Chapter 2
His days and nights are spent in a haze of pain and torment—he wakes up briefly to the feeling of insistent fingers rubbing salt into his back, and passes out again. The times when he isn’t drifting in and out of consciousness are spent gasping for breath as he’s Crucioed over and over again, until his limbs are snapped in five different spots and he can barely think without agony blurring his thoughts. The worst parts are when he’s being rocked lovingly in Grindelwald’s arms, the dark wizard humming under his breath as he repairs Percival’s failing organs, replenishes his blood supply, mends his broken bones. He’s well aware that Grindelwald needs him alive, but this little ritual of his threatens to make Percival go insane.
He’s so tired of his basement. It’s easily the most unsettling place Percival has ever seen, crime scenes notwithstanding. The identical grey walls mock him with their cleanliness—after every torture session, he wakes up to see it clean as the day he was locked up in it; bloodstains miraculously disappear everytime he goes unconscious and wakes again. He can’t even tell which corner is which; the door is Disillusioned to blend in with the other walls, robbing Percival of even the small comfort of leaning against the wall, fearful that the door could slam into his ruined back and he’d have to scuttle away as fast as his wounds allowed him while Grindelwald descended down the steps, like a fallen angel ready to bring down unholy devastation upon him.
He sits in the center of the room, trembling and so very, very cold—he sings songs to himself, sometimes, to remind himself that he’s there, that he’s tangible and that he’s still alive. His throat is almost always hoarse and raw and it hurts to speak, hurts even more to scream, but if he doesn’t do something to ground himself to reality, he’ll really go insane.
Grindelwald knows this.
So when he wakes up to find that his mouth has been spelled shut, he goes straight into hysterics, clawing at his own face until he draws blood and slamming his head into the wall until bloody patches stain it—evidently Grindelwald hadn’t been expecting that, since he’d received a good old No-Maj beating for ‘nearly giving himself brain-damage’, as if his brain isn’t already fucking damaged from the constant torture. Still, his mouth had been unspelled shut, and Percival takes that as a win.
It’s strange, really. Out of all the things about being a free man, being able to interact with co-workers, being able to choose what he wants to eat and drink, being able to do whatever he wants, he misses his bed the most. Sleeping on the freezing floors of his basement nearly always aggravates his wounds, whether he sleeps on his back or not—he remembers the time Grindelwald had used his wand to slice Percival’s stomach open, blood spilling out and painting the floor crimson while Percival watched, cross-eyed and horrified, as the other man poked an intestine with a curious noise before closing his stomach back up.
The criss-crossing scars that take up the entirety of his torso twinge whenever he sleeps on them, but it’s better than sleeping on his flayed back; at least, it had been better—until he’d woken up to Grindelwald’s steel-toed boot grinding his head into the floor, smiling disarmingly and caving in Percival’s skull with his heel. That one had been a close one; Grindelwald had sat in front of him for thirty minutes as he sealed Percival’s skull back up before berating him for being so careless.
Therefore, when he opens his eyes and finds himself on a plushy, warm bed, he’s obviously instantly wary. This is his bed. The bed Grindelwald has been sleeping on, probably, but it’s his bed. He chances a peek from under the covers and sees the dark wizard sitting in Percival’s favourite armchair, flicking through a case file (he scowls internally at that—they’re not allowed to bring case files home).
Not wanting to alert Grindelwald to the fact that he’s awake, he lets his body sink back, curling up instinctively to shield his ribs and head from assault. He doesn’t usually sleep anymore, unless going unconscious is counted, but the few times he gets the luxury of napping, he’s curled in a corner, like a scared rabbit instead of his previous sleeping position on his side, facing the door. His time with Grindelwald has affected him, changed him right down to his psyche, down to the way he sleeps—he isn’t sure whether that fact makes him want to throw up or die. Preferably both, in that order.
Percival isn’t very good at keeping track of time anymore, but it’s been about ten minutes when Grindelwald sighs and shuts the file, crawling into bed with him—the Director goes deadly still, keeping his breaths shallow as the man hovers over him. What kind of torture will it be, this time?
“I know you’re awake.” Percival’s eyes snap open as Grindelwald grins toothily down at him, pinning him down with his body so he can’t move, can’t escape from a torture so exquisite, so damming.
Hands pull at the rags that his clothes have become as Percival’s eyes widen in terror, starvation-weakened arms pushing at Grindelwald’s chest uselessly, shaking too hard to speak coherently as words spill from the crumbling Auror’s lips, worthless words like no and stop and please—vicious curses turn to desperate pleas turn to quivering sobs, all in vain as the monster holding him down smiles victoriously at his unmaking.
“Want to know how?”
Sharp agony arcs through Percival’s lower half, Grindelwald’s smile burnt permanently into his broken mind as his mental shields finally shatter.
“You don’t stop screaming when you’re asleep.”