Fifteen years working in the Magical Security office, with some of the best and brightest wizards in the United States, and you would think someone would notice when he was not him.
Could no one tell?
He could hear his mother's voice, chiding him for burying himself in his work.
Never taking the time to make connections outside of work. Never inviting his co-workers over. Never meeting a nice girl, getting married.
At the time, he had scoffed; his work was all he needed. To be the top Auror in MACUSA had been his dream, and it wasn't a thing he took lightly.
And well. At 16 he figured out that while girls were nice, his tastes tended to lean towards the more sturdier of sexes.
At 20, the taste of danger and the thrill of pursuit were still new and exhilarating for Percival. To be an Auror, to hunt dark magic and chase the lawless, it was the life he dreamed. And on nights where the exhilaration didn't wear off fast enough, he found time for a quick tryst to burn off the nerves. People never questioned his bachelordom.
At 30, people were kind enough to think he was obsessed with his work. He still was, though his youthful passion had transformed to a steady burn to prove himself. After watching a few too many of his peers fall on the field, the exhilaration changed a little. After seeing a few witch hunts of a different kind, Percival learned to deal with his nerves a different way.
A few years later though, were when whispers popped up.
Mary Graves was not the matron of one of the most powerful wizarding families in the United States for nothing. She was quick to stamp out those who breathed a word of ill will towards her one unmarried son, in the only way a high society witch could be kind and ruthless. Percival knew she knew before she passed, but she was far too practical a woman to be concerned with who her son youngest fancied.
The Graves name was ensured through his only older brother and wife in Europe, and consequently she could not have cared less.
To be frank, Percival had just reached his stride in work. Director of Magical Security, right hand to Madame President, and finally passed the age of probing personal questions, Percival was settling into his skin.
It would make sense that when he was finally comfortable, was when he was finally vulnerable.
~
Percival imagined it spoke volumes about his life that the feeling of waking up after a particularly strong 'Stupify' spell was familiar to him.
It probably said more that his first feeling was closer to amusement, and not fear, at finding his hands tied behind him. An odd change of place.
He only had a moment to test his binding before he felt the nerve splitting pain of a Crucio.
Grindelwald and the unsteady stream of lackeys would take turns torturing and sedating Percival.
In the beginning, it had been to probe for information, to break him.
Towards the middle, it became a pastime for them, competition to see who could make his scream the most (he allowed himself that, the screaming).
Towards the end, it became an outlet for the frustration.
Whatever they were looking for eluded them, and while Percival wanted to find solace in this quiet thought, the fact that he had been coughing blood for two months now made this hard.
The moments Percival dreaded the most, however, were the ones were Grindelwald would talk to him.
"Call me Gellert" he said so sweetly the first time they spoke. Percival had spent the past hour swallowing the blood from a broken nose after someone came to bring him his 'meal'.
He responded with as much spit and blood he could muster.
Grindelwald simply laughed before he kicked Percival. "You'll be so easy" he demurred before he left.
After that Grindelwald took to taking occasional meals with Percival, rich fragrant food filling the air as he spoke to him. Idle chatter as if they were friends, all while Percival was chained to a cot on the floor.
"I decided to try a charm yesterday before taking the polyjuice, since your holiday is almost over, to get a...feel for you. I've been watching you for a while now."
In training, they taught you to compartmentalize. To ignore. To shutdown. Percival's newest game was trying to guess the food from the scent that hung in the air.
"I chose you for many reasons, dear Percival, not just your position. I've found you have excellent taste in taverns in this area. When I first came here I could hardly find a place that served whiskey worth a damn. This No-Maj Prohibition, what nonsense these creatures think of."
Today the room smelled of fried meat, charred and buttery. There was a cloying scent underneath, slightly sharp and metallic.
"I found this lovely place called Tavernacle. Have you been there? Oh, what am I saying, I know you have."
Blood, it was blood he was smelling. Perhaps the meat was left a little raw this time.
"A lovely boy name Joe served me there. He seemed very pleased to see me. Or well, to see you."
Something starchy as well, potatoes if he had to guess.
"He was very hospitable to me, Percival, I can see why you go there. And the things he asked for, well. I didn't know a man of such high regard as you had such a predilection for such...darker things."
The scrape of this utensils stopped. Percival absently wondered why he ate so little today.
"I suppose it makes sense though, one doesn't become a Director in MACUSA without a hunger for power. I shouldn't be surprised that it bleeds into other aspects. It really was a shame I had to dispose of him, wonderful mouth and all..."
How many days had passed since he has a solid meal, Percival wondered. His mind was hazy. He registered the sound of Grindelwald getting up.
"It was nice though, to find we had so much in common!"
There was a strudel spell one of the girls at work had suggested, he tried to recall the incantation she'd hurriedly scribbled out for him.
"We're not so different at all, it seems."
Percival only allowed himself to wretch when the sound of footsteps faded away.
~
When they found Percival, the front of his hair was shorn and he had lost 50 pounds.
The tips of his left pinky had been removed (a clean cut, remarked the healer), both his hands were broken at the wrist, his right femur was snapped in 3 places, and a gash along his neck had started to become septic.
MACUSA had a dedicated wing for their Auror to get treated, however Percival's personal healer forced his way inside once he heard he was there.
"They ground your right wrist to dust, Percy, it's best we just regrow 'em."
He had given up trying to make Healer O'Neill call him by his full name. He supposed two separate Lycanthropy scares afforded the Healer certain infractions others would never attempt.
When he offered Percival a potion for his nerves, however, he refused.
Once he had cleared his last physical assessment Percival check out of the medic wing as fast as he could.
Floo powder took him home, where he entered an apartment that looked hardly changed. Someone has brought the clothes Grindelwald last wore back to the apartment, folded neat with his coat laid carefully next to it. The air however, reeked of dark magic.
Percival set to work, going room by room, cleaning and bagging any personal effects he found. It was around midnight when he finished, his mind clearing to finding himself in the bathroom. Until this point he had managed to avoid any reflective surface he could. But the mirror that hung above the sink, often used to shave his face, stared back remorselessly.
The wound on his neck had healed into a corded knot of scar tissue. A nurse had stopped by and offered to help with the scar but at that point Percival waved off any treatment that wasn't deemed necessary. His hair had grown back in uneven patches, the gray at his temples purer than before.
Percival hadn't used manual grooming tools in years, let alone cut his hair himself, but the idea of holding a wand made his stomach roll. Not like he had one anyways, his current one still impounded at MACUSA.
Under the sink he found a pair of hand hair clippers.
When he finished, Percival methodically swept up the remnants from the floor, careful to carry them to the fire place. Kindling it took him longer than he cared to admit, but once the fire was up to a steady roar Percival tossed his hair into the flames. As he watched them curl in the embers, his mind whispered an incantation his Aunt Meredith had taught him, so many years ago.
Odd, how her face he could hardly remember, aged and eccentric as she was, but the words and charms she taught him seemed to have stuck. She had spent far too many years in the European hills, doing 'research' with the tribal wizards and witches there, an oddball that wasn't spoken of much after her passing.
He muttered the spell under his breath as he clipped his nails to the quick, tossing them in with the rest.
Hours passed before light seeped into the windows. Percival decided it was day enough to contact the family broker, and set upon putting the flat up for sale. He might have bullied the man into finding him a studio right then, but he hardly could care at this point. Another Floo call arranged his bagged things to be disposed of, and with that Percival set out to his new home. He caught himself reflexively reaching for his coat, only noticing when it wasn't at its usual hook.
He spared it a last glance before he turned and stepped into the fireplace for the last time.
~
The truth is, Percival thought, when you spend a year in captivity, life doesn't go back to normal afterwards. Even less so when the person impersonating you was aspiring for a new world order via genocide.
The truth is, when you're an Auror they train you for torture of all kinds, but they can't train you for the cruelty of time.
The truth is, when something dark takes over, and no one sees, you begin to think there's no difference between the dark and you.