck," Graves looks down and wrinkles his nose. His shirt is in tatters, something glowing a toxic green around the edges and getting brighter. "I'll just..." He shrugs off his coat; peels off the disintigrating cotton in pieces. Newt has pulled a curse-proof containment bag out of fucking nowhere for the remains, but now he's frozen staring at Graves' bare chest.
Now, Graves isn't a self-consious man. What's a bit of skin between friends, especially when an unknown but very potent curse is encroaching on your body? But after a while without Newt so much as blinking, he's about ready to pull his coat back on, button it up to the collar, and walk away, because Mercy Lewis, that stare was intense. He grabs the coat, only for Newt to snatch his wrist to halt him. He's suddenly leaning in so terribly close to Graves' chest that he can feel his breaths breezing softly over his sternum. Mitchell is cackling unabashedly at his expression (he must look like a deer in the headlights but that's about how he feels with Newt breathing on his skin and his fingers delicately reaching out to trace his collarbone, what the fuck).
"You have a nundu tattooed on your chest?" Newt doesn't move back when he looks up, so now Graves has a face full of incredulous, smiling Newt. He opens his mouth to respond. Closes it again. Does anyone actually expect him to string coherent words together with long, calloused fingers still stroking his chest, making Betty purr contentedly and his own thoughts scatter like marbles?
Tina returns to them with drinks courtesy of Ruffolo, drops them on the table before dropping herself into the chair beside him. "Her name is Betty," she inforns him.
Mitchell takes a swig of firewhisky. "She's real friendly," he adds.
Newt spends the rest of the night poking at and playing with Betty. Graves spends the rest of the night gaping like a fish and trying not to shudder at every other touch. He needs more whiskey. Tina and Mitchell, the fuckers, watch on with smug satisfaction. Even Betty was conspiring against him, trying to bat at Newt's fingers and meowing sweetly like the delicate kitten she absolutely was not. Little shit. This is all her fault.
(Later, when he's finally given a grand tour of the infamous case, Graves watches in awe and a little bit of terror as Newt scratches behind the ears of a fanged, six-legged beast that's at least twice as tall as him.
"Who the hell names a nundu Adelaide?"
Newt raises an eyebrow from where he's burying himself in a tuft of fur. "Who names a nundu Betty?"
"It was Picquery!"
"I'm sure.")