Static Tranquility
He jolts awake at being hit with the Cruciatus curse, only to realize it was just a dream.
Well, it had been a dream. But it was as fresh in his mind as the phantom sensation of being tortured with it had been. His heart was thundering but he was as cold as the dead.
When his heart finally stops racing, the only thing he can register for one long moment is how tired he remains. Light tries to break through the slits of his eyelids and does nothing but warm them, but he can’t seem to open his eyes to witness the light for himself. He tries to swallow, but finds there’s not even a lick of saliva in his mouth to soothe the borderline pain as his throat constricts around nothing, unused to being used once again.
He can’t entirely feel the rest of his body either. It’s all too numb for him to really move anything, for him to even think let alone twitch his arms and legs. If there’s light behind his eyelids, he must be out of that dark, horrid room at least. For that thought alone, he allows himself a sigh, to relax himself into the soft bed below him and listen to the full silence of the room.
There is only a still hum that can be heard and felt across his body; the soothing air that comes with healing magic and gentle intentions.
It’d been a long time since he’d been in the care of a healer. It’d been even longer since he’d woken up in a healer’s cot, beaten physically to need the extra attention. He wonders what all of him will need fixing when they realize he’s awake. When the thought comes to him, he immediately banishes it. So long as he didn’t open his eyes, no one would know he was awake quite yet.
It’s so calming within the room, nothing but the warm light on his face, that causes him to drift back to sleep.
He dreams of nothing. Nothing but the dark which has his heart thundering wildly in his chest even while he rests.
When he wakes again, he opens his eyes with ease almost immediately.
It’s light in the room, but whether he’s slept through the day or only a few hours remains unknown to him. The only indication that he fell asleep at all is the new presence in the room.
He turns his head slightly to find a man cleaning up a bench by the side of his bed—a healer , his mind surmises when he can only sense the same comforting magic as the rest of the hospital—and simply stares at the man’s back until he turns around.
His eyes are tired, almost closed, and he lays as still as the dead, but he’s awake nonetheless, and at the sight of him, the man jumps slightly in surprise.
“You’re awake!” he exclaims. Percival can only blink blearily at the man in agreement. The man is scurrying out the door, “I’ll be just a moment Mr. Graves—let me get your primary healer!” before Percival can even blink his eyes again. The room goes silent at the loss of the man’s presence and Percival turns his head to stare at the ceiling once more.
The hospital itself is still vibrating with magic, but it’s still quiet, like no one else is even in the building. It’s probably just silencing charms, but he likes to believe that there just aren't that many people in the hospital, no one else sitting in beds like him, too tired and laden with unseen, bone-deep injuries that may never be seen by anyone else. It’s silent, and Percival’s head is already being filled with morose and morbid thoughts. He wishes he were asleep again.
By the time a group of healers make their way into his room, he almost was asleep. Percival had never been one to take naps or fall asleep so easily. He was used to going to bed with a million things on his mind and waking up with soreness in his shoulders from the weight of it all. He’d probably slept more now than he had in the past year.
The group of healers to walk in were surprised, maybe even moreso than the man before, to see him awake.
“Mr. Graves,” one of the three healers begins. She, like the others, had her eyebrows up to her hairline when she walked in, but now she picks up a clipboard from the end of the bed and reads over the words calmly.
Whatever has the staff so shocked slowly disappears as the woman continues reading. Then, they’re checking his vitals and waving their magic over his body; checking anything and everything that he only barely keeps up with. Sleep still weighs heavy on his head, and despite wanting to go back to sleep, something tells him he should stay awake. Everything is a little too fuzzy around the edges to keep track of everything the healers are checking, but it’s probably for the best. Whatever medicine or potions they have him under are keeping him from tensing and flinching, as he knows briefly in the back of his mind that he would in any other circumstance. After everything, even with only the gentlest of healers working around him, he can’t help but feel a sense of endangerment to his being, as if his own security has been breached.
He doesn’t necessarily feel safe, but he feels welcomed, and that’s enough.
“We’re glad to see you finally return the world of the living, Mr. Graves,” the woman from before says. Her smile reflects the softness in her eyes. One by one, the healers around him begin to pull away, fleetingly giving a few short details to the woman—he presumes the main healer of the bunch—before leaving the room entirely until it’s just him and her.
She still holds the clipboard in her hands, but doesn’t look at it after she’s written a few things down. Instead, she looks at him square in his tired eyes and smiles a little sadder this time around.
“You’ve been in a coma for only three days. We expected at least a week, but it seems that isn’t the case.”
No, it wouldn’t be, he thinks, blinking up at her, as if to say I’ve never been good at staying down for long.
Her smile twitches briefly into something akin to amusement, as if she expects just as much from him, before she looks down at the clipboard.
“You fell into an unexpected coma, so I’ll need to ask a few questions to make sure your cognitive abilities are functioning correctly. Is that alright?
He tries to open his mouth to respond this time, the action coming from a bone-deep need to answer verbally, but nothing comes out. The woman across from him visibly frowns when he can only nod.
“It’s common for patients who’ve been in comas to not be able to talk right after they come out of one. You can nod or shake your head in response to any questions if that works for you.”
He nods again, much more put-off than anything else, frustrated that his body isn’t cooperating even though it’s already awake. It must show from the way the healer gives him a few seconds. But then it’s all questions from there.
“Do you remember the moments right before you fell into the coma?” Yes.
“Reports say you were in a dark room when you were found. Is that correct?” Yes.
“Are you having trouble seeing right now?” No.
“Are you having any trouble hearing?” No.
“Do you remember being found?” Yes.
“Do you remember who found you?” No.
“Do you remember anything before being found?” Begrudgingly, yes.
Similar questions filled the room with only silent answers to follow. Percival found himself feeling more and more tired as he continued nodding, shaking his head, even breathing too deeply, and just before he found himself about to fall asleep to the healer’s gentle voice, the questioning was over.
However, he was wide awake after she spoke her last piece.
“We’ll inform your aurors that you’re awake. Do you have any next of kin we can inform?”
Hesitantly, he shakes his head no.
She nods in response, quietly putting the clipboard back at the end of his bed.
“We’ve been able to keep you nourished as much as we can, but we’ll try to move you onto solid foods until you can go home. There should be food in here shortly.”
And then she was out the door, but her presence remained in the room all the same.
Percival no longer felt like sleeping, not while dreading the days to come.
—
An hour or two after he wakes, he hears Picquery in the doorway before he actually sees her.
He isn’t quite sure what comes over him, but before he can stop it, his hoarse throat grates to get the first words he’s said since waking out of his mouth. “Get out.” He can’t seem to look at her as he says it, one part of his mind admonishing his obvious insubordination while the other can’t stand to be in the presence of anyone else other than the healers.
At least the healers didn’t expect anything of him other than to heal on his own time, to eat his share of food and lay there. Not even a day after he’d woken up and the President herself was here with nothing but pity in her eyes.
He couldn’t stand it.
For the first time since he’s worked at MACUSA, he watches as the Madam President hesitates over the threshold, stalling in the doorway as her eyes flicker down to the floor at his obvious affront.
Then, much to his surprise, he watches as she turns and leaves, her robes fluttering solemnly behind her.
He leans back into his pillows and closes his eyes. His heart rattles in his chest, but there’s relief wrapping around the hard-working organ to know that he has a little more time to get himself together before they come back.
—
Maybe it was because he wanted to be close to Golstein and Picquery before that he really didn’t want to see them at all now.
When a gentle knock comes at the door, silent as a mouse, he doesn’t have to look at her to know it’s Tina Goldstein. In all the time he’s worked with her, there’s no one else so daring yet quiet as her. She could walk face-first into a battle with only soft-spoken spells falling from her tongue and he’d know it was her.
He knows the President sent her even before she steps into the room, and for that knowledge alone, the same two words slip from his mouth as they did when the President tried to visit him.
He can’t look at her after he says it, but there’s a silence big enough to speak volumes in the absence of conversation.
Even before he told her to leave, he already knew she’d stay, and something ugly retreats into the depths of his mind as something warm threatens to overcome his previous feelings on it all. Goldstein would walk into a battle she wasn’t welcomed to if she knew the pros outweighed the cons. It was what had made Goldstein his favorite before.
Now, not so much.
There aren’t enough words to describe his feelings on the matter. He knows what she’ll say even before she’s said it; he knows she only ever means good intentions, but the outcome hasn’t been favorable; he knows Picquery’s sent her because out of anyone, Goldstein had been the closest to him; he knows Picquery’s sent her because there’s news he’ll only be able to take with the same admonishing authority as before with someone like Goldstein.
He knows. He wishes differently.
Just as he predicted, Goldstein doesn’t stall, nor does she back away. She stands in the doorway for all of three hesitating seconds before crossing the threshold and taking careful, quiet steps to his bedside. He still refuses to look at her, even when she begins to speak.
“Mr. Graves, sir…” And there it is: the kind of sadness in her voice that only makes Percival feel the threads of guilt pierce his heart with thin needles mercilessly. Percival Graves is not a man of conscious guilt, but after everything—no, and after everything, he doesn’t want to start understanding guilt right now.
It takes her a moment, as if she knows he doesn’t want to hear the words. Or maybe she wants him to look at her in proper acknowledgment. Maybe he doesn’t know his aurors as well as he did.
They sure as hell didn’t know him.
The words fall from her lips with sincerity.
“I’m sorry.”
He cringes and she apologizes once more. Before she’s even done uttering the apology though, he’s already shaking his head, and he hears her clothes stiffen and he knows she’s paused at his unexpected response.
He’s grateful then that his throat hurts too much to speak, but for all the reasons he’d never thought he’d have. He doesn’t know what he would utter to her in that moment, whether it would be something vile or something completely different, something much softer and vulnerable than he had ever been before. He wonders, however briefly in those few seconds of shocked silence, what they expect of him then. They must know an inkling of his feelings, but he wonders how deep it goes, how much thought they’ve given to their beaten-down boss who they hated. Or hates. He doesn’t know if they still hate him, but they must. Surely they must.
Goldstein presumes. “Madam President has asked me to relay a message.” Oh, I know, he thinks bitterly. “She said you’re on leave for at least six months. A year if you don’t seek external...help.”
No, he’s glad he doesn’t have a voice then. If he did, he’d laugh, and he doesn’t know how many years it’s been since he’s bellowed, but he’d sure have more than enough to say to that. He’s glad he turned Picquery away when he did. He’d surely have crossed a line with what he could have said to her, had she been the one to relay the message.
Goldstein had relayed it as gently as she could, how she was supposed to, and Percival could not find it in himself to fault her for trying now.
He just wished none of it had happened at all.
To his side, he hears Goldstein shuffle around, the drag of a chair, and the creak of the wood as she sits herself beside him, and for yet another long silence, there are no words said. He can practically hear the storm though, the mountain of things Tina Goldstein would say then.
He doesn’t think. He has no idea what to make of any of it, not so soon after waking from a terrible nightmare. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know.
If he were a more dramatic man, he’d think the world was beginning to crumble and crackle around him, but the hospital room is as pristine and pale as before, soothing magic still thrumming through the air. He just doesn’t know what to do with himself.
“It wasn’t any of us who realized you weren’t you,” Goldstein says suddenly. And that—that’s what has Percival turning his head too fast to look at her, to really see her for the first time in many, many months. All the time fades away as he looks at her same baby face overcome with somber eyes. It really is a blessing he cannot speak. He feels his heart stutter still to the confession, with the statement that he never wanted to hear after so long in the dark.
They never knew. Not a single one of them.
She’s not looking at him, but at her lap. A frown mars her face and he doesn’t recall ever having seen her so disappointed. “I don’t know if I would have noticed whether I hadn’t gotten demoted or not, but I would like to apologize Mr. Graves. If Newt hadn’t noticed—Newt Scamander, that is—when he did, I really wouldn’t know what would’ve happened. I’m truly sorry, sir.”
There are some things in that explanation he doesn’t understand. Goldstein had been demoted? Why? When? To where? Had she been reinstated? And who was Newt Scamander and what role had he played in understanding his impersonation?
He’s sure the confusion must show on his face, but Goldstein still isn’t looking at him. It seems that there’s more pressing matters than questions he can’t ask when Tina Goldstein is practically crying at his bedside. She moves to get up, presumably to leave, but Percival drags a slow hand from his side to touch her sleeve and she stops. Her eyes fall on him and it seems to sober her up some. He doesn’t move his hand.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir. I only meant to relay Picquery’s message but I seem to have gotten carried away…”
Percival is sure he’s never seen Goldstein so unsure of herself. He’s reminded of a young woman, fresh to the crop of aurors in his department looking sure of her ideals even while sitting across from him, knowing full well she was treading a thin line in their area of work. This is a different auror than the one he’d seen all that while ago, but he’s sure he must look different as well, laying in a sickbed recovering. It still gives him pause to consider her and all that he’s missed. An ache still rests somewhere deep in his mind, deep in his chest, that someone has come to apologize at all, when he’s missed so much in so little time between then and now.
He lets Goldstein go and she ducks her head, leaving the room as quietly as she’d come.
There’s a loud, harsh noise ringing in his ears, unspoken, unheard: silence.